Author: Ron Huisken

It is not hard to read into Pyongyang’s behaviour in the Six Party talks. There is a profound ambivalence about what it should be asking for and even about whether it should be in the negotiations at all.

This ambivalence seems to have been tested by the Bush administration which, in its second term, switched from demands to negotiations, and private bilaterals with the DPRK outside the Six-Party framework. It even delivered on a key demand: delisting the DPRK as state sponsor of terrorism, in October 2008.

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Author: Ron Huisken

Twenty years ago, Japan and Australia spearheaded a drive to create a forum for the states of the Asia Pacific to collectively consider how to advance their shared interests in a more liberal trading regime. This became Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation or APEC, the first official (or Track One) multilateral acronym in the region (other than the sub-regional Association of Southeast Asian States – ASEAN – which dates from 1967). Establishing APEC was a major, and difficult, accomplishment. The Asia Pacific was (and, of course, still is) a vast and diverse region. Moreover, it had little pedigree in, and weak instincts to, surrender of any sovereign rights to multilateral processes. The difficulties are manifest in the title of the forum – four adjectives in search of a noun, as one wit observed – and in the fact that it was a gathering of member economies, not of states, in order to finesse Taiwan’s participation. But APEC has endured. Since 1993, at the initiative of the US, it has involved Heads of Government. Even though its formal mandate has remained confined to trade liberalisation, HOGs have found the opportunity for low-key bilateral negotiations to be sufficiently attractive to continue to turn up.

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Author: Ron Huisken, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU

In a fit of calculated fury, North Korea has undone the work of several years of negotiations, declared the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War in 1953 to be null and void, and promised ‘merciless’ retaliation against anyone that violates its unilateral definition of sovereign rights.

Subtlety and imagination are among the many things in short supply in Pyongyang. Policy setbacks lead the regime to press the only button on the console: belligerence. Even so, the latest phase of ill-humour is strikingly fierce.

Why? Has one or more of the other five participants in the Six-party talks done something so aggressive or insulting that Pyongyang was left without a choice?

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Author: Ronald Huisken

Negotiations with the DPRK to reverse its nuclear weapon program changed character in 2008 with the bilateral US-DPRK channel overshadowing the 6-party forum.  US negotiator, Christopher Hill, secured new freedom from President Bush to secure a positive outcome, ideally before the administration left office in January 2009.  Hill appears to have exploited this freedom to the full.  As details of the arrangements he had agreed with Pyongyang filtered back to the other parties, the Japanese were deeply disturbed that Washington seemed prepared to slide over the abductee issue. For their part, the Chinese were spooked by very private US-DPRK bilaterals.  Beijing feared some dramatic US initiative that could translate into a relationship with the DPRK much closer than China desired.

There was, in addition, the usual blowback from hardliners in Washington. This time, however, they had some real ammunition. Read more…