Author of, among other things, “Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World,” Gordon Chang has today called for Stephen Bosworth, the U.S. chief nuclear negotiator, not to make the trip to Pyongyang for bilateral talks that he is scheduled to make on December 8th.
Writing for Forbes, Chang asserts that for Bosworth to go to Pyongyang at this time is both playing into North Korean hands and completely undermining the policy which Washington had appeared to be adhering to since Barack Obama came to office, namely that there would be no bilateral discussions outside the context of the Six-Party Talks.
Chang cites a speech given by Jeffrey Bader, the U.S. National Security Council’s Asia head, at the Brookings Institution last month. In it, Bader said that Stephen Bosworth would not make the trip to Pyongyang unless the North “acknowledged that the six-party talks were the proper “framework” for denuclearization discussions, the agenda for the Bosworth meeting was the denuclearization of North Korea, and the North Koreans reaffirmed their September 2005 commitments to surrender their nuclear arsenal.”
“If we see that, then there is no problem with bilateral contacts either in Pyongyang or elsewhere,” Bader concluded in his speech. The problem, Chang claims, is that none of those things has happened, but Bosworth is apparently going anyway.
As a result, Bosworth needs to come home with North Korea’s commitment to give up its nuclear arsenal. No other result will be adequate, Chang claims, for other nations which might aspire to challenge the United States will be watching the results of the bilateral tete-a-tete very closely, and “will see the Bosworth trip not so much as a test of Kim Jong Il but one of Washington’s word.”
