The Blue House has moved to explain President Lee Myung Bak’s “Grand Bargain,” the Presidential prescription to solve North Korea’s nuclear problems which he announced on Monday.
President Lee, who is visiting the U.S. for the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh and to give a speech in the U.N. General Assembly, said on Monday, “We have to pursue a ‘Grand Bargain,’ by which we abolish the core of North Korean nuclear programs through the Six Party-Talks and provide North Korea with security and international aid in return.”
Kim Eun Hye, the Blue House spokesperson explained, “The President’s suggestion of a ‘Grand Bargain’ came from the need for a fundamental solution to the custom of step-by-step measures followed by compensation in North Korean nuclear negotiations. It means a fundamental and comprehensive package settlement.”
According to the Blue House, the “Grand Bargain” aims to disable the salami tactics which North Korea usually attempts to employ in any international negotiations. Pyongyang has repeatedly extracted food and energy aid from the international community through these tactics during the Six-Party Talks’ and before.
In 1994, North Korea was promised a costly light-water nuclear reactor and heavy oil by way of compensation, but broke the promise of freezing its nuclear program, and then broke the deeply flawed 2005 September 19 Joint Statement by conducting two nuclear tests, in October, 2006 and again in May this year.
President Lee Myung Bak wants to break out of that, “Past nuclear negotiations went back and forth between dialogue and tension. We have to get out of this pattern.”
Jeon Sung Hoon, senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification, agrees, “The ‘Grand Bargain’ suggestion seems to stem from the belief that the step-by-step approach has failed to achieve North Korean denuclearization.”
However, he pointed out that, “We should keep an eye on what kind of things are in the Grand Bargain. If there seems to be new concessions, adverse criticism will be harsh.”
Regardless, if the Bargain is pursued then cooperation with the five member states besides North Korea will be more important than ever before. After the second nuclear test, international cooperation was apparently effective in constraining North Korea through UN Security Council sanctions, so close cooperation between the five countries has proven its value.
President Lee suggested a similar “comprehensive” package at the U.S.-South Korea Summit in May of this year, and President Obama expressed sympathy with it at the time, calling it a “Grand Bargain.”
Yu Myung Hwan, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, explained in a press conference after meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday, “It stems from the idea that we should not be dragged around by North Korea’s tactics.”
Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Kurt Campbell spoke of the “Grand Bargain” yesterday in a press conference in New York, “[There is] strong agreement among all the parties that North Korea must accept the fundamental conditions which it signed up for in 2005 and 2007, which are essentially a commitment to a nuclear-free peninsula in Korea.”
