Buffalo stance
The 6-party talks are still going on, of course:
At the opening ceremony of the six-way talks, which resumed after 13 months of suspension at the the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan said concerned parties were required to have political will and make strategic decisions if they intended to make progress toward the denuclearization of the peninsula. He added that North Korea was fully prepared to do so.
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But the North Korean chief delegate went on to say that he believed the United States and other participating nations should also be willing to make strategic decisions.
The delegates were again struck by Pyongyang’s unyielding stance.
By referring first to its readiness to make a strategic decision, a course of action U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had urged Pyongyang to take, North Korea showed a positive stance apparently aiming at preventing other nations from increasing pressure on Pyongyang to scrap its nuclear program.
North Korea argued in the July 24 editorial of the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Workers’ Party of Korea, that the United States had transformed South Korea into a nuclear arsenal by bringing in various nuclear weapons. South Korea has denied the allegation that any nuclear weapons are deployed in the nation.
In February, Pyongyang declared it possessed nuclear weapons. Denuclearization of the peninsula means that Pyongyang’s own nuclear programs and nuclear weapons, and those held by the U.S. military stationed in South Korea, must be abandoned at the same time. North Korea therefore insists that the United States, which drove Pyongyang to develop its nuclear programs by bringing the weapons into South Korea, also should make a strategic decision to abandon its nuclear weapons.
Retaining this view, North Korea is able to argue that the two nations, as equal nuclear powers, can then proceed with direct negotiations.
Right…which means that the probability of the DPRK’s actually disarming (what leverage would it have left then–economic might?) is around zero.
Everyone seems to agree that it would be a bad idea for Japan to push the abductee issue at this week’s talks. Not everyone agrees on how the talks themselves could be “productive,” but perhaps it really is possible for a sort of Dilbert-ish chain of never-ending committees and conferences and inquiries and stuff to be established and kept lamely going until the DPRK actually does collapse.