North Korea making threats again
North Korea has ordered the expulsion of U.S. and U.N. experts monitoring its idled nuclear facilities and is threatening to restart its main nuclear plant and begin production of plutonium. The expulsion, which violates a 2007 international agreement, was in retaliation for the U.N. Security Council’s unanimous condemnation of North Korea’s provocative April 5 launch of a ballistic missile over Japan, itself a violation of previous U.N. resolutions. If North Korea is true to form, it will have engaged in bad behavior in order to demand favors and concessions from the international community in return for stopping the bad behavior.
Usually Pyongyang starts becoming more amenable to reason about the time the U.S. and U.N. show signs of beginning to seriously enforce existing sanctions against North Korea.
North Korea would like to derail the six-nation negotiating process – itself, the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, South Korea – by peeling off the United States for direct bilateral talks.
And indeed, after the world has become sufficiently alarmed by the prospect of North Korea building nuclear weapons, Pyongyang may offer to again idle its program and let the international inspectors return if only Washington will sit down with it.
The young Obama administration may be tempted by the possibility of pulling off a diplomatic coup. It should resist. What little progress – and the 2007 nuclear deal was progress – has been achieved through the laborious and frustrating mechanisms of the U.N. and the six parties.
China is the only nation with real leverage on North Korea but is reluctant in the extreme to use it. If there is diplomacy to be done, it is in convincing China that it is in no one’s interest, including its own, to have a loopy dictator with delusions of grandeur armed with nuclear weapons recklessly flinging ballistic missiles around the Pacific.
Maybe there’s hope yet. China joined in the U.N. rebuke this week of North Korea.