The danger receded, with Chinese intercession, as North Korea stepped back and, following on from the private visit of US Democrat Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson to Pyongyang in December, has called for unconditional talks to build bridges with the South apparently aimed at re-starting the Six-Party Talks and North-South defence talks.

As Aidan Foster-Carter argues in this week’s lead essay, 2011 still leaves the peninsula a terribly dangerous place. No one knows what anyone will do next, how the other will react, or what their game plan is; no one should presume a stable outcome, despite the initiatives out of Pyongyang over the last few weeks. And Andrei Lankov rightly warns that a closer look at the recent crisis and the current mood in Seoul and Pyongyang gives little ground for optimism: both North Korean strategic calculations and South Korean assumptions about ways to handle its uneasy neighbour could bring the crisis back with a vengeance. In Washington on Tuesday, President Obama warned Chinese President, Hu Jintao, over their private dinner that if North Korea was not reined back, US defence posture in Northeast Asia would have to change sharply.

Foster-Carter very carefully parses the verbal exchanges from the North and South that have taken place over recent days. The North Koreans announced on 5 January that they were ‘ready to meet anyone anytime and anywhere’ and declared that they proposed ‘discontinuing to heap slanders and calumnies on each other’ and refraining from any kind of provocation. As Foster-Carter says, ‘This is not the kind of language we are used to hearing from Pyongyang lately’. North Korea’s follow up with an invitation to South Korean defence leaders to join North-South defence talks adds to the sense of relief and optimism.

But Foster-Carter underlines the reality that peaceful resolution of the Korean problem is still in stasis. Peaceful resolution of the problem requires clarity in the objectives and strategies of the principal parties. But, on both sides, they are by no means clear. President Lee Myung-bak’s position may, as Foster-Carter says, be unenviable. But what does he want? Does he have a goal and a strategy, apart from angst and wanting North Korean capitulation as the pre-condition to dealings with the North? The signals from Seoul appear as mixed as those out of Pyongyang. And as Lankov warns, South Korea’s drawing the wrong lesson from the North Korean back-down in December has made the problem worse: it is a dangerous illusion, he argues, for Seoul to walk away from that episode thinking that North Korean leaders will duck a fight at any cost. ‘This round of military and diplomatic standoffs might be more dangerous than usual … because of Seoul’s newly acquired belief in the power of counter-strikes’.

In America, the advent of the Obama administration promised a more innovative policy towards North Korea built on the Clinton-Kim Dae-jung model. But there was a stronger current of thought in the new US Administration: that North Korea could wait; be made to sweat it out; did not demand priority, given a number of major domestic and international issues including the economic crisis, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Palestine. Though the relationship between the South and the North had begun to deteriorate after the inauguration of the Lee Myung-bak presidency in 2008, there was still hope for progress and it rested heavily on US initiative, not ‘strategic neglect’. In reality there was no mood for US initiative. This was a volatile stasis. Independently of the pressures of political transition in Pyongyang, it was likely to catalyse North Korea’s desperation for dealing. And it did. However ill-calculated Pyongyang’s various provocations have been, on past record, they were a likely outcome of the growing and steely resolve from Seoul and Washington not to deal. Pyongyang decided to teach Seoul and Washington a lesson, to show that North Korea is too troublesome to be simply ignored.

Developments over the last year have both hardened antagonisms at the same time as increased the urgency of a breakthrough. By the end of the year, the tenuous grasp on control and reason was fraying badly around the edges of the Lee Presidency in Seoul, among the informed US commentariat, not to mention, it goes without saying, in Pyongyang. One of the most respected and reasoned commentators on US Asian policy developments in Washington, Chris Nelson, concluded, ‘So to be brutally blunt about it: if a critic today sees a moral and political equivalence between Pyongyang and Seoul, who could possibly trust that critic’s judgment sufficiently to include in any serious policy discussion, in government or elsewhere?’ Those who dared urge that there could be a way through, that standing back from negotiation was damaging to US and allied security interests, have found themselves more readily labelled what Foster-Carter calls ‘North flank guards’, who found an excuse for Kim Jong-Il whatever his regime might do.

Foster-Carter’s core question is this: What should we be negotiating about? From the standpoint of the United States and her allies, the imperative is denuclearisation and security. The North Korean nuclear reality is there and it was shoved in America’s face on the Hecker mission to Yongbyon in November. Nobody seriously believes that North Korea will give up its (still limited) nuclear stockpile immediately or soon. US policy has in place no positive or proactive strategy for dealing with North Korea’s perfection of nuclear weapons and proliferation risk other than sanctions and Proliferation Security Initiative, and these instruments have, for good reason, not worked. There is an offer on the table for a substantive North-South dialogue to negotiate the shipping out of the fresh fuel rods containing 10 nuclear bombs worth of plutonium. Start there, Joel Wit argues. That is only a start. There needs to be a strategy that puts in place a comprehensive security and economic settlement. Only that is likely to be able to satisfy both sides of this problem.

Lack of moral equivalence has never been a reason for failure to find a way through in international diplomacy.