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Analysis: Korean Six-Party Hopes

Council on Foreign Relations

February 6, 2007
Prepared by: Carin Zissis

The New Year has brought cautious optimism about the Six-Party Talks on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, set to resume this week. Up until last month, the talks seemed to hold little hope of offering resolution to the standstill over the North’s nuclear weapons program. The negotiations stalled for more than a year after Pyongyang walked away from the talks, held with China, the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Russia. Beijing brought North Korea back on board, but only after Pyongyang joined the nuclear club with its October 2006 test. Christopher Hill, the U.S. State Department’s chief negotiator, left the last Six-Party round in December “disappointed” over the lack of progress. This new CFR.org Crisis Guide offers an in-depth look at the crisis on the Korean peninsula.

In an interview with Bernard Gwertzman, CFR Director of Studies Gary Samore says Hill was recently “given more negotiating flexibility than he previously enjoyed.” The Bush administration eased up on its hard-line stance of refusing to hold the bilateral talks Pyongyang has long demanded when Hill met with his North Korean counterpart last month in Berlin. Samore says in the February round of Six-Party Talks, Hill will be able to negotiate for “an interim step rather than going directly to full disarmament.” The Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner says the United States should ask for nothing less than full dismantlement, saying, “Talking is not success, and North Korea should not be rewarded for its intransigence or its noncompliance with U.N. resolutions.”

Before heading to Northeast Asia, Hill said he did not expect to achieve full denuclearization, but that “we have a basis for making progress at this round” toward implementing the Six-Party September 2005 agreement.

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.