If the evidence is a clear cut as is widely assumed, there are grounds for decisive action in the UN – a debate in the Security Council leading towards intensification of sanctions. The US, Japan, Russia and also China must join that effort. Clinton’s visit to Beijing will be a failure without that outcome. These are circumstances in which return to the Six Party Talks without North Korean disclosure and settlement is impossible. If US Congress successfully moves to re-list North Korea as a terrorist state, return to negotiation of normalisation of relations with North Korea will be prolonged.

As Bill Tow writes today, ‘despite Kim’s latest promise that North Korea will return to the Six Party Talks, defusing of tensions on the Korean Peninsula will remain a tortuous and elusive task. What can Australia – so distant from the vortex of Northeast Asian confrontation yet more dependent on its peaceful outcome than any country not directly involved– do to help resolve this dilemma?

Tow urges that Australia join the US in encouraging South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak to continue exercising judicious restraint as the evidence implicating Pyongyang in the destruction of the Cheonan leads to clear proof of North Korean guilt. The Action Plan underwriting the 2009 Australia-South Korea Joint Statement on Enhanced Global Security Cooperation provides a framework for the Rudd government to engage in bilateral policy consultations with South Korean officials to encourage responses which reflect both appropriate firmness and judicious restraint. Due to its long-standing membership of the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission (UNCMAC) which oversees the 1953 armistice, Australia is also well positioned to influence any economic sanctions or other penalties that the United Nations may eventually impose on North Korea in the absence of Kim’s return to the Six Party Talks. As an established leader in disarmament politics and as a country that maintains normalised diplomatic relations with North Korea, Australia can calibrate its policy responses toward preventing unbridled crisis escalation between the North and South and work with both China and the United States to achieve that end.

There has been too little initiative all round to deal with the broader, including economic, security anxieties that underpin the North Korean problem when opportunity arose. Immiserisation of the North is neither a pretty nor a feasible solution to the problem we now all face. Ironically, President Lee Myung-Bak has more assets in forging a break-through than anyone. The very close relationship between Lee and Rudd could help.

This editorial is part of a special series on the aftermath of the Cheonan sinking.