Slow and quiet diplomacy isn’t exactly our style

Slow and quiet diplomacy isn’t exactly our style

Americans are an impatient people and it was that impatience — that do-it-now attitude — that served the nation well during a century of unprecedented growth.

It won wars, it built industrial might, it made skyscrapers rise from the ground, it constructed a prosperous middle class, it put men on the moon ... its accomplishments are almost too many to be counted on the computers that the genius of this nation spawned.

But such impatience does not serve the nation well in all arenas — particularly that of diplomacy and particularly when dealing with nations that don’t share American attitudes.

It has been nigh impossible to deal with North Korea, a feudal state run by a second-generation megalomaniac who is perfectly willing to see his people starve rather than admit weakness.

And so it was not surprising that when the North Koreans finally lived up to the next step of a nuclear disarmament agreement they signed in 2005 they were six months late in doing so.

A first account

They turned over to the Chinese, the key player in the six-party negotiations, a 60-page account of their nuclear activities, including the amounts and whereabouts of plutonium produced under a program the North Koreans have since been persuaded to abandon.

White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said, “They will make available documents, records, operating manuals and the like,” and provide access to their nuclear personnel.

If this holds up, it is remarkable progress in defanging one of the world’s most dangerous regimes. It will also give President Bush an opportunity claim that he was right to scrap a unilateral approach and to negotiate in partnership with China, South Korea, Japan and Russia. There will be those who will counter that unilateral negotiations might have also resulted in the desired effect if Bush had not labeled North Korea one of three countries in the infamous axis of evil.

Those are arguments for the history books.

In the here and now, the president announced he was lifting some sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act, involving trade and financial transactions. Other sanctions involving shipping and frozen assets remain in place. And he gave Congress the required 45-day notice of his intention to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terror.

The White House was candid in saying these gestures were largely symbolic. North Korea is probably the world’s most heavily sanctioned country and other U.S. and U.N. sanctions for other transgressions — human rights violations, its 2006 nuclear tests — still apply.

What’s next

The next steps in this process are critical — coming up with a reliable system of verification and monitoring and establishing how much plutonium North Korea has on hand as a preliminary step toward removing it from the Korean peninsula and determining what nuclear technology it provided to places like Syria.

The real test will be how cooperative Pyongyang is about identifying and disabling its uranium enrichment program. That was supposed to have been part of this declaration but apparently was not. North Korea first admitted to an enrichment program, then denied it and may never have stopped. Following Friday’s detonation of explosives that brought down the 60-foot-high cooling tower at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, there was visual evidence that there will be no more adding to the country’s plutonium stockpile from at least that source.

But North Korea has reneged on agreements before and may renege on this one. It operates on a more protracted timetable than the United States and could have its eyes on goals 10 or 20 years in the future that the United States can’t even see. Still, the stakes make it worthwhile to keep trying. This may be, as Bush said, a small first step in a long process — but better small steps than none at all.