6자회담과 북한의 협상전략

Abstract

After two years of tug of war, Pyongyang agreed to abandon its nuclear program in the 4th Six-Party Talks. As the current stalemate after an agreement reveals, however, the future of the Six-Party Talks and prospect of Pyongyang's willingness to abide by its own promise is not bright. Noting that part of the problem comes from Washington Neo-con's unwillingness to deal with Pyongyang on the equal stance, this paper argues that Pyongyang will pose an even more serious obstacle due to its typical negotiation strategy, and thereby, the process of transforming commitments to action will be bumpy and full of small scale crises and stalemates. Many have argued that Pyongyang's negotiation strategy typically includes bluff, brinkmanship, unexpected withdrawal from the negotiation table, raising irrelevant issues in the middle of the talk, and denial of the past agreement. Four round of Six-Party Talks demonstrated that Pyongyang's negotiation strategy has not changed. Despite the fact that brinkmanship diplomacy has posed a serious credibility problem, Pyongyang has not abandoned its risky negotiation strategy. This paper finds the reason in the fact that Pyongyang has no leverage left other than its military threat. Shrewd use of threat in a way to exploit the demand for international stability has gave Pyongyang room for manipulation and illusive initiative considered critical to secure its peculiar political system called “Sooryong (the leader) system”.