U.S. Agreed to North Korea Peace Talks Before Latest Nuclear Test
Pyongyang rejected condition that nuclear arms would be on the agenda—and then carried out atomic test
An undated photo of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un released by the country’s Korean Central News Agency. Photo: KCNA/KNS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Instead the U.S. called for North Korea’s atomic-weapons program to be simply part of the talks. Pyongyang declined the counter-proposal, according to U.S. officials familiar with the events. Its nuclear test on Jan. 6 ended the diplomatic gambit.
The episode, in an exchange at the United Nations, was one of several unsuccessful attempts that American officials say they made to discuss denuclearization with North Korea during President Barack Obama’s second term while also negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program.
The State Department on Sunday acknowledged the U.S. exchange with North Korea, saying it took place in accordance with longstanding U.S. goals.
“To be clear, it was the North Koreans who proposed discussing a peace treaty. We carefully considered their proposal, and made clear that denuclearization had to be part of any such discussion,” said spokesman John Kirby, adding the North rejected it. “Our response to the North Korean proposal was consistent with our longstanding focus on denuclearization.”
Kim Jong Un’s Weapons Tests
- December 2011: Kim Jong Un takes power after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.
- April 2012: Launches long-range rocket that crashes soon after takeoff. North Korea takes rare step of admitting failure.
- December 2012: Launches long-range rocket that puts a satellite into space, North Korea’s first success in putting an object into orbit.
- February 2013: Conducts North Korea’s third nuclear-bomb test, about twice the explosive force of previous test in 2009.
- January 2016: Conducts North Korea’s fourth nuclear-bomb test, which Pyongyang describes as its first hydrogen bomb. Outside experts say it is less powerful than a typical hydrogen bomb.
- February 2016: Launches long-range rocket similar to late 2012 rocket that puts a satellite into space. Mr. Kim calls for more launches.
Since taking power at the end of 2011, Mr. Kim has stepped up the North’s demands for a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, 63 years after it ended with an armistice. Many analysts see the move as an attempt to force the removal of the U.S. military in the South. The U.S. insists denuclearization must have priority, and said that has to be part of any peace talks, even while dropping the precondition that North Korea first take steps that show a willingness to give up its nuclear program.
Pyongyang rejects that. “For North Korea, winning a peace treaty is the center of the U.S. relationship,” said Go Myung-hyun, an expert on North Korea at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a Seoul-based think tank. “It feels nuclear development gives it a bigger edge to do so.”
The international reaction to North Korea’s January nuclear test and follow-up rocket launch this month was swift, with Japan imposing new penalties on Pyongyang, South Korea closing an inter-Korean industrial park that had filled the North’s coffers and American lawmakers passing a bill to tighten economic sanctions against the regime. Mr. Obama signed the bill into law last Thursday.
The new U.S. sanctions and Washington’s efforts to raise pressure on China, Pyongyang’s main political and economic ally, will provide a test of whether the deadlock can be broken. The U.S. law goes further than previous efforts to block the regime’s sources of funds for its leadership and weapons program, including by extending a blacklist to companies, primarily Chinese ones, that do business with North Korea. Existing sanctions targeted North Korean individuals and entities with little presence outside the country.
Advocates of the law, many of whom cite the example of Iran, say more pressure was needed to deter North Korea. The law will force Mr. Kim to “make a choice between coming back to the table and ending his nuclear-weapons program or to cut off the funding for that program and for his regime,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Ed Royce, a California Republican, said recently.
People
watched a television screen in Seoul showing a news broadcast on North
Korea’s long-range rocket launch on Feb. 7. Pyongyang’s latest nuclear
test and rocket launch triggered a fresh round of U.S. sanctions. Photo: SEONGJOON CHO/BLOOMBERG NEWS
“It’s not like Iran where they have a lot of vulnerability because there’s a lot of commercial activity,” a senior U.S. official said. The sanctions “will have an effect, but the real lifeline is the Chinese assistance.”
While Mr. Obama felt emboldened by his success in reaching a nuclear deal last year with Iran, he has largely tried to use any momentum from that diplomatic effort to push for a political resolution to the conflict in Syria, rather than shift focus to North Korea.
Iran and North Korea “are both countries that have a long history of antagonism towards the United States, but we were prepared to have a serious conversation with the Iranians once they showed that they were serious about the possibility of giving up the pursuit of nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama said last October. But he added, “there’s been no indication on the part of the North Koreans, as there was with the Iranians, that they could foresee a future in which they didn’t possess or were not pursuing nuclear weapons.”
North Korea’s U.N. mission didn’t respond to a request for comment. Its state media agency wrote this month of the U.S.’s prioritization of nuclear talks: “This is just like a guilty party filing suit first.”
Mr. Kim recently praised the rocket launch, saying it had dealt a “telling blow to the enemies seeking to block the advance of our country” and called for more of them, state media reported. The U.S. and other nations view such launches as the test of a missile that could potentially carry a nuclear warhead.
South Korea, which is also still technically at war with the North, said Pyongyang’s calls for a peace treaty show it is evading denuclearization. “The government will take stronger and more effective measures to make North Korea bitterly realize that it cannot survive with nuclear development and that it will only speed up regime collapse,” South Korean President Park Geun-hye told lawmakers last week.
Disagreement between the U.S. and China over new sanctions against Pyongyang has flared in recent weeks. Talks between Seoul and Washington over a new U.S.-made missile-defense shield for South Korea to guard against the North have further alarmed Beijing, which opposes a bigger U.S. military presence in Asia and wants above all to avoid North Korea’s destabilization, U.S. officials and experts say.
The U.S.-South Korean missile-shield talks “further strengthens arguments of those in China who argue North Korea is a strategic liability,” said L. Gordon Flake, head of the Perth USAsia Centre at the University of Western Australia. “It’s becoming more difficult for China to give North Korea leeway.”
For the U.S., coordination with China is important to pass new U.N. sanctions against North Korea. Some American officials said in the past week that China agreed to cooperate.
“I think it unlikely that China wants to be seen by the international community as the protector of North Korea, given its recent outrageous behavior in violation of international law and U.N. Security Council resolution,” Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, said last week.
A Chinese vice foreign minister has said Beijing will support a “new, powerful” U.N. resolution, though added that negotiations are key to fixing the problem.
But any external pressure faces the challenge of North Korea’s unwillingness to yield its nuclear weapons, especially after Pyongyang revised its constitution in 2012 to declare itself a nuclear-armed state.
“Submitting to foreign demands to denuclearize could mean delegitimization and destabilization for the regime,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
—Felicia Schwartz in Washington contributed to this article.
