‘Obama to follow Park on NK’

Victor Cha

U.S. President Barack Obama will follow the lead of incoming President Park Geun-hye in handling North Korea, a U.S. expert said, amid concerns over possible provocations by the Kim Jong-un regime.

Victor Cha, Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Pyongyang put Washington in a “deep hole” with few diplomatic options with its Dec. 12 long-range rocket launch. The U.N. Security Council (UNSC) is poised to announce a new resolution condemning the act this week.

The UNSC measure “will be the first thing the Obama administration will be focused on,” Cha said on the sidelines of an Asan Institute for Policy Studies forum in Seoul.
“We’ll see how the North Koreans respond to that.

“And then the U.S. also has to wait to respond to what the Park government is going to do. The U.S., I think, will try to be supportive.

Park, who takes office on Feb. 25, has pledged to take a moderate line on Pyongyang, seeking to bolster defenses while reaching out for dialogue with Pyongyang.

On Monday, Obama said in his inauguration speech that he would try to resolve differences with other countries peacefully, “not because we are naive about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear.”

Cha, however, believes that U.S. is a “long way from any kind of new initiative” on the North, after the Kim regime fired off two long-range rockets in 2012, the first of which, in April, broke a food-for-nuclear-freeze deal with Washington.

Cha said the new UNSC resolution ㅡ which would put additional North Korean entities under sanctions ㅡ could provide a pretext for Pyongyang to carry out a third nuclear test. “But at the same time I don’t think there was a choice in the matter,” he said. “There had to be a U.N. response. The real question is how will the North Koreans respond?”

Park told visiting U.S. envoy Kurt Campbell last week that she would leave the window open for dialogue with Pyongyang and provide humanitarian assistance to the impoverished nation, indicating that she will seek Washington’s support in carrying out her trust building pledge.

On bilateral relations, Cha said the allies would be given an early test as they are deadlocked in their negotiations over rewriting a 1974 nuclear accord that bans Seoul from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel

Seoul wants to use a technology called “pyroprocessing” for enriching uranium and reprocessing spent fuel, saying there is an absence of storage space for spent fuel, a prospect Washington has been reluctant to embrace. Analysts say Washington wants Seoul to strengthen its rationale for reprocessing and enrichment.

Cha said negotiations would be difficult, and underscored the responsibility that would come with the advancement.

“If they want to become a first-tier civilian nuclear power, they have to carry first-tier non-proliferation responsibilities,” he said. “There are tremendous responsibilities than come with being a full service nuclear power.” <The Korea Times/Kim Young-jin>