New Haven, USA - Call it the most bizarre way to fish for an invitation but the North Korean claimed nuclear test is just that. Having failed to get the attention of the White House in their call for direct bilateral talk, Kim Jong Il has yet again taken an outrageous step. Some sanctions will inevitably follow but the immediate fallout of the test will be to unleash a debate about who lost North Korea.
Is it the Bush administration's pig-headed refusal to talk to North Korea? Is it China's years of molly-coddling the ill-behaved North Koreans? Is it South Korea's woolly-headed 'sunshine policy' of rewarding North Korea for not calling them puppets? Whichever way the debate turns, the North Korean's slow motion, well-advertised entry into the nuclear club should raise serious questions about the non-proliferation policy that has been pursued since the 1960s.
After the loud denunciations and the sanctions that will be imposed, North Korea will still be there with its desperately poor and oppressed people and its indeterminate stockpile of nuclear material. There may be no other option but to do what Washington has so far avoided: talk with Pyongyang. This is unless, of course, the U.S. contemplates the unlikely scenario of a regime change with discreet Sino-American cooperation.
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