HONG KONG — All the countries involved in talks to wind down North Korea’s nuclear program have chosen leaders this year — Park Geun-hye won the presidency in South Korea on Wednesday — and there has been some optimism among experts in the region that a chance might be at hand to revive the moribund six-party process.
The North’s successful launching of a long-range rocket last week could complicate any new nuclear talks, but it also seemed to make them all the more urgent. As Ms. Park said at a news conference Thursday morning in Seoul, the launch “showed how grave the security reality is that we are faced with.”
During her campaign, Ms. Park, a conservative and the daughter of the late dictator Park Chung-hee, criticized the hard-line approach of the unpopular incumbent, President Lee Myung-bak. But that distancing, many analysts said, was more about election strategy than a reliable indicator of her future policies toward the North.
North Korea’s state propagandists were having none of that, however, suggesting on the eve of the election that a Park administration would merely be an extension of Mr. Lee’s.
“It is as clear as noonday that the inter-Korean relations will enter into another five years of collapse if the group of gangsters bereft of elementary ethics and morality is allowed to stay in power,” said a commentary in Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party.
The article, cited by the official state news agency K.C.N.A., said that North Korea “will never pardon traitors defaming the dignity of its supreme leadership but deal a sledgehammer blow at them.”
That’s overblown, inflammatory language, yes, but it’s almost boilerplate for the North — and it stops short of the regime’s usual threat to turn Seoul into a sea of fire.
“North Korea will wait a few months to see if Park Geun-hye will appease it with cash,” Andrei Lankov, a North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul, told my colleague Choe Sang-hun. “If she does not — and it looks unlikely that she will, given her statements so far and the hardliners surrounding her — then North Korea will launch provocations.”
The six-party talks, which started in 2003, were meant to persuade North Korea to shut down its nuclear weapons program in exchange for food aid, foreign investment and security assurances. The talks themselves have been hosted by Beijing.
But the fitful negotiations fully broke down in 2009, after which the North conducted various tests of missiles and nuclear devices. A series of incidents the following year put the six-party process into a deep freeze: The North was implicated in the sinking of a South Korean Navy ship that drowned 46 sailors; engaged in an artillery exchange in which four South Koreans died; revealed a new industrial-scale uranium enrichment plant; and resumed work on a light-water reactor that could be used to extract plutonium.
These incidents only served to harden Mr. Lee’s North Korean policy — and Washington’s as well — and it remains to be seen whether Ms. Park will be inclined to soften that approach.
She “prefers a cautious rapprochement,” as Sang-hun reported. “She said she would decouple humanitarian aid from politics and try to meet the new North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.”
Mr. Kim was named “supreme leader” by the Korean Workers’ Party in April.
The other (s)elections among the six-party members this year: in Russia, in May, with the return of President Vladimir Putin; in the United States, in November, with Barack Obama’s re-election; in China, also in November, with the selection of Xi Jinping as the head of the Communist Party; and in Japan earlier this week, with the conservative Shinzo Abe expected to be sworn in as prime minister on Dec. 26.
John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, noted in an article for CNN that Mr. Kim’s fledgling regime “has signaled an interest in improving inter-Korean relations” while de-emphasizing military spending to focus on economic development. An excerpt from his piece:
If the next government in Seoul makes a bold, strategic decision to re-engage the North, there is good reason to expect that inter-Korean dynamics can improve markedly, reviving everything from humanitarian aid and development assistance, to family reunions and cultural exchanges, to economic cooperation and political dialogue.
If Kim Jong-un is going to engineer a shift from “military-first” to “It’s the economy, stupid,” he is going to need Seoul’s encouragement — and he doesn’t have five years to wait. It is up to the stronger power to unclench its fist first, so that the leader of the weaker state can outstretch his hand.
Which of the two Koreas is the stronger? Consider this fact — South Korea’s annual defense spending is roughly the size of the entire North Korean economy.
But what about the nukes? If Seoul, Washington and Beijing coordinate resumed engagement with Pyongyang smartly, there should be a way to build gradual denuclearization into the process of improving political and economic relations. That, after all, is the only conceivable way North Korea will give up its nuclear deterrent.
Mr. Delury, known for his trenchant political insights as well as his wry sense of humor, added: “The joke in Seoul now is that if the Koreas ever reunify, at least the South will get a viable space program.”
If you were calling the diplomatic shots, what would you do — reach out to the North with unconditional food aid and supplies, put tough conditions on future assistance, shut off the North completely, or pursue some other strategy? Do you think the North will ever willingly surrender its nuclear capabilities? And if you were Kim Jong-un, facing a newly installed roster of six-party leaders and with a successful rocket launching now on your résumé, what would be your strategy?
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 20, 2012
A previous version of this post misstated the number of South Koreans killed in an artillery exchange with North Korea. Four South Koreans were killed -- two marines and two civilians.
IHT Rendezvous: A New Start for the Koreas (or Not)
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