And then there were two ...

By Donald Kirk

NEW YORK - South Korea appears on a collision course with the United States over growing sentiment among American officials in favor of talks with North Korea in the hope of somehow dragging the North back to six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons.

The White House and State Department have already reached a consensus that there's no harm in beginning the bilateral dialogue that North Korea has long wanted - but only if the US nuclear envoy, Stephen Bosworth, can use such talks to persuade the North to return to multilateral talks that the North has vowed to spurn.

The US consent to bilateral talks as an opening gambit represents a triumph for the diplomatic strategy of North Korea's ailing but still active leader Kim Jong-il. He conveyed his own message of reconciliation through former US president Bill Clinton when Clinton visited in early August on an "unofficial mission" to pick up the two women from Al Gore's Current TV network who'd been held for 140 days after North Korean soldiers captured them filming along the Tumen River border with China.

Presumably, US President Barack Obama assented to the bilateral dialogue after Clinton briefed him on the three hours and 17 minutes that he spent with Kim Jong-il. Bill, mingling his public and personal lives, no doubt also thoroughly briefed his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had been saying, in effect, six-party talks or no talks at all.

Now, however, the US is clearly wary of upsetting South Korean leaders after Bosworth briefed them in Seoul on his notion of chatting with the North Koreans. The South's President Lee Myung-bak and his Unification Minister, Hyun In-taek, have been saying, warily, that, sure, they don't mind if the US does whatever it can to speed up the process, but North Korea had better give up its nukes first - and forget about bypassing South Korea on the way.

South Korea's suspicion that the whole idea of bilateral dialogue is North Korea's way of simply attempting to gain recognition of its status as a nuclear power worries US diplomats. They don't want to appear to be cold-shouldering their South Korean ally while kowtowing to Kim Jong-il for a bilateral process that's likely to nowhere fast.

Washington, however, also is dealing with conflicting views from South Korea from foes of the current government.

Chung Dong-young, who ran for president against Lee in December 2007 and lost badly, is calling for Obama to invite Kim Jong-il to Washington in accordance with Obama's stated willingness during his campaign a year ago to meet any foreign leader.

Korea is now at "a crossroads between moving toward peace and falling into a crisis that would continue an unstable deadlock", Chung warned in remarks that he planned to make on Friday at the National Press Club in Washington.

"We should seize this new opportunity of dialogue offered by Pyongyang," said Chung, a National Assembly member who served as unification minister under Lee's left-leaning predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun. It was vital, he said, to know the North's "real intentions".

Against this background, the State Department has engaged in a delicate dance in which officials are acknowledging that North Korea has indeed invited Bosworth, but that first it's necessary to chat "with our multilateral partners". The stalled six-party talks included the two Koreas, the US, China, Japan and Russia.

So far, the invitation remains unanswered while diplomats try to allay the qualms not only of the South Koreans but also the Japanese.

The sensitivities of the latter are especially important as Japan makes the transition to governance under the Democratic Party of Japan. The question is whether new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama will be more inclined than his predecessors from the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party to reconcile with North Korea.
Japanese sensitivities about North Korea, as analysts have often noted, are rooted deep in the history of Japanese-Korean conflict and Japanese colonial rule - and may transcend what would appear to be a momentous change in leadership.

Hatoyama's stated desire for greater diplomatic independence from the United States only complicates matters as US and Japanese diplomats feel their way along and the Americans worry about appearing to pressure him on any aspect of the US-Japanese alliance.

The ambivalent US position may explain why Senator John Kerry, chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is also said to be considering a North Korean invitation. The word, as spread by Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, was that Kerry would go to Pyongyang on an "exploratory" mission, but one of his aides later told Yonhap he had no such plans.

Kerry signaled his uncertainty by failing to appear at a Korean Peninsula Peace Forum in the US Capitol building at which an array of speakers, most of them from the liberal Korean reconciliation movement, urged bilateral dialogue to bring about a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War in place of the truce signed by the US, North Korea and China in July 1953. (Rhee Syngman, then president of South Korea, refused to agree to the truce, which he said made permanent the division of the Korean Peninsula.)

Kerry was listed as host of the forum, but more or less delegated that duty to the committee's East Asia specialist, Frank Januzzi, who also advises the White House on Korean policy. Januzzi at the forum sought to avoid controversy, talking up both multilateral and bilateral talks, saying "we need both" and it "will require the efforts of many parties to bring about lasting solutions". He was emphatic, though, on the need for South Korean assent, calling it "inconceivable that the US could negotiate successfully with North Korea without the full support of our South Korean allies".

Others at the forum were far more outspoken, harking back to the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation initiated by the late Kim Dae-jung during his presidency from 1998 to 2003.

Park Won-soon, executive director of the Hope Institute of South Korea, charged the Lee Myung-bak government "just took steps to reverse the course of national reconciliation and cooperation in Korea". He called on the Lee government to "seize the opportunity newly created" by Bill Clinton and "the North Korean leadership for resuming dialogue and cooperation" and urged the US government "to take bold initiatives in their Korea policy".

The best way, said Park, would be for the US to transform the armistice "into a permanent peace arrangement". Otherwise, he warned, "North Korea's 'provocations' may continue."

Another speaker at the forum, Paik Nak-chung, a retired professor at Seoul National University, called for "step-by-step unification going through an intermediate stage of confederation or loose union of two separate states" - a vague format often advocated by Kim Dae-jung. "Strong and wise leadership by President Obama, his administration and the Congress and people of the United States will be essential," he said.

Joel Wit, a former State Department official, now at Columbia University, cited the need "to meet with the North Koreans to figure where we're going". He called for broad talks on a wide range of topics rather than what he said were the "technical discussions" in which Christopher Hill, nuclear envoy in the presidency of George W Bush, promoted the six-party talks in which North Korea in 2007 signed two agreements for giving up its nuclear program.

"It may take a few meetings or a few months," he said. "I wouldn't be fixated on when's the next meeting of six-party talks."

South Korea's Unification Minister Hyun was doubtful about recent North Korean moves toward reconciliation beginning with Clinton's visit to Pyongyang. "North Korea is rewinding inter-Korean relations to how they were a year-and-a-half ago," he told a seminar in Seoul. "Toward the US, it is demanding dialogue. The North appears to be seeking improved relations with Japan's new government as well. Nonetheless, said Hyun, "North Korea has not shown, at least as of now, any fundamental change in its attitude."

Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.

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