Georgetown's Casimir Yost, director of Georgetown's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, was in Tokyo last week giving a series of talks. I saw him at the US Embassy's Tokyo American Center on Friday.In the course of his talk, Yost made an interesting point about how the US has been distracted from Asia by Iraq, …
Tag: Six-party talks
Farewell six-party talks?
So the US Department of Commerce has imposed tariffs on imports of glossy paper from China, bowing to pressure from the paper industry.This is one of those cases that lead me to question whether the Bush administration is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time.At the same time that the administration has …
Japan’s worst nightmare?
If there's any truth to this article in the Chosun Ilbo, Japan should be worried. The article reports that North Korea is alleged to have asked the US at bilateral meetings earlier this month if it would be possible for the US and North Korea to normalize relations without North Korea's having to give up …
The ever-shifting balance
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 …
China in charge
The FT ran an article on Wednesday dissecting the process of releasing the frozen $25 million to North Korea. I was especially struck by this line:Several people familiar with the debate said Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, agreed to overrule officials responsible for terrorism financing, who objected to the move, after Beijing warned that a failure …
Seoul speaks up — how about Washington?
The Jiji wire service carried two articles today that report on South Korean officials criticizing Japan for its focus on the abductions issue in the multilateral de-nuclearization talks.First, Yu Myong-hwan, South Korea's newly appointed ambassador to Japan, said at a press conference with Japanese journalists in Seoul that the resolving the nuclear issue must take …
Alliance or agreement?
Talks resume in Beijing on the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and the big story is that Japan and North Korea came to blows over the abductions issue.This was always the danger of Japan's pushing the abductions issue at all costs in the face of the North Korean stone wall: the US will have to …
Seeking options
I found this op-ed by Gregory Clark in last Thursday's Japan Times fascinating. Clark suggests that North Korea may well be more open to an agreement with the US than commonly assumed, because Pyongyang is looking to expand its foreign policy options: "Even less is there any realization of an even more important factor possibly …
Driving a wedge in the alliance
Once again a response to a post deserves a fuller response. Adamu of Mutantfrog Travelogue noted in reply to this post:You keep saying that America is abandoning Japan, but wouldn't a grand nuclear bargain that works be more in Japan's interest than letting the whole thing fall apart over the abduction issue?It's a fair point. …
All going according to plan…but whose plan?
I can't say that I'm surprised to hear that North Korea delayed the start of normalization talks with Japan in Hanoi, right after reports out of New York suggested that the US and North Korea had positive talks.The unfolding of events seems almost too scripted to be real: just as international opprobrium falls on Abe's …
Continue reading All going according to plan…but whose plan?
Tobias S. Harris 