Still, no one else sees much choice. The talks adjourned with Seoul and the other five participants–Washington included–agreeing to meet again within two months, but setting no place or date. The White House, while publicly calling the talks a success, is quietly bracing for more bad news. Its Asia experts expect Pyongyang may proclaim itself a nuclear power on North Korea’s 55th anniversary, Sept. 9. Defense analysts in the United States and elsewhere say North Korea might mark the occasion with a missile test or possibly even a nuclear blast. But Chinese officials say Pyongyang only wants a better bargaining position. “The most important quality of a diplomat is to remain calm,” says China’s deputy foreign minister and chief negotiator, Wang Yi. “Particularly with the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, we must keep calm.”
The chief U.S. negotiator, James Kelly, certainly knows that. The current crisis began last October when Kelly met with North Korean officials in Pyongyang. He accused the Northerners of having a secret uranium-enrichment program. “We’d expected the North Koreans to deny everything,” says a source familiar with the talks. Instead they left the room in confusion, only to return the next day brazenly acknowledging the program and boasting of “an even more powerful weapon.”
The Americans went home angry and worried, thinking they had been threatened with germ-warfare agents. The North’s rhetoric and provocations quickly spiraled even further out of control. Weeks later U.S. officials concluded that the “even more powerful weapon” was only juche: Pyongyang’s decades-old policy of self-sufficiency. North Korean officials have since told U.S. acquaintances that each new threat was intended to signal Pyongyang’s desire to resume the talks. It was a massive failure to communicate.
The problem persists. The Kelly team’s cable to Washington recounting last week’s fiasco was headed digging their hole deeper. But it’s not only North Korea’s hole, and no one on either side knows how to dig a way out of it. The administration’s hawks want no less than regime change in Pyongyang. The men who control North Korea–and its nuclear program–want guarantees that Washington won’t try to push them out if they agree to disarm. Kelly gave his promise last week, but Kim ignored it. Wang did his best to laugh off the misunderstandings. “If there’s no heat, there’s no news,” he joked with reporters afterward. “Right?”
