Can someone please explain all this mess to me?
North Korea has nuclear weapons. We want North Korea to disarm. North Korea wants to have bilateral talks with us. We don't want to.
Whaaaaa?
What possible harm could there be in having bilateral talks with North Korea? Are we afraid that they're such good negotiators that we're going to agree to something we don't want? (Them: We'll get rid of two of our nukes and in return, you can either have the washer-dryer combo or the contents of ... this box! Us: The box! The box!) Isn't the point to do everything possible to stop what Bush himself admits is the biggest threat to security -- nuclear proliferation?
And, then, what the heck is up with North Korea? What possible good can come out of announcing to the world you have nuclear weapons and then trying to get bilateral talks with us, even though
A fourth round of talks did not take place in September when North Korea refused to attend, citing what it called a "hostile" U.S. policy.
and
Pyongyang also lashed out at Bush's inaugural speech in which he emphasized the effort to spread freedom, calling it an "untamed fire" that "will reach the darkest corners of our world."
North Korea called the effort a diabolical U.S. scheme to turn the world into "a sea of war flames."
I don't think they want to have these meetings to ask us to marry them, if you catch my drift. So can someone please explain these goings-on to a confused layman?
5 comments:
Short answer: The N. Korean leaders are nuts and incompotent. They think that because they have been able to get more goodies by dealing directly with the US in the past that now that they have nukes it will be even better.
But they forget that we were bribing them to stop developing nukes. They took the bribes and developed the nukes anyway. Now they want another bribe. Not too smart.
The Bush Administration does not want bi-lateral talks because to make any deal stick in that region it must be acceptable to China, South Korea and Japan (and maybe Russia too). So why go to the trouble of cutting a deal with N. Korea only to have them turn around and use it to leverage a better deal from China or Russia (which has happened in the past).
Frankly, I don't think talking will do any good now anyway. The time for negotiations of any kind was 4 years ago....ooops.
The Korean peninsula is one of the more convoluted WWII and cold war relics. The politics there are of mandarin complexity. Keep in mind that the Korean war is not over -- there is technically a state of war remaining. First, to allow NK to use nuclear weapons to get the USA to deal directly w/o its clients SK or Japan, or without China, will be viewed as appeasement. Second, bilateral talks are presumably meant to get a deal with the US that the other states might not agree to. Third, it gives NK more dignity than it deserves. We need to deal with NK the way we should have dealt with Iraq, through worldwide pressure and cooperation. If we still can.
p.s. I'm not making fun of RBR's spelling prowess, but his typo "incompotent" combining both "impotent" and "incompetent" is wonderful and eerily freudian about the very odd and childless Kim Jong Il.
The story that North Korea negotiated in bad faith with Clinton is not the whole story. The U.S. did not follow through on its aid promises to North Korea either.
Yeah, I can't spell. But at least I'm still funny when I screw up!
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