North Korea will continue to produce nuclear warheads at a rate of eight to ten a year, and six-party talks are not going to halt production anytime soon. After three days of negotiations in Beijing last week, the six-nation talks ended on the same ambiguous and undefined note they began.
The meetings between China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and the United States failed to set up basic working groups to solve technical problems. What did the meetings resolve? They determined that the talks would continue. However, a date for the next round of negotiation is still to be determined.
Multiparty talks are fine in principle. Multilateral cooperation with North Korea applies more pressure and more economic incentives from a diverse group of nations. However, in practice they are clumsy and difficult to create consensus. Considering the ineffectiveness last week, imagine the time frame needed to form an agreement promising a United States' light water reactor and oil for North Korea in exchange for the dismantling of North Korean nuclear capabilities.
Bilateral negotiation is the solution to disarming North Korea. Before Bush entered office, Clinton had arranged a meeting in Pyongyang following the successful visit of Secretary of State Madeline Albright. The Bush administration entered office without a North Korea policy, neither advocating nor admonishing diplomacy. Without a defined policy stance on North Korea, the Bush administration cancelled the 2001 Clinton visit and dismantled bilateral relations.
In its place, Bush demanded reliance only on the six-party talks founded a year earlier at the Korean Summit. Bush then announced a new hard-line stance: North Korea must dismantle first and then the United States will provide assistance. As a result of Bush's aggressive policy, North Korea abandoned the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the only binding multilateral treaty with the goal of nuclear disarmament.
Ever since the abandoning of bilateral relations for six-party talks, Bush has refused to meet with Kim Jong-Il. If the United States is serious about dealing with North Korean nuclear capabilities, Bush must get over his unwillingness to meet with the dictator. After his two-day negotiation with Chinese President Hu Jintao Nov. 19 and 20, Bush should fly to North Korea and meet with Kim Jong-il. A face-to-face interaction would eliminate the inefficiency of six-party talks and focus on the main issue, a United States-North Korea agreement. Not to mention Bush's foreign relations credentials would be padded by becoming the first U.S. president to conduct negotiations in Pyongyang.
Instead of approaching Kim with a hard-line stance, a more effective approach is a policy Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Affairs, calls integrative. Offering security guarantees and substantial political and economic incentives in a personal setting rather than a malfunctioning six-party framework could move the discussion into debate and compromise.
There is no reason to involve six countries in a dialogue more easily resolved with two. The Bush administration must overcome its Kim Jong-Il aversion and solve the North Korea nuclear problem with bilateral talks. In the case of North Korea, two is much more powerful than six.
