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The U.S. Embassy on Tuesday announced that a Treasury team was here to persuade Seoul to join U.S. efforts to strangle financial institutions like the Banco Delta Asia, which Washington has identified as North Korea's main money laundering channel, and take practical steps against "illegal financial activities led by the North Korean government." That phrase makes it clear the U.S. has no intention of covering up the counterfeit issue by blaming individual officials or organizations for the sake of creating an atmosphere where the North feels it can return to the six-party talks on its nuclear arms program.
Seoul did agree to participate up to a point in the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative to intercept suspicious arms shipments, a step it had been reluctant to take for fear of inflaming Pyongyang. Under the initiative, ships, vehicles and aircraft suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems and related materials can be intercepted and seized. The North has denounced the initiative as a scheme aimed at "squeezing us to death." It is a measure of how strong U.S. pressure must have been that a government as timid as our own when it comes to upsetting the North has agreed to join the initiative at least in part.
The Korean government has put priority on the resumption of the six-party talks and has tried to gloss over the dollar-counterfeiting issue by saying it was North Korean organizations rather than the Kim Jong-il regime that made the fakes. In doing so, it has also skirted the issue of the PSI. North Korea insists the accusations are a ploy and has warned it will stay away from the talks until the sanctions are lifted.
The U.S. is increasingly pursuing a policy of tightening the noose against the North's illegal financial activities and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It is therefore inevitable that issue will come up even if efforts to reconvene the talks are successful. That means participating nations must address all the issues together, the atomic program and North Korea's other crimes, if there is to be any progress.
On Monday, our government explained the visiting U.S. Treasury team made no request of it, but an embassy press release the next day emphasized twice that the team had asked Seoul to join the U.S. crackdown. On Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry denied this again, saying the press release is inappropriate and exaggerates what was actually discussed. In short, the Korea-U.S. alliance has deteriorated to the point where neither trusts the other to tell the truth and conflicting explanations and rebuttals are the order of the day.
The government must free itself from the delusion that the North Korea issue can be resolved under the leadership of South Korea and instead make cool-headed decision what is in the national interest given a U.S. strategy of boxing in North Korea from all sides.
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