Update 2: Talks have been extended one more day. But with North Korean media accusing the U.S. of “betrayal,” the outlook doesn’t look good, not that it ever did. I think North Korea behavior – making demands that would derail any agreement – can be explained by Strategic Disengagement.

Update: Four days of talks ended with no agreement on implementing the 19 September 2005 Joint Statement. North Korean negotiators did this on purpose with demands they must know would be dealbreakers:

A diplomatic source said North Korea had demanded the United States and four other countries provide it with 2 million metric tons of heavy fuel oil annually [or] 2 million kilowatts of electricity in exchange for scrapping its nuclear arms programs. “The North Korean demands are outrageous and incomprehensible by our standards. . .”

Original post: The watchwords for this installment of the Six-Party Talks in Beijing are “optimism” and “caution.” The North Korean negotiator in Beijing, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan (a.k.a. the “smiling assassin”), has helped perpetuate this:

“There is an agreement and also still differences. . . We’ll try to overcome them.” […] Kim declined to clarify what differences still exist.

Which is about what the U.S. negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, has said:

“One or two issues, really… not broad issues, and frankly, not fundamental issues… It’s hard to think that these issues would hold it up. It’s hard to think that they would be dealbreakers, but we have to see.” [. . .] “We have an approach for how to deal with [Banco Delta sanctions] … let me just say, I don’t think that’s what’s holding us up.”

Hill stressed that the “fundamental issues” are apparently solved, and that concluding some sort of deal hinges on solving what he apparently considered as lesser issues. We may learn more of exactly which issues were sticking points after the talks.

A nuclear expert who recently visited North Korea and met with officials was also optimistic:

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington and one of the experts, said yesterday that the North Koreans appeared interested in a solution that would calm international concerns about Pyongyang’s nuclear programs, provided it was tied to an improving relationship with the United States.

[. . .]

“They are willing to take the first step,” Albright said. “This may be the only step.”

And what does North Korea want?

Japan’s Kyodo News agency reported today that the draft called for communist North Korea to suspend operations at its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon within two months in exchange for energy aid.

[…]

Yonhap said the one-page draft included timelines for the North’s freezing of its key nuclear facilities, including its only operational 5-megawatt reactor, and for the other parties to supply aid and security guarantees.

Another key demand is said to be the a normalization of relations with the U.S. Two Nautilus Institute scholars stressed this:

“Above all, it wants, and has pursued steadily since 1991, a long-term, strategic relationship with the United States,” said John Lewis, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and Robert Carlin, a former U.S. State Department analyst who participated in most of the U.S.-North Korea negotiations between 1993 and 2000.

Japan however, which ruled out giving aid to North Korea until the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea has been settled, has taken a more realistic view of the prospects an agreement:

Japan’s chief negotiator, Kenichiro Sasae, sounded a bleaker note, telling reporters: “I don’t think there is any prospect at this stage of an agreement being reached. But each country is making efforts to reach an accord.”

Last week a Chinese expert on North Korea also voiced doubt:

“Frankly speaking, I have changed my view from optimistic to pessimistic,” Teng Jianqun, deputy secretary-general of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, told a news briefing in Beijing.

[. . .]

“I am just wondering whether the parties concerned, especially the U.S. and North Korea, would like to solve the dispute in the short term. The answer might be not,” he said.

While the speculation about U.S. goals doesn’t have much of a basis considering Christopher Hill’s Herculean efforts in trying to achieve a tenable agreement, the North Korean government’s motives are key.

Although wire reporting does not mention it, if North Korea wanted to implement the agreement worked out on 19 September 2005 (DOC), they could have… in September 2005. Instead they killed any hope of implementing that deal “at an early date” with the statement they issued the next day (DOC). This was followed by U.S. sanctions on North Korean bank accounts in Macao for money laundering which, while justified, added another hurdle to the already unlikely task of entering into a good faith deal.

The fact that the term CVID – complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization – is not being used by Hill or in the press could mean that the U.S. doesn’t feel they can make an agreement with those terms, or that the term was viewed at too charged for the negotiations. That latter makes more sense, if they can include other language that would accomplish the same end, as the former would be a complete reversal of policy up to this point.

We must remember, particularly when dealing with North Korea, that an agreement is only a piece of paper, and that what it says does not necessarily translate into action or inaction on the North Korean side. While Lewis and Carlin may be right – perhaps North Korea does want to normalize relations with the U.S. – they must also consider that North Korea has claimed to want a nuclear free peninsula yet created and tested a nuclear bomb. What North Korea says is not always what North Korea means.

GI Korea echoes my sentiments:

I have said this before and I will say it again, Kim Jong-il has no intention of giving up his nuclear weapons. He developed nuclear weapons in order to appease his military eager to join the prestigious nuclear club and to ensure regime survival. He is using the current six party talks to buy time to perfect his nuclear weapons program. Once Kim Jong-il has successfully created a half dozen nuclear weapons he will be able to fully implement what fellow K-blogger Richardson at DPRK Studies calls Strategic Disengagement. Before strategically disengaging, if Kim can get the US to drop its financial sanctions and return the $24 million dollars frozen in a Macau Bank and any other goodies the US is willing to throw in for a nuclear freeze Kim will take it. Why not when he already possesses the weapons? (emphasis added)

Strategic Disengagement explains why North Korea cannot engage with the U.S. or South Korea in the fashion required to implement any viable nuclear deal. Distilled, the reason is that the foundation of the regimes power was and is a cult of personality, making the Kim’s more deity than human.

This cult has survived only because the regime has been successful at isolating the population from outside information and engaging in what is almost certainly the most invasive public brainwashing campaign ever undertaken by a government. In North Korea’s case, true engagement – or war – means regime failure.

However, since the famine that began in the early to mid 1990s, North Korean’s have slowly been learning of the real world, especialy South Korea via pop culture. This outside information threatens the regime, and the regime has responded:

North Korea is cracking down on a flood of South Korean pop culture permeating the hardline communist state, intelligence sources have said.

[. . .]

Videotapes or CDs of South Korean films, music or TV soap operas enter the North via neighbouring northeast China.

[. . .]

North Koreans for decades had access only to state-run domestic media which extolled the virtues of “Great Leader” Kim Il-Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-Il, known as the “Dear Leader”.

[. . .]

The VCRs are also undermining North Korean propaganda claims that life in the South is far inferior, according to Lankov.

While viewers did not believe everything they saw in the films, some things could not be faked — such as Seoul’s affluent cityscape.

“It is gradually dawning on the North Koreans that the South is not exactly the land of hunger and destitution depicted in their propaganda.”

A survey of North Korean refugees in China by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea showed 82 percent do not believe that the South’s economy is in worse shape than the North’s.

Jeung Young-Tae of the Korea Institute for National Unification said the North views fads from the outside as a threat to its socialist system.

“North Korea has been expanding trade and exchanges with the outside world in order to improve economic conditions, but such a policy always entails fallout in the form of what it perceives as negative foreign influence on its people.” (emphasis added)

It may be too late:

A North Korean defector who came to the South in 2004 said, “With the spread of secondhand, China-made VCRs or DVD players, it is very likely that almost all young people living in border towns, as well as those in Pyongyang, have watched South Korean visual entertainment at least once.

[. . .]

Reportedly, North Korea prevented 5,000 VCD players, imported from Dandong, China, from reaching its citizens. By mobilizing all of its youth organizations, Pyongyang is cracking down on the Wave. The Seoul official said, “the Pyongyang government seems to think that if more people call for change, the regime will be more likely to collapse. To avoid the meltdown of the regime, North Korea is trying to stabilize the livelihood of its people by channeling more money into its light industries.”

There have even been (false) rumors of an overthrow of Kim Jong-il:

North Korea watchers in Asia and America a few days ago, speculating that the “Dear Leader” in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il, had been placed under house arrest by disgruntled military officers.

The recent http://freekorea.us/?p=6442" target="_blank">mass escape of North Koreans from a prison concentration camp is just another symptom.

My position remains that the North Korean regime is unable to keep any denuclearization deal in good faith, and that its October 2005 nuclear test helped seal that outcome. We may indeed see an agreement come out of Beijing, in this round of talks or ones to follow, but implementation on North Korea’s side will still be the dealbreaker.