U.S.-N. Korea Talks Back on Track as Standoff Ends

The United States and North Korea ended a six-month standoff Wednesday by agreeing to resume direct talks on security issues, but only after the Bush administration made an important concession.

Officials said the two parties will meet in Beijing, probably late next week, for three-way talks with the Chinese. The agreement came after the U.S. administration abandoned its insistence that the talks include North Korea’s two democratic neighbors, South Korea and Japan.

Instead, U.S. officials said they will press to include the two countries in later rounds of talks.

U.S., South Korean and Japanese officials all hailed the planned talks as an important step forward, though the Americans acknowledged that it will not be easy to get Pyongyang to give up the nuclear deterrent it has sought to acquire.

“We’re not looking for a solution in one meeting of a couple days’ duration,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview with Associated Press. “We believe this is the beginning of a long, intense process of discussion.”

Though the outlook is unclear, the fact that talks are scheduled was widely viewed as a breakthrough after half a year of growing tensions and intermittent threats of war.

The U.S.-North Korean relationship deteriorated last October after Pyongyang acknowledged that it had violated a 1994 pact by carrying on a secret nuclear program. Since then, North Korea has ejected U.N. weapons inspectors and taken a series of steps suggesting it wanted to begin a weapons program that could make it a major exporter of nuclear materials and bombs.

“The priority is to lift the atmosphere of crisis from the Korean peninsula,” said Yoon Young Kwan, foreign minister of South Korea, whose economy has been badly stressed by talk of war.

Intensive secret talks on a meeting have been going on for weeks, but the breakthrough apparently came last week. On Saturday, the North Korean government, in a shift, said it could agree to multilateral talks.

The U.S. delegation will be led by Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly, who was conducting talks with the North Koreans last fall when they admitted to the secret program.

Powell said the American delegation is “placing no conditions on the meeting. We are not afraid of talking.” And he emphasized that President Bush “is looking for a diplomatic solution.”

He said U.S. officials hope the meeting might be held next week. “We’ll have to see the reaction we get to news of this arrangement,” he said.

U.S. officials said China became the third party in talks because the North Koreans, after balking at inclusion of the South Koreans and Japanese, said they would consent to Beijing’s participation. The Chinese, after contending for months that they had little influence over the reclusive Stalinist state, have recently begun working hard to move the North Koreans into talks.

When the North Koreans agreed to allow the Chinese into the talks, Beijing “asked the South Koreans and Japanese, ‘What do you think of this?’ And they encouraged us to go for it, as a start,” said the State Department official.

Some conservative analysts expressed concern that the administration was willing to give ground on the inclusion of all the important neighbors.

“It seems China is acquiring a greater role in this than does make sense, even considering the pressure that they exerted,” said Ellen Bork, deputy director of the Project for the New American Century think tank in Washington. “It doesn’t seem entirely consistent with what the administration says it values in its approach to North Korea.”

The meetings should quickly test how willing the North Koreans are to give up their nuclear program. As recently as last week, the official North Korean news agency declared that Pyongyang needed a powerful nuclear deterrent to ensure its security.

Robert Einhorn, a former top State Department official, said the talks would test both whether the North Koreans will give up their nuclear program, and whether they will give it up at the front end of a deal with the United States, as the Bush administration has insisted.

U.S. officials have said that the United States would begin a major effort to help North Korea economically and politically, but only after Pyongyang gave up its nuclear efforts and consented to strict verification procedures.

Einhorn said the meetings would also show whether the Bush administration has been able to overcome internal differences of opinion and the distraction of Iraq to craft a single policy on Pyongyang.

“Serious differences remain within the administration, and they’re going to have to be worked out,” said Einhorn, who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Both South Korean and Japanese officials put a positive face on the developments.

South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun predicted that negotiations will eventually succeed if North Korea is assured that the United States isn’t aspiring to topple the regime of Kim Jong Il as it did that of Saddam Hussein.

“North Korea will take the road of reform and openness, if economic aid and its political system are guaranteed,” he said in a statement Wednesday.

“I expect it will not make any dangerous moves if it has those assurances.”

Han Sung Joo, a former South Korean foreign minister who was recently named as his country’s next ambassador to Washington, said in an interview that he believed North Korea dramatically changed its strategy in the last few weeks as the U.S. war in Iraq was underway.

With the Americans displaying their military power in Iraq, “the North Koreans were very worried. They had to choose between trying to speed up their nuclear program to get as much done as possible or to try to find a diplomatic solution for the issue. It seems they have probably chosen the latter,” Han said.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Wednesday also welcomed the talks and said that they were realized “thanks to behind-the-scenes work by various countries.”

Richter reported from Washington and Demick from Seoul.