Analysts: N. Korea Buys Time with U.S. Nuclear Deal
North Korea's new leaders, hungry for food aid ahead of a landmark anniversary, have bought time in a deal with Washington but show no sign of actually renouncing their nuclear bargaining chip, experts say.
Under the deal announced Wednesday, the communist state now led by the young and untested Kim Jong-Un agreed to suspend nuclear and long-range missile tests, and its uranium enrichment program.
The United States -- which analysts said was keen to remove at least one strategic headache in an election year -- agreed in return to provide North Korea with 240,000 tons of desperately needed food.
Implementation will be the key, however, after almost two decades of nuclear negotiations and broken agreements amid mutual accusations of bad faith.
Peter Beck, Korea representative of the Asia Foundation, likened the deal to "a second marriage -- the triumph of hope over experience", but also said that pragmatism had prevailed in Washington and Pyongyang.
"At this point the best that can be done is to freeze the nuclear program," he told Agence France Presse.
North Korea under Jong-Un's late father Kim Jong-Il repeatedly offered to bargain over its nuclear program, only to renounce negotiations and press ahead with atomic and missile tests once new aid was secured.
But for now at least, the deal appears to be the best that could be hoped for by both sides as U.S. President Barack Obama grapples for re-election and North Korea prepares to mark a symbolic date next month.
"For the United States, the agreement lays the foundation for bringing the North's nuclear issue under control for a while," professor Yang Moo-Jin of Seoul's University of North Korean Studies told AFP.
Obama needs some progress on North Korea at least before facing U.S. voters in November, especially when Iran and Syria present such challenges, Yang said.
"For Jong-Un, he secured a practical gain in the form of food aid."
Yang said Kim Jong-Un needed massive food aid in the run-up to April 15, the 100th anniversary of the birth of his grandfather and North Korea's founding leader Kim Il-Sung.
The regime has pledged to turn the impoverished nation, stalked by years of famine, into a "strong and prosperous" state to mark the anniversary.
Officially at least, Pyongyang and Washington are committed to a six-nation agreement of September 2005, under which the North would scrap all nuclear programs in return for major diplomatic, security and economic benefits.
But many analysts doubt whether the regime will ever abandon a decades-old atomic drive that is vaunted as one of the Kim's dynasty's greatest achievements.
"For now, the agreement is a welcome development. Talking is better than not talking and a freeze is better than an unfettered nuclear program," Beck said.
But he added that the North would not give up its nuclear programs and it was "highly unlikely" that any significant progress could be made on denuclearization any time soon.
North Korea abandoned the six-nation talks in April 2009 and conducted its second nuclear test the following month.
There have been months of diplomatic effort to revive them, culminating in U.S.-North Korean talks in Beijing last week that agreed the latest deal.
Yang said that if things go as planned, six-party negotiations may resume in the first half of this year.
Richard Bush, a senior researcher at the U.S. Brookings Institution, said Wednesday's agreement could be an initial step towards serious negotiations.
"Or they could simply be a ploy to get nutritional assistance and meddle in South Korean politics," Yonhap news agency quoted him as saying.
"North Korea's record suggests the latter, but we shall see."
The North bitterly opposes the South's conservative government, which faces its own elections this year.
While there is plenty of skepticism about the latest nuclear deal, it has raised some hopes of better relations under Kim Jong-Un, whose personality and policies remain a closed book to the outside world.
Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said there were questions after Kim Jong-Il's death in December about whether anyone was in charge in Pyongyang.
"Now we know that someone is capable of making decisions and their first one constitutes a conciliatory (indeed, concessionary), not belligerent gesture," they wrote in the blog Witness to Transformation.
"The agreement does not completely freeze the North Korean nuclear program, but it is progress."
Source: Agence France Presse
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