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GIVE AND TAKE ON NORTH KOREA

Donald Kirk

Asia Times, October 7, 2009

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il gave the perfect farewell present on Tuesday to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at the wind-up of a triumphant three-day visit to Pyongyang that seemed to delight both host and guest - if not all others with a stake in the Korean Peninsula.

China's second-highest-ranking leader was able to return to Beijing safe in the knowledge that North Korea had made a show of yielding to Chinese pressure to return to the six-party talks that the North had previously spurned. And North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, having personally greeted Wen at the airport and then seen him off with pomp and circumstance, could claim to be doing all possible to achieve the dream of his father, Great Leader Kim Il-sung, for "complete denuclearization" of the Korean Peninsula.

There was just one big problem: Kim is linking any multilateral talks specifically to the two-way dialogue with the United States that he's been demanding for years, and he's not just waiting for that dialogue to begin before going into broader negotiations with the others, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. Rather, he's awaiting "the outcome of the DPRK-US talks" - that is, the long-awaited meetings in which negotiators for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or North Korea, are certain to want to go far beyond what Washington has said will be the limited scope of any bilateral dialogue.

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