Chance lost to spur North Korea talks

Unilateral countermoves by individual stakeholders have proven insufficient, and ineffective, in reining in North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, as its latest missile test on Wednesday demonstrated. While the accumulative effect of Pyongyang’s most recent series of tests has been a hardening of the consensus among the interested parties that they should end, there is still no well co-ordinated collective response to achieve that aim.

As a key interested party in the unfolding confrontation between Pyongyang and Washington, Beijing is in an awkward position, bearing the brunt of the blame for the failure to stop Pyongyang’s nuclear missile programme even though that failure has essentially been everyone’s, and being criticised for “inaction”, which ignores the truth.

Beijing wants the two belligerents to calm down as much as anyone. It is vexed that a golden opportunity to build concerted momentum to encourage Pyongyang to engage in talks has been so casually wasted by the Trump administration’s recent action of renaming Pyongyang a sponsor of state terrorism, which may have prompted the latest missile launch.

There is a severe trust deficit among the relevant parties that is being repeatedly exacerbated by the actions of Washington and Pyongyang. This, as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday, is moving the situation further away from the point where a settlement of the crisis can begin.

Which means the clock is ticking down to one of two choices: learning to live with North Korea having nuclear weapons or triggering a tripwire to the worst-case scenario. But there is a third choice, which the US keeps ignoring. That is for all stakeholders to genuinely pull together to end Pyongyang’s dangerous game once and for all through dialogue and a peace treaty.

It requires accommodating the concerns of the various parties and following the proposed step-by-step plan to establish conditions for dialogue. Beijing, November 30