On North Korea, burgers not bombs

The following is an excerpt from an editorial in The Guardian:

The prospect of sitting down to hamburgers with Kim Jong Un, as aired by Donald Trump, is not appetizing. But North Korea’s latest missile launch should remind the United States that it can’t wait for him to eat humble pie, nor expect China to take his lunch away . . .

“Time is not on our side,” former U.S. senior officials with extensive experience of Pyongyang warned the president last week, urging him to engage in dialogue. The regime is not suicidal, but a miscalculation or mistake could bring nuclear catastrophe to the region, they told him. Technological solutions — disabling launches through electronic or cyber attacks, or intercepting missiles — will be at best only partially successful. Sanctions may be part of the answer, but history shows that they are not in themselves a solution.

Beijing and Moscow have a useful part to play. So too does South Korea, where new president Moon Jae-in seeks better relations with the North, and Japan. But Pyongyang’s real interest is in the U.S., and specifically in the prospect of a security guarantee . . . Kim does not want a banquet with Xi Jinping, but a place at the table with President Trump.

Both as a candidate and as president, Trump has toyed with the idea of meeting Kim; last month the North Korean ambassador to India again mooted the possibility of bilateral talks and a freeze on nuclear and missile tests. Such a prospect looks even more distant and less palatable following the case of Otto Warmbier, the American student detained in the North and released, in a coma, only days before his death.

Turning low-level, informal talks into negotiations and then a deal would be harder still. But as the former U.S. officials stressed, opening dialogue is neither a reward nor a concession to North Korea; it is simply the only realistic way to reduce the growing dangers. The prospect of Pyongyang triumphing in its program, or of a conflagration on the peninsula, should be even harder to swallow.