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Analysis: U.S.-North Korea Talks: Behind Closed Doors

Council on Foreign Relations

January 29, 2007
Prepared by: Carin Zissis

While attention focused on the Bush administration’s new Iraq war plan in recent weeks, the White House strategy shifted significantly on another foreign policy conundrum: North Korea’s nuclear program. CFR.org presents an in-depth, multimedia look at the standoff on the Korean peninsula in this new Crisis Guide.

In 2002, President Bush famously included North Korea in the “Axis of Evil” along with Iraq and Iran, and the Bush administration has long refused the Hermit Kingdom’s demands for bilateral negotiations. The North does not want “‘drive-by’ encounters” with the United States and instead seeks “sustained talks in which ideas can be explored and solutions, at last, patiently developed,” says a Washington Post op-ed. But even in the tense weeks after North Korea’s nuclear test last October, the White House rejected the idea. The day after the test, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told CNN that when the Clinton administration tried dialogue with Pyongyang in the 1990s, “It didn’t work.”

Yet the State Department now confirms that Christopher Hill, its lead man on East Asia, met with his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-gwan for three days in Berlin (Deutsche Welle) in mid-January. Hill refused to divulge specifics about what he called a “useful” meeting, but the North Korean negotiator “sounded positively giddy” after the Berlin discussion, according to South Korea’s Joong Ang Daily. Hill said the talks served as a prelude to further multilateral discussion involving China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea, the other Six-Party Talk members. Meanwhile, Rice insisted the Hill-Kim talks were informal and the United States would not go “outside the Six-Party framework to bilateralize our discussions.”

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.