President Lee Myung-bak has proposed talks of five nations in six-party nuclear talks except North Korea, but the practicability of the idea depends on the position of China, which played a pivotal role in the opening of the six-party talks.

China's short-term perspective involves the management of relations with North Korea. Given that the whole international community has condemned North Korea's nuclear test under UN Security Council Resolution 1874, will five-party discussions without Pyongyang be able to produce any concrete solution other than enforcement of punitive sanctions? Probably not, considering the structure and multilateral nature of the issue.

China will not want to explain its position on the enforcement of the Security Council sanctions at five-nation talks; and if they put pressure on the North, they can hardly serve China's relations with Pyongyang.   

China believes that it cannot gain any practical benefits from doing more than support the UN resolution to pressure the North, and thus is unwilling to take the initiative in persuading Pyongyang. This is the reason that excessive expectations for Beijing's influence on North Korea are unrealistic. In fact, China may care what the North thinks about its move more than the North does what China thinks of it. 

The long-term prospective depends on a number of factors such as the strategies of the United States, China and Japan in countering the North's nuclear arms program, the stability of the North Korean regime, the coordinates of U.S.-China relations, and the geopolitical weight the U.S. gives the Korean Peninsula. Other geopolitical factors also come into play.

The South and the North must seriously think about the hypothesis that a nuclear North Korea makes it impossible for the two Koreas to unite in peace. Seoul, Washington and Tokyo are prepared to take firm measures against Pyongyang, which is desperate to keep its nuclear weapons. What does China intend to do? Some Chinese officials and experts judge that Beijing, hoping that no sudden change takes place in the North Korean regime, feel that controlling the North's nuclear weapons is more important for now than getting rid of them.

The six-party talks only saw bilateral negotiations among the six nations and trilateral discussions among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan. It is regrettable that we failed to conduct trilateral talks among South Korea, the U.S. and China. It would not have been easy to persuade China, which externally at the least tried to give the impression that it understands North Korea. But the flexibility to hold three-, four- and five-party discussions in addition to bilateral talks within the framework of the six-party talks could be a meaningful step on the road to peace and prosperity.

The North Korean nuclear issue is at the heart of the Korean Peninsula question. North Korea itself is unable to predict how far its nuclear brinkmanship will go and what disaster it will bring. But we must do everything that can deter North Korea within the framework of the six-party talks. If the six-party talks comes to an end like the failed four-party Geneva conference in 1997, all that remains will be bilateral Washington-Pyongyang talks and tripartite Pyongyang-Washington-Beijing talks. Both are a nightmare scenario for Seoul.  

The two Koreas are tied together by the same ethnicity and cultural heritage. At the same time, we are confronted with the dismaying reality that Pyongyang never ceases to threaten to turn Seoul into "a sea of flames." We must make sure that things do not get any worse. That is the only way for North Korea and the entire Korean nation to survive together. We need far-reaching insight and intelligent and creative diplomacy. We must work out solutions by resuming the six-party talks.  

By Lee Soo-hyuck, a former deputy director of the National Intelligence Service