U.S. Invites Top North Korean Officials To New York

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday that the U.S. had invited a top North Korean envoy to New York to talk about ways to resume long-stalled talks aimed at halting North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Continue reading after the jump.
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Over the weekend, Mrs. Clinton said while in Indonesia for a regional security summit that tensions in two of Asia’s most dangerous areas of conflict, the Korean peninsula and the South China Sea, were far from being resolved despite signs of progress in the last week.

The U.S. invitation to the North came after senior diplomats from North and South Korea met Friday on the sidelines of a regional meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations here and pledged to try to return to the so-called six-party talks, which also involve China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

In comments released Sunday by North Korean state media, the country’s foreign minister, Pak Ui Chun, said the Korean peninsula now stands “on the crossroads of detente and the vicious cycle of escalating tension,” according to the Associated Press. The countries involved, Mr. Pak said, must “make the best use of [the] opportunity of dialogue and make a bold decision to settle the fundamental issue.”

But Mrs. Clinton made clear much needs to be done—including more steps to improve relations between North and South Korea—before the U.S. will be willing to fully rejoin the negotiations, which fell apart three years ago.

“We are open to talks with North Korea, but we do not intend to reward the North just for returning to the table,” Mrs. Clinton said in a statement. “We will not give them anything new for actions they have already agreed to take. And we have no appetite for pursuing protracted negotiations that will only lead us right back to where we have already been.”

Speaking a day earlier, on Saturday, she called for North Korea to “demonstrate a change in behavior, including ceasing provocative actions [and] taking steps towards irreversible denuclearization,” among other moves.

On the South China Sea, a resource-rich area subject to multiple overlapping territorial claims, Mrs. Clinton said all parties need to outline their exact claims in the region and defend why they think they have a right to the territory. The push came shortly after China and Asean countries said they had at last agreed upon guidelines to deepen cooperation among the different countries that have competing claims on the South China Sea, though many analysts dismissed the guidelines as vague.

“The declaration is a first step,” she said Sunday on her last day in Indonesia before continuing on her world diplomatic tour to Hong Kong. “There needs to be a call by the international community for all parties to clarify their claims, both land and maritime, and to conform them to international law, including as reflected in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.”

China may not be willing to go much further to keep up the momentum on the issue, analysts said. It continues to maintain that it will deal with competing claims in the South China Sea directly with other countries rather than through multi-lateral negotiations or international courts. Vietnam, the Philippines, and China are among the countries that have conflicting claims on parts of the islands and open water in the area, some of which may contain oil reserves.

Tensions in the region have been rising for months and triggered complaints from Vietnam and the Philippines, who say China has interfered with their vessels in the sea. China has acknowledged some of the incidents, but otherwise said it wants peace, while also insisting on its sovereignty over the disputed areas.

“It’s a fact that the South China Sea situation has been peaceful and stable,” China Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said, according to the Xinhua news agency. He repeated Beijing’s stance that the conflicting claims “should be resolved directly between two related countries, peacefully through friendly discussion.”

On the possible progress in talks between the two Koreas and other powers in the region, Mrs. Clinton said North Korea’s vice foreign minister will visit New York this week. The minister, Kim Kye Gwan, is expected to meet with a team of U.S. officials to explore North Korea’s commitment to taking concrete steps toward disarmament, Mrs. Clinton said in a statement.

North Korea in late May revealed so-called back channel meetings being conducted by officials from the two Koreas, aiming to embarrass the South’s government and its president, Lee Myung-bak.

Pyongyang said at the time that it wouldn’t negotiate with representatives from Mr. Lee’s government for the remainder of his term, which ends in February 2013. South Korean diplomats publicly expressed regret at the North’s statements and privately expressed the belief that coming multilateral meetings, including this weekend’s Asean gathering, would provide the stage for the two sides to get back together.

With the North’s appointment of a new nuclear envoy when it announced its plans to reopen talks at Asean last week, diplomats in Seoul grew more confident that some type of opening could be created. After Friday’s meeting, Seoul allowed the North’s new envoy, Ri Yong Ho, to make the first announcement of the small step forward by the two Koreas. Still, it remains unclear how serious Pyongyang is about restarting official diplomacy with Seoul and Washington.

One measure—what the North Korean government says to its own people—may be telling. By late Sunday, the North’s official state news agency had carried no word of the two-hour meeting between the Korean nuclear envoys on Friday in Bali or the shorter meeting on Saturday between the foreign ministers of the two Koreas.

WSJ