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The fourth round of six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue opens in Beijing on Tuesday, a crucially important meeting that could decide whether the nuclear dispute can be resolved diplomatically or will move on to the stage of pressure and confrontation. The goal of Seoul, Washington and Tokyo is for Pyongyang to declare in writing that it will scrap its nuclear programs, based on a judgment that a more ambiguous decision like merely freezing the program would only buy Pyongyang time to wiggle out of a permanent solution. If the North does make that written commitment, it will get -- also in writing -- regime security guarantees and economic assistance including the supply of free electricity.
But North Korea appears to harbor expectations entirely at odds with the three countries¡¯. In statements by its Foreign Ministry and Rodong Shinmun reports it has reiterated that it is looking forward to mutual disarmament talks. By disarmament it appears to mean any nuclear weapons the U.S. deploys in Asia. If Pyongyang is going to insist on this points, the outlook for the six-way talks is grim.
What has brought North Korea back to the negotiating table after boycotting the talks for more than a year is the consistent and principled response of the international community. Pyongyang announced that it extracted spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor for reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium after declaring it already has nuclear arms, but failed to extract any more U.S. concessions. Only if that cooperation between the countries involved holds can results be achieved. Seoul must make it clear that progress in the nuclear dispute and in the inter-Korean relations cannot be separated. If South Korea goes its own way instead with a stop-gap measure in the hope that it can then persuade the North to give up its nuclear program once inter-Korean relations improve, it would lose out on both counts.
The nuclear dispute crystallizes all the problems the North Korean system faces. Resolving it will therefore inevitably be difficult. But once the Pyongyang regime declares that it is abandoning nuclear development, it will find help from many sources. Any attempt to buy time by first coming back to the talks and then walking away without giving up its nuclear ambitions would mean that North Korea has squandered its last chance for dialogue. It would stand at the edge of a cliff.
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