Walking the Tightrope

Har

d-liners in George W. Bush's administration, never known for their diplomatic bedside manner, have called it the "strangulation strategy": forcing the North Korean despot Kim Jong Il to shelve his nuclear weapons program by cutting off his isolated country from trade and aid.

One of the most visible obstacles to that strategy is the Friendship Bridge across the Yalu River in northeastern China. The span connects the city of Dandong with North Korea, and every day pedicab drivers and minivans haul their goods across the Yalu, bringing scissors and shampoo, fruit and vegetables, and even DVD players and color TVs to market in Kim's socialist paradise. Train cars also trundle over, carrying oil destined for use in North Korea's million-member military. For Kim, the economic link to the outside world that the bridge symbolizes is vital. Beijing knows it—and so does Washington.

So now that Kim has once again played his nuclear card—pulling out of talks aimed at disarmament, bragging that he has the Bomb—the strangulation question is front and center. Should North Korea's trade and economic ties, most importantly those with China and South Korea, the North's largest trading partners and charitable benefactors, be choked off to pressure a country that is already among the most economically backward in the world?

That question was in the air last week during a furious round of diplomacy set off by the North's Feb. 10 declaration that it has joined the exclusive club of nuclear nations. In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned her counterpart in Beijing, Li Zhaoxing, then hosted foreign ministers from South Korea and Japan. The U.S.'s new point man on the now stalled six-party talks aimed at persuading Kim to abandon nuclear arms—ambassador to Seoul Christopher Hill—flew to Beijing, where he met with a group of senior Chinese officials, including Wang Jiarui, China's top North Korea handler, who traveled to Pyongyang for talks on Saturday.

For the U.S., getting its negotiating partners on the same page when it comes to North Korea is the diplomatic equivalent of herding cats. The Bush Administration, in fact, is having a hard time getting its own message about North Korea straight. Immediately after the North said publicly it had nuclear weapons, Rice said, in effect, we already knew that. But at his confirmation hearing last week, Rice's new deputy, Robert Zoellick, suggested it was possible the North was just bluffing. At the same time, outgoing U.S. ambassador to Tokyo Howard Baker told reporters that the North was a "deadly threat," particularly given its record of arms proliferation "to all comers," adding that he didn't see any upside in disbelieving the North's assertion.

Baker wasn't being particularly diplomatic, but he was closer to the truth. As the six-party talks, which began in 2003, dragged on, the North appears to have become a greater military threat and proliferator of missiles (and possibly nuclear weapons technology) to rogue states. Underscoring the danger last week in testimony to the U.S. Congress, CIA Director Porter Goss declared that North Korean missiles have been improved to the point that one long-range version, the Taepo Dong-2, "is capable of reaching the U.S. with a nuclear weapon-sized payload."