This just in from AP:
North Korea no longer wants to negotiate with the United States and four other nations in an effort to ease the ongoing standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear program, China’s state news agency said Saturday.
The official Xinhua News Agency, citing an anonymous North Korea Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the official reiterated the communist regime’s Feb. 10 decision to indefinitely suspend its participation in six-party nuclear disarmament talks. Those parties are the United States, the two Koreas, China, Russia and Japan.
OK, now the interesting part:
After announcing it had an arsenal, Pyongyang demanded one-on-one meetings with the United States to discuss the nuclear dispute a move Washington rejected. On Saturday, the North Korean official withdrew that demand.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said Pyongyang no longer was willing to hold direct talks with Washington because of what it described as the United States’ alleged persistent attempts to try to topple the communist regime, Xinhua said.
“The DPRK has no justification to take bilateral talks on the nuclear issue of the Korean Peninsula with the United States now,” Xinhua quoted the spokesman as saying. DPRK is the acronym for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Fine with me. Hope those nukes taste good.
UPDATE: Condie is now threatening Pyongyang with “other measures“:
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on North Korea to return to nuclear-arms negotiations, saying the U.S. and its allies did not want to resort to “other measures’’ to force compliance.
Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their Japanese counterparts, meeting for security consultations today in Washington, issued a joint statement saying the six-nation series of talks was North Korea’s only route to normal relations with the rest of the world.
“They ought to return to those talks so that people don’t have to contemplate other measures,’’ Rice told reporters during a question session at the end of the talks with Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura and Defense Minister Yoshinori Ohno.
I’m growing ambivilent with talk like this, to be frank. This is partly because I don’t really care if the North Koreans have nukes or not (although I would draw the line at them selling them), but mostly because I really doubt whether the parties involved (whoever they might be) actually intend to “contemplate other measures,” a doubt I’m pretty certain is shared by the North Korean leadership. If the White House really is willing to break out the sanctions, fine, but if not, I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to try to bluff Pyongyang. Never bullshit a bullshitter, as my Mom used to say.
