It has been four years since the United States and North Korea negotiated their framework agreement to dismantle the latter's clandestine nuclear-weapons program. Progress -- if one can call it that -- has been slow. Hopes that tensions on the Korean Peninsula would abate have been frustrated. Last weekend, the two governments largely talked past each other about inspections of a suspected North Korean nuclear facility. This week, the two countries, along with South Korea and China, resume the two-plus-two talks that are designed to yield a dialogue between the two Koreas. Expectations are low, but even those willing to be satisfied with purely nominal signs of progress are likely to be disappointed.
Pyongyang's continuing mistrust of its negotiating partners seems misplaced. South Korea, Japan and the U.S. have offered to provide the North Korean regime with two light-water nuclear reactors and the U.S. promised to supply oil until the reactors were running if North Korea discontinued its nuclear program. (Despite some delays, the U.S. has delivered the fuel as stipulated.) At the same time, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung has initiated his "sunshine" policy, which reverses decades of suspicion toward the North in an effort to build ties between the two Koreas.
In response, the North Koreans have fired a medium-range missile over Japanese territory, launched several spy missions into South Korea and begun work on a suspicious underground facility near its reactor complex in Yongbyon. All the while, the Pyongyang government has been spewing rhetoric that echoes the worst vitriol of the Cold War. Earlier this month, North Korea threatened to abandon the framework agreement.