Aditya Tiwathia's blog

The six-party talks have failed yet again, though the North Koreans have promised to study more generous U.S. proposals. Pyongyang has also promised to "improved its nuclear deterrent."

The deal-breaker was North Korea's demand that U.S. financial restrictions be part of the negotiations on the North's nuclear weapons. That was met by a stiff refusal by Christopher Hill, the chief negotiator for the United States. The Bush administration says the sanctions are tied to North Korea's criminal enterprises, not to its nuclear program.

Our sympathies are with Mr. Hill, sandwiched as he is between the unrealistic demands of the White House and the unstable negotiating tactics of Pyongyang.

First, Hill must deal with Mr. Bush's North Korea policy: bluster and saber-rattling one day and pleading for a return to talks another. Until the North's nuclear test in October, Washington had demanded a complete dismantling of the nuclear program as a pre-condition to talks. Having had to crawl back to the table (a pattern), the Bush administration maintains that the only solution it is willing to accept is complete dismantlement. But out of the nine countries that have ever acquired nuclear weapons, only South Africa has ever given them up—and that happened because apartheid regime collapsed. Every other country has done what the UK just decided a few weeks ago: Maintain and improve their nuclear stockpiles.

A more realistic goal than complete disarmament, says Brookings scholar Ivo H. Daalder, would be for North Korea to freeze and verify its existing program. This means: No more testing, a freeze on plutonium production, the return of international monitors, and the end of North Korea's uranium enrichment program. As Daalder tartly observes, if the U.S. achieves these goals, we'd be back where we were under Clinton 12 years ago.

But the Bush administration's negotiating foibles pale in comparison to the calculated unpredictability of the North Koreans. Mr Hill is the latest of a series of envoys to match wits with Mr. Kim Kye-gwan, who has been North Korea's chief negotiator since the mid-1990s. As Tim Johnson explains, North Korea has honed erratic negotiating behavior to an art:

Make outlandish demands. Appear unyielding. Threaten to bolt at the slightest provocation…escalating a mood of crisis, demanding last-minute concessions and unilaterally reinterpreting past accords…"They basically demand everything but the kitchen sink, and they are not offering much in return so far," Snyder said. "It helps to shape the field of negotiation to their advantage."…"Nobody has ever effectively countered their negotiating style. That's why we're in the mess we're in," said Ralph A. Cossa, head of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy institute.”

Mr. Hill got a taste of this strategy when the North Koreans pulled one of their favorite tactics, arriving a day late. Much of this is for show. The North Koreans are loth to display any sign of weakness in public, but according to U.S. negotiators, in private sessions there is greater willingness to talk and sort things out. Yet, if last week is any indication, they aren't very willing. For now, Mr. Hill faces an uphill battle to resolve East Asia's biggest security challenge.

An Egyptian police officer slaps around a detainee, to the delight of his colleagues. He didn't think anyone was watching.

A Sky News reporter risks detention, even harm to report on the simmering discontent brewing in China over land grabs. But the victims haven't been waiting around for him to discover their misery. His report builds on footage shot by ordinary Chinese of clashes between peasants and government hired thugs, and of ordinary people being forcibly evicted from their houses.

This harrowing video, purportedly of U.S. troops crying and praying during a firefight with Iraqi insurgents, may be a fake. But that didn't stop 86,000 people from viewing it in the first 10 days after it was posted.

Chinese soldiers shot down Tibetan monks, women, and children in cold blood, but a climber caught them on tape.

While nobody's happy about rising sea levels and temperatures in hotter parts of the world, the warming of the Arctic is a different story. The melting of the sea ice during the summer months has at last made the dream of 15th-century explorers—the Northwest Passage—a reality. The new Arctic passage will dramatically reduce shipping times. But as The Economist points out, the shipping industry is not the only one that will benefit from climate change:  

The biggest beneficiary is likely to be Russia itself, which encircles almost half the Arctic Ocean. Currently uninhabitable areas will become more hospitable; currently inaccessible energy resources will become more exploitable.

According to the United States Geological Service, about one-quarter of the world’s undiscovered energy reserves may be in the Arctic. [...]

Russia has claimed half the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole, as its territory. It submitted the claim under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but had it rejected. The convention decrees that who owns what is determined partly by the extent of a country’s continental shelf, and Russia did not have enough geological data to back up its claim. Russia is now mapping energetically, as are America, Canada, Denmark and Norway, which also border the Arctic Ocean.

Ironically, major oil producers who have invested thousands of dollars promoting "research" suggesting that global warming is a hoax are also beneficiaries of melting Arctic ice. They may find, however, that the Arctic's treasures aren't quite as rich as originally thought.

CNN annoyed liberal bloggers this week when it aired a story on how Senator Barack Obama's last name sounds suspiciously like al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden's first name, and that his middle name is "Hussein."

Then, in a surreal mimicry of the Daily Show, The Situation Room's Jeff Greenfield weighed in on the fashion choices the presidential aspirant made during his recent visit to New Hampshire. Greenfield observed that Obama was "sporting what's getting to be the classic Obama look. Call it business casual, a jacket, a collared shirt, but no tie." While this made Obama "look comfortable in his skin," the CNN reporter opined, "he may be walking around with a sartorial time bomb."

Ask yourself, is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of "GQ" to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable. And maybe that's not the comparison a possible presidential contender really wants to evoke.

But it wasn't enough to compare a future Presidential candidate to the holocaust-denying leader of an Axis of Evil member state. Greenfield wasn't done:

Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful. But an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread. Or is that threads? -- Wolf."

Yes, filling 24 hours with serious news without boring viewers to death is difficult—but is this the best CNN has to offer? Greenfield's plea: it was just a joke.

If there was any doubt about how Sunni Arab states see Iranian nuclear ambitions, it was cleared up by a declaration by the Gulf Cooperation Council that they intend to pursue nuclear power.

It is not a threat," said Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister. "It is an announcement so that there will be no misinterpretation for what we are doing."

The timing of the announcement, coming as it does on the heels of the Baker-Hamilton report, would indicate otherwise. The Baker report urges the administration to engage Iran to secure its support on Iraq, but punts on the nuclear issue.

Saudi Arabia is already quite nervous about having a Shiite Iraq controlled by the Iranians right on its borders. Its largest oilfield, Ghawar, is close to the Iraqi border and lies beneath a sizable and increasingly restive Shia population. Bahrain, another oil-producing state, is majority Shiite but is ruled by a Sunni minority. The precarious position of these Sunni regimes has them freaking out about growing Iranian influence in the region.

The message is that the gulf countries will develop their own nuclear program if Iran is rewarded with the terms of the Baker-Hamilton report," said Abdelaziz O. Sager, chairman of the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, who is familiar with the nuclear initiative. "They are trying to say that if the Iranian program continues, you will force us to become nuclear capable too."

This is not an empty threat. Saudi Arabia, for example, has been considering nuclear weapons for at least a decade. Their quest became more fervent in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion and Iran's nuclear shenanigans. The Saudis certainly have the cash. And they already have the missiles, courtesy of China, and have flirted with using Pakistani know-how to develop the payload.

Tehran's nuclear ambitions spook the Saudis more than the Israeli bomb ever has. After all, Iran has supported Shiite terrorists operating in Saudi Arabia (it was blamed by some for the 1996 Khobar Tower Bombing) and spares no effort to embarrass Saudi Arabia for its close relationship with the U.S. As Mark Levenstein put it in a earlier posting chez Passport: "we need to stop Iran's enrichment program cold lest nuclear power plants start sprouting up in the Middle East like mushrooms after a storm." But it's easier said than done.