WASHINGTON -- North Korea's return to six-party negotiations in Beijing has been accompanied by greater civility and seriousness than many expected. Further, the frequent and direct bilateral contacts that have taken place between the U.S. and North Korean delegations -- a softening of the Bush administration's earlier insistence that six-party talks be its only mode of dealing with Pyongyang -- have been surprising and welcome.
In the absence of U.S. concessions, which should not occur absent further North Korean steps beyond the nuclear issue alone, it is doubtful that North Korea will agree to a deal. Kim Jong Il and those who rule North Korea with him need much more than electricity to rescue their country from its post-Cold War economic collapse and are thus nearly certain to demand a higher price than electricity for the one major asset they possess.
Anticipating an impasse, what should the United States and its partners do? As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has argued, the right way of dealing with an unsolvable problem is to enlarge it -- an approach we believe proper for dealing with North Korea's nuclear arsenal. Rather than barter over the price to be paid to a Stalinist regime that threatens the region and abuses its own people for weapons that it is treaty-bound not to have, we believe that the U.S. should pursue regime transformation in North Korea by also placing market and human-rights reform "baskets" squarely on the negotiating table.