Caution greets N. Korea moves

The Bush administration’s good-cop strategy toward North Korea appears to have paid off for now, with the communist regime promising to meet with United Nations weapons inspectors today as a first step toward decommissioning its nuclear reactor.

Still, nearly everyone who has closely followed the protracted effort says it’s far too early to assume the United States and other nations will succeed in peacefully persuading North Korea to give up its membership in the nuclear club. And some say the U.S. may yet regret having set aside its bad-cop strategy of refusing to provide incentives to the government in Pyongyang until the denuclearization process has begun.

“It’s hard to say if this is vindicating [President] Bush’s policies,” said Zhang Liangui, a Korea expert at China’s Central Party School in Beijing. “This is like gambling. The U.S. had a tough attitude earlier, but it’s hard to say which one is working more effectively, the tough one or the soft one.

“If North Korea doesn’t want to give up its nuclear weapons at all and is purely prolonging the process,” he added, “the United States is only buying time.”

North Korea announced Monday that it considered a banking conflict with the United States closed, with about $25 million in disputed funds “finally ... transferred according to our demand.”

Early last year, banking regulators in the Chinese special administrative region of Macao froze the money in North Korean accounts in Banco Delta Asia after the United States accused the bank of helping Pyongyang launder funds and distribute counterfeit U.S. currency.

The Bush administration recently agreed to free up the money if North Korea would live up to its end of a February agreement on denuclearization.

The money had since been transferred to a bank in Russia, Dalkombank, which said Monday that it had finished transmitting it to the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea.

This morning, South Korea said it would start sending promised food aid to North Korea this weekend. Its delivery of 400,000 tons of rice had been put on hold to spur Pyongyang to act on the February pledge.

With the money issue out of the way, officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency left for Pyongyang to begin talks about how to monitor the shutdown of the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, where fuel for nuclear weapons has been produced. North Korea had expelled the U.N. inspectors in 2002.

“Now we are going to go to negotiate the details: how to verify and make sure the reactors will be shut down at Yongbyon,” Olli Heinonen, the agency’s deputy director-general, told reporters on a stopover Monday at Beijing Capital International Airport.

Christopher Hill, the U.S. assistant secretary of State who is the Bush administration’s envoy to talks with North Korea, said after a weekend trip to Pyongyang that he expected the reactor to be shut down “probably within three weeks.”

But as Hill has acknowledged, the shutdown is just “a small step” toward denuclearization. There will almost certainly be difficult days ahead for the United States and the four other powers negotiating with North Korea -- China, Russia, Japan and South Korea.

In September 2005, North Korea agreed to abandon its nascent nuclear weapons program and give up its dream of becoming a nuclear power. But in October 2006 it tested a low-grade nuclear device.

By February, it had agreed to once again head down the road toward denuclearization, with the decommissioning of the Yongbyon reactor. Once that is done, the six parties are to move on to tougher issues of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. North Korea is believed to have enough plutonium to build six to 10 nuclear weapons.

“The complicated and contentious issues of this second phase of talks will provide a greater test of North Korea’s commitment to denuclearization,” wrote Korea analyst Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation recently. Among the issues he cited was “North Korea’s parallel uranium-based nuclear weapons program.”

Zhang, the Chinese analyst whose government is North Korea’s closest ally, essentially agreed, and said the regime might be emboldened by its success in retrieving its bank funds, despite having “totally broken the rules” that it agreed to in the February accord. At the time, North Korea agreed to an April deadline to shut down its nuclear reactor.

Now, Zhang said, “they know that even when they don’t follow the timetable, other countries will still wait. They know they can procrastinate as they wish.

“The United States first claimed that the bank case had nothing to do with the nuclear talks, but North Korea successfully hooked them up together,” he added. “So the U.S. had to deal with the bank case first. So North Korea concluded that as long as they act tough to the U.S., they win.”

mitchell.landsberg @latimes.com

The Associated Press and Gu Bo of The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.