Stardate 20030418.2017

(On Screen): North Korea made what seemed to be a concession, and so did China, and the US made plans to enter into multilateral talks with both nations in China.

But since then the North Koreans publicly boasted that they had begun to reprocess several thousand fuel rods to extract plutonium, and now it's reported that the US may not go after all.

I think there won't be any talks, but not because of the North Korean announcement (bad as it is). I think the real reason is because China pulled a fast one. The thing we've been trying to avoid is getting stuck in bilateral talks with North Korea, because it would tacitly acknowledge that the US alone would be responsible for solving the problem and making whatever concessions were required to do so. That's always been the reason that North Korea demanded this, and the reason why we refused.

Earlier this week it seemed as if North Korea had backed down from its demands that it negotiate with the US exclusively, and the Chinese seemed to consent to be parties to the discussion. But after the US expressed interest, the Chinese suddenly stated that they would host the talks but wouldn't actually participate in them, or even to mediate the talks.

That's not exactly what we had in mind. It's looking now a lot like the Chinese and North Koreans tried to pull a fast one to con us into bilateral talks after all. I think they assumed that once they'd managed to get the US to accept the talks, the Bush administration wouldn't be willing to back out even if the rules changed.

Not surprisingly, the South Korean government thinks the talks should happen anyway, but I don't think they will. It may be that the US will use the NK reprocessing announcement as its excuse for publicly pulling out, but the real reason will be the fact that the Chinese tried to screw us over. There will be no talks with North Korea until the Chinese formally accept that they will be involved.