What Does Pyongyang Want? A Personal Interpretation of North Korea's Priorities and Motivations 

Lee Sun-Jin, former South Korean deputy minister of foreign affairs and visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, shared his perspectives on North Korea's often opaque political goals and negotiating tactics. The North's rhetorical bombast and seemingly erratic moves fit into its two overall negotiating strategies: escalating the sense of crisis in the ongoing diplomatic talks, and shifting the focus of the talks. But despite its brinkmanship, the DPRK has made significant accommodations to the U.S. in its effort to reinstate the terms of the 1994 Agreed Framework. At the start of the Six-Party Talks the DPRK demanded a non-aggression treaty from the U.S., yet in recent rounds it has insisted only that the U.S. recognize it as a "dialog partner." Unfortunately, U.S. policymakers haven't shown a reciprocal flexibility and have used an extremely loose definition of "program" to accuse the North of having a secret uranium program, thus exacerbating tensions. This sort of intransigence, Lee warned, would make it very difficult for Seoul to back any U.S. move to bring the DPRK before the U.N. Security Council unless it contained significant incentives for the North.