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With concerns mounting that six-party talks on North Korean nuclear disarmament will remain stuck, South Korean government officials worry Pyongyang does not understand that the tide has turned against it.
A high-ranking official said North Korea was stuck in 1994, when during its first nuclear crisis the Stalinist country was able to wangle direct negotiations with the United States that produced the fateful Geneva Accords. Under the accords, Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear arms program in return for two light water reactors and 500,000 tons of heavy oil a year. The North later tore up the agreement.
South Korean officials believe Pyongyang is mistakenly applying that experience to the present, unable to shake its expectation that brinkmanship will persuade Washington to agree to bilateral talks where it can then extract bigger rewards.
The high-ranking official called this an "illusion" on North Korea's part sustained through the "lost 10 years." He said the country's capacity to analyze the situation was in tatters.
It is clear that the U.S. has no intention of agreeing to bilateral talks. In a speech at Japan's Sophia University on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said if Washington had learned one lesson, it was not to repeat the Geneva Accords debacle.
The government official warned the future looked bleak if North Korea remains deaf to Rice's comment that a variety of discussions could take place within the six-party talk framework.
(Shin Jeong-rok, jrshin@chosun.com )
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