Struggle with North Korea not exactly over

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To someone paying less than full attention to the news, it might seem as though tremendous progress had been made in the past few days in convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.

A spectacular video showed North Korea blowing up a 60-foot cooling tower at its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.

Meanwhile, President Bush said he was removing North Korea from a list of nations that sponsor terrorism.

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Kim Jong Il

Kim Jong Il

In reality, the Bush administration and its negotiating partners have only begun the process. It will be up to the next U.S. president to follow through if the biggest and most difficult goals are to be achieved in negotiations with North Korea.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il still has not revealed how many nuclear weapons it has built. It’s widely believed that Kim has enough weapons-grade plutonium to create six to eight weapons.

In addition, Kim has still not turned over details about the unclear test he conducted in 2006, and he has not divulged information on the possible sale of nuclear technology to other countries including Syria. This spring Israel bombed a suspected nuclear reactor site in Syria. The reactor reportedly was being built with the help of North Korea.

But while the progress toward denuclearization should not he exaggerated, neither should it be trivialized.

In addition to destroying the cooling tower, which would take 12 months to reconstruct, the North Koreans also have dismantled other parts of its Yongbyon reactor, and those would be more time-consuming to rebuild.

The North Koreans also have turned over 19,000 pages of documentation on its plutonium program.

This represents more progress than the Clinton administration made when with its deal with North Korea in 1994, according to Gary Samore, who conducted the negotiations. Samore, now with the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out that no facilities were disabled under the Clinton agreement with North Korea.

Sen. Chuck Hagel described the Bush administration’s progress with North Korea as “important,” and pointed out that it was “the direct result of painstaking multilateral diplomacy.” Hagel has been critical of the Bush administration for refusing for six years to talk to the North Koreans.

Critics of the deal, such as former Pentagon official Chuck Downs, contend that the deal will fall apart when a new administration takes office. “They they’ll try to lure the next administration…into another negotiating cycle,” Downs told the Los Angeles Times. “This is the standard North Korean playbook for negotiations and there is no reason to believe it has changed.”

One of the key elements of the recent success in negotiations has been the involvement of China and other key regional partners in the so-called six-party talks.

Whoever the next president may be, they should make it a prime objective to pick up the U.S. role in these negotiations without missing a beat.