The BBC is reporting that North Korea has announced that in exchange for its accounting for all of its nuclear activities and disabling its nuclear facilities, the US will remove North Korea from the list of terror-supporting nations and lift related sanctions.Given that the story originated with the DPRK foreign ministry — and that no …
Continue reading North Korea to be removed from terror list?
North Korea has indicated that in order for the six-party talks to go forward, the US will have to remove North Korea from its list of state supporters of terrorism. That demand, of course, is aimed squarely at US-Japan cooperation on the abductions issue, because Japan is adamant that so long as North Korea fails …
Peter Howard at Duck of Minerva greets Chris Hill's visit to Pyongyang with fairly effusive praise, arguing that the "reverse course" in North Korea policy undertaken by Hill with Condoleeza Rice's support has begun to yield some positive results. He points to the imminent closing of Yongbyon and the admission of IAEA inspectors as signs …
CFR has compiled a brief rundown of where the presidential candidates from both parties stand on North Korea.There are few positions that stand out: for the most part Democrats repeat the charge from 2004 that President Bush is to blame for refusing to engage directly with North Korea in bilateral talks, Republicans generally holding back …
I was slightly remiss in this post yesterday, because I should have said more about just how successful North Korea's diplomacy has been through all this.North Korea has the Bush administration bending over backward to assuage North Korea and keep negotiations on track, and -- with an assist from the US Congress -- has Japan …
So the six-party talks have produced a tentative agreement -- although it seems that there's no sign of a timeline, and at this point all North Korea has agreed to do is close the Yongbyon reactor that has apparently fuelled its nuclear weapons program, with no mention of what happens to North Korea's existing arsenal.Japan …
Nikkei reports today on the results of the Japanese government's annual survey of public opinion on Japan's foreign relations. The results are not particularly surprising. Nikkei leads by reporting that the ratio of respondents (57%) who thought that Japanese-South Korean relations were bad was the highest since the survey began in 1986 -- this likely …
The Japan Times reported yesterday on comments by Columbia's Gerald Curtis at a forum at the Korea Society in New York, in which he suggested that the abduction issue -- the dispute that has followed upon North Korea's 2002 admission to having abducted Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s -- has isolated Japan.It's worth …
North Korea has demanded that Japan be excluded from the next round of six-party talks, to be held in Beijing sometime before the end of the year. What did Japan do to deserve Pyongyang's scorn? Well, aside from colonizing Korea during the first half of the twentieth century, Japan is guilty of having questions about …
As I discussed here, Japan has little reason to celebrate North Korea's returning to the six-party talks.As this article in the Japan Times shows (link in English), senior cabinet and party officials have been cool to the news out of Beijing. The Japanese government, of course, was not in position to insist on the importance …
Tobias S. Harris 