February’s announcement that North Korea had agreed to implement several trust-building measures in exchange for food aid from the United States set the political stage for the possible resumption of the Six-Party talks, which haven’t convened since negotiations broke down in December 2008.
The on-again, off-again talks can hardly be characterized as a model of success. Indeed, while speculation abounded that North Korea had a small number of nuclear weapons when the talks first convened in August 2003, there was no conclusive evidence until Pyongyang conducted a relatively weak underground nuclear test in October 2006. Despite additional negotiating sessions, North Korea launched a much more potent nuclear explosion in May 2009. Seven rounds of Six-Party talks had therefore seemingly yielded little in the way of concentrate results. To no one’s surprise, as presidential candidates in 2008, Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden and Barack Obama all criticized the Bush administration’s multilateral forum.
After taking office, however, the Obama administration failed to devise a better alternative to the Six-Party Talks, and in December 2009 sent Special Representative Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang to establish the conditions for restarting the Bush administration’s much criticized forum, instead of beginning direct diplomacy as Obama and Biden promised in the election.
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