The 2005 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics were selected for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis”. I would check out thier work in order to make sense of the current DPRK/ROK diplomatic posturing.
From the Washington Post:
South Korea on Thursday suspended humanitarian aid to North Korea until it agrees to return to international nuclear disarmament talks.
The action infuriated visiting North Korean officials, who immediately cut off high-level talks in South Korea and stormed back home.
The decision to postpone consideration of a North Korean request for 500,000 tons of rice marked the South’s first punitive action against its impoverished communist neighbor since it defied the international community and test fired seven missiles, including a long-range Taepodong-2, on July 4.
The move came as the administration of South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun has come under sharp public criticism at home for what many there viewed as a weak response by Seoul to the North’s missile tests.
South Korea on Thursday reiterated its deep opposition to a push by Japan and the United States to impose broader sanctions on North Korea through a draft resolution at the United Nation’s Security Council. Seoul has also vowed to maintain its “sunshine policy” of engagement, which has fostered the warmest ties between the Stalinist North and capitalist South since the Korean War divided them in two more than half a century ago.
But the decision to follow through with a previous threat to suspend food aid if North Korea tested missiles — a threat many experts doubted the South Koreans would stick to — displayed a new willingness by the South to use its significant economic clout to apply pressure on the North.
The North Koreans — for whom economic assistance by South Korea is topped only by China — appeared jolted by the decision. At talks being held in the South Korean city of Pusan that were originally scheduled to end Friday, Pyongyang’s delegation abruptly departed Thursday afternoon.
South Korea’s Yonhap news service reported that the North Korean officials left after circulating a statement calling the rupture the result of “reckless” attempts by South Korea to raise “irrelevant issues.” Those issues, South Korean officials said, were the recent missile tests and the North’s refusal to return to six-party talks on its nuclear programs.
The North bitterly condemned Seoul’s decision to suspend food aid, saying “the South side will pay a price before the nation for causing the collapse of the ministerial talks and bringing a collapse of North-South relations.”
South Korean officials, who in recent years have rolled out the red carpet for their visiting North Korean kin, this time offered them a simple meal and welcome bereft of customary sightseeing excursions and photo opportunities. When the North’s representatives understood they would not be returning with promises for more food aid, they simply left.
“The North Korean side expressed their position that additional negotiations would be unnecessary under the circumstance that additional humanitarian aid they need would be impossible,” Lee Kwan Se, a South Korean Unification Ministry official, told reporters.
For the United States and Japan, both pushing for a strong draft resolution at the United Nations that would ban international trade of North Korean missile and other military technology, the South Korean action was a rare diplomatic bright spot.
Christopher Hill, Washington’s top envoy on North Korea, left Beijing for Washington on Thursday after it became clear that Chinese efforts to persuade the Pyongyang government to come back to the six-party talks had apparently failed.
Before leaving, Hill said there was no indication that the North Koreans had changed their position to boycott the talks, which have been stalled since last November.
Japan, which has been deeply rattled by the North’s missile tests, vowed to continue pushing for a tough resolution that would impose sanctions on the North Koreas. But China and Russia back their alterative U.N. resolution unveiled on Wednesday. That draft would censure North Korea for its missile tests, but would endorse only voluntary measures aimed at restraining Pyongyang’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs.
“The Chinese are as baffled as we are,” Hill told reporters in Beijing before departing. “China has done so much for that country and that country seems intent on taking all of China’s generosity and then giving nothing back.”
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
