Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will win kudos at home if he re-unites the families of kidnapped Japanese as a result of his upcoming summit in Pyongyang, but he needs to make progress in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear programs to earn global applause as well.
Koizumi will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang on Saturday to seek both a breakthrough in the dispute over the Japanese abductees and progress in deadlocked six-party talks on the communist state's nuclear arms program.
"I think the prime minister has a very strong determination to act in a very proactive way to bring about peace and stability in the region," a government source said.
"We have no intention whatsoever of putting the question of nuclear weapons on the shelf," the source added.
Working level talks on the nuclear crisis ended in Beijing on Saturday with little apparent success in narrowing gaps between the two main protagonists, the US and North Korea. The other participants were South Korea, Japan, China and Russia.
`Very little progress'
The nuclear question is the delicate part," said Masao Okonogi, a Korea specialist at Keio University in Tokyo.
"There was little progress at the working talks and it is very hard for North Korea to compromise with the US. Conversely, there is a chance that Kim wants to use Japan as a messenger, a mediator, and so will say something to Koizumi," he said.
North Korea wants compensation for giving up its nuclear arms program, with a deal for a freeze as a first step, and says it has the right to pursue nuclear projects for peaceful purposes.
The US wants North Korea to abandon completely both a program to make weapons-grade plutonium and a uranium enrichment program that Pyongyang now says does not exist.
"It's very hard to expect North Korea to accept in talks with Japan the demand for complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantling that it has rejected in the six-way talks," defense policy analyst Satoshi Morimoto said in a TV talk show last weekend.
But he added: "While not accepting complete dismantle-ment, North Korea may show a more positive stance toward freezing its nuclear program."
The latest crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions emerged on October 2002, when US officials said Pyongyang had confessed to pursuing a project to enrich uranium for weapons.
One more time
That was just one month after Koizumi's first summit in Pyongyang, where Kim made the stunning admission that his agents had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train spies.
Five Japanese abductees then came home to Japan, but had to leave behind their seven North Korean-born children and an American spouse, who Washington says was a defector.
Japan wants all the relatives to be allowed to come to Japan. It also wants better information about eight abductees Pyongyang says are dead and another two Tokyo believes were also kid-napped.
Kim also promised Koizumi in 2002 that North Korea would keep its international pledges about its atomic ambitions.
But after the October disclosure by US officials -- later denied by North Korea -- Pyongyang pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expelled UN inspectors and took a plutonium plant out of mothballs.
Talks on establishing diplomatic ties with Japan -- a prerequisite for Tokyo to give North Korea's struggling economy large-scale aid -- also stalled.
North Korea may now hope that by showing some flexibility on the nuclear issue to Koizumi, it can get Japan to help persuade the US to soften its tough stance, analysts said.
Mixed signals
The US publicly welcomed the planned Pyongyang summit despite suggestions it was not in favor of the meeting, since the trip might imply that Japan was giving some sort of approval to North Korea's administration before the nuclear dispute was resolved.
But Koizumi must take care not to give the impression Japan is parting ways with Washington on the matter, analysts said.
"The summit is an opportunity for Prime Minister Koizumi to tell Kim just how vital it is to resolve the nuclear problem," said Shunji Yanai, a former ambassador to the US.
Whether Pyongyang will make any concession is hard to predict and expectations in some quarters are low.
"If the two countries can make any kind of breakthrough [on the abductees] from the visit, it would allow them to focus more on the nuclear issue. This could create more favorable circumstances for the six-way talks," said Kim Kwang-yong, a professor at Hanyang University in Seoul.
"But the impact would still be limited because the nuclear issue is basically an issue between the US and North Korea," he said.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
Sasha B. Chhabra’s column (“Michelle Yeoh should no longer be welcome,” March 26, page 8) lamented an Instagram post by renowned actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) about her recent visit to “Taipei, China.” It is Chhabra’s opinion that, in response to parroting Beijing’s propaganda about the status of Taiwan, Yeoh should be banned from entering this nation and her films cut off from funding by government-backed agencies, as well as disqualified from competing in the Golden Horse Awards. She and other celebrities, he wrote, must be made to understand “that there are consequences for their actions if they become political pawns of
RSS