Pyongyang peace pledge

ASEAN foreign ministers will gather in Singapore for their annual meeting on Sunday, but most international attention will be directed to a visitor from farther north. At the regional forum that will follow the ministerial meeting, ASEAN is due to add North Korea as a new signatory to its Treaty of Amity and Co-operation. This obliges its members to attempt to solve conflicts among one another peacefully.

The agreement would be a coup for ASEAN members, wary of the wayward state’s nuclear ambitions and keen to demonstrate their group’s diplomatic usefulness after it failed to pressure member state Burma to accept outside Cyclone assistance in May. North Korea, too, would also make important gains from signing, signalling its credentials as a good regional citizen, and completing one requirement for (eventual) participation in the East Asian Summit. Joining this body would in turn give it important regional contacts and a stake in the region’s most ambitious political grouping.

After all, along with food, energy and economic aid, diplomatic recognition has been one of the Pyongyang’s main goals at ‘six-party’ negotiations on its nuclear programme (the major parties in which will be in Singapore next week). In theory, signing may take it closer to this crucial objective for leader Kim Jong Il. However, whether North Korea can complete the journey to diplomatic normalcy is much more doubtful. Despite its recent concessions  -- disabling its Yongbyon reactor, and agreeing to international verification of the nuclear information it disclosed -- nuclear weapons remain the regime’s main (and arguably only) bargaining chip in talks with the outside world. As long as the regime is dangerous, the logic goes, it is important, -- and it is this fundamental strategic calculation which could keep North Korea in the wilderness for some time to come.