Obama must leave door open to North Korea
来源:百度文库 编辑:神马文学网 时间:2024/04/29 10:03:02
Obama must leave door open to N. Korea
- Story Highlights
- U.S. President Barack Obama must leave the door to talks with N. Korea open
- Tough sanctions have failed to get N. Korea to negotiate in the past
- N. Korea has said it will retaliate if U.N. crackdowns with more sanctions
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For CNN
(CNN) -- There's an old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
U.S. President Barack Obama is facing a stern diplomacy test over
Although President Barack Obama and other world leaders could be forgiven for feeling that North Korea's Kim Jong-Il is deliberately driving them insane, that adage is worth keeping in mind amid the calls for U.N. Security Council sanctions against Pyongyang over its recent rocket test.
Virtually every angry editorial, opinion column or government statement condemning the launch and urging tough new sanctions has grudgingly acknowledged that -- however satisfying such a step would be -- it almost certainly won't work. Not only have the Chinese and Russians -- key neighbors and trading partners of North Korea -- made clear their opposition to sanctions, but history shows that pressure and coercion aimed at punishing the North or changing its behavior have usually had the opposite effect.
A few examples:
-- A Bush administration move in November 2002 to halt promised shipments of heavy fuel oil in retaliation for
-- After the U.S. Treasury Department targeted North Korean accounts in a bank in the former Portuguese
-- And following the strongly worded condemnation of those missile tests by the U.N. Security Council, the North Koreans ignored warnings not only from
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There is no evidence to suggest that "punishing" North Korea with tougher sanctions this time will produce a result any different from past attempts at pressure, especially because the threat or use of force -- which would raise the prospect of a new Korean war when Washington is preoccupied with Afghanistan, Iraq and the financial crisis -- is clearly not an option.
Moreover, the North has signaled that it will retaliate sharply for any U.N. sanctions move. One likely step could be the reprocessing of spent fuel rods removed from the Yongbyon reactor as part of the process of disabling the facility that began in 2007. That could give
Despite its strong condemnation of the April 5 rocket launch and public support for action at the United Nations, the Obama administration appears to understand that sanctions alone are a dead end. In a revealing meeting with reporters the day before the test, the new
"We ... believe strongly that everyone has a long-term interest. Regardless of this short-term problem, everyone has a long-term interest in getting back to the negotiations in the six-party process as expeditiously as possible," he said. He added, "We will continue to have bilateral contacts with the North Koreans. And we are prepared to open that channel at any point."
In the current heated climate -- especially given the hardline positions toward the North adopted by key