Issue Brief - The Six-Party Talks and President Obama's North Korea Policy

Issue Brief - The Six-Party Talks and President Obama's North Korea Policy

http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_six_party_obama_north_korea.html

The Six-Party Talks – multilateral negotiations aimed at dismantling North Korea's nuclear weapons program –lost momentum during the last few months of the Bush administration. The latest round of the Talks, which closed on December 11, 2008, failed to produce any results, with the representatives from the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia unable to reach an agreement on the details of a verification protocol.[1] During this time, North Korea appeared to be sending mixed signals in what can be interpreted as Pyongyang's attempt to vie for the new U.S. administration's attention. In the weeks leading up to the inauguration of President Obama, North Korea revved up its rhetoric asserting its status as a nuclear weapons power and demanding that normalization of relations between the two countries must be achieved before North Korea will fully dismantle its nuclear weapons program.[2] Despite the rhetoric and posturing, on January 23, 2009, only days after the official swearing in of President Obama, North Korea's dear leader Kim Jong-il pledged his country's commitment to the "denuclearization of the Korean peninsula" during a meeting with Wang Jiarui, head of the International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee.[3]

There is widespread expectation that once the Obama administration settles in, the United States will be able to not only jump-start the Six-Party Talks, but that it will take these negotiations to a whole new level. While the new administration has yet to clearly pronounce its North Korea policy, there have been indications that it will pursue a dual-track diplomacy of continuing multilateral negotiations within the framework of the Six-Party Talks, while at the same time directly engaging North Korea in bilateral talks. It remains to be seen what kind of opportunities and challenges the change in administration in the United States will present for the multilateral efforts to strip North Korea of its nuclear weapons capability.

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