By Ankit Panda
What will it take for nuclear talks between U.S. and North Korean officials to be productive?
The United States and North Korea “have been secretly discussing having ‘talks about talks,’” notes one headline over at the Washington Post, accurately capturing the long-standing hesitance and skepticism on both sides of the negotiating table. After all the hullabaloo toward the end of 2014 concerning the possibility that North Korea had sponsored a major cyber attack against Sony Pictures on U.S. soil, the two countries are trying to revisit the possibility of opening talks regarding denuclearization on the Korean peninsula. What, then, can be said about this latest effort at returning to talks?
Say what you will about the United States’ North Korea policy, but as Russia, China, and even Japan vacillate on their positions toward Pyongyang on a variety of issues, the U.S. has hardly budged from the position it held when the Six Party Talks died in 2009. In short, the United States’ position, emphasized as recently as fall 2014 by senior U.S. diplomats, is that the United States is unwilling to return to the Six Party Talks without guarantees from North Korea that it fully accepts the 2005 joint statement, which included affirmations from the United States, South Korea, and North Korea on denuclearization. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, had “committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning, at an early date, to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons and to IAEA safeguards” as part of that statement. Of course, much has changed in the meantime. North Korea has carried out multiple nuclear tests and the current regime sees its nuclear program as perhaps the best guarantor of its long-term security; as a result, its isolation from the international community has increased. The road back to the Six Party Talks is long indeed.
Read the full story at The Diplomat