Diplomacy or blackmail?

By one view, the Great Leader has held a gun to the heads of the Great Powers by going nuclear and got them to give him what his country needs most "" energy in the form of fuel oil, the promise of full diplomatic relations with the US (no more talk of the 'axis of evil'), and the lifting of all trading and financial sanctions. In ret-urn, Kim Jong-Il will shut down his nuclear facility at Yongbyan and also hand out a list of the other nuclear facilities.

The other view, in the countries that negotiated with Pyongyang, will be that the price that has been negotiated is a small one for weaning North Korea back to the nuclear fold. One way of interpreting what the North Korean president has done is to say that he has succeeded with nuclear bla-ckmail. Another way of looking at it is that this is the first significant success in more than a decade, in establishing th-at the nuclear non-proliferation reg-ime still has meaning and that 'rogue nations' can be made to see reason.

Which interpretation is correct will depend on how things work out here onward. No one will forget that such an agreement was signed earlier, after North Korea threatened in 1993 to walk out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). A rattled Washington rus-hed into an agreement in 1994 which was virtually identical to the latest one, but then bungled on follow-up action.

The difference is that then it was a bi-lateral deal and this time, four other countries "" China, Japan, Russia and South Korea "" are involved. Only time will tell if the new agreement works as hoped, or falls apart as the last one did. Meanwhile, South Korea is to pay the bill "" as was the case the last time around.

The man who will have a wry smile is Senator John Kerry "" who in his US presidential campaign in 2004 had arg-ued that he would get a multilateral group to negotiate with North Korea, involving precisely the countries that have pulled off the latest agreement. In contrast, President Bush had pooh-poohed the idea of multilateral effort. It turns out that Senator Kerry was right after all.

That inevitably raises the question of how to tackle Iran "" the second country that shows signs of wanting to break out of the NPT's restrictions. President Ahmedinejad is not as vulnerable to international pressure as a crumbling North Korea has been, though there are those who argue that Iran has in fact sent the occasional signal to Washington that it is willing to do a deal, but the US has either been too busy or too caught up in its own worldview to notice.

The complicating factor here is that any settlement with Iran will have to be accompanied by progress on a much larger canvas in West Asia. When there is sabre-rattling in Washington vis-à-vis Tehran, and the possibility of a pre-emptive strike by Israel, the Pyongyang agreement is a useful reminder that diplomacy can sometimes achieve more than what trigger-happy leaders might have us believe.

What about others who have played with nuclear blackmail? Pakistan, for instance "" in 1999, the general who now runs Pakistan decided to take over some Indian territory, thinking that his country's nuclear weapons would ensure that he would be able to hang on. Pakistan has also been caught exporting nuclear technology, which it had acquired from China. In return, Pakistan got missile technology, which North Korea had got from "" guess who? "" China. Which begs the question as to which is the rogue nation, and which is not.