fb-pixelJohn Kerry says US would reward restraint by North Korea - The Boston Globe Skip to main content

John Kerry says US would reward restraint by North Korea

But Pyongyang unlikely to halt nuclear program

Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would reduce its defenses if the nuclear threat ended.KIMIMASA MAYAMA/EPA

TOKYO — Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that the United States was prepared to reach out to Kim Jong Un of North Korea if he made the first move to abandon his nuclear weapons program.

“We need the appropriate moment, appropriate circumstance,’’ Kerry told reporters in Tokyo.

While he did not say specifically what steps would be needed, according to the long-standing US position they might include a public commitment to denuclearization and such measures as halting the production of nuclear material, refraining from testing missiles and ceasing threats to attack its neighbors.

Over the past week, there has been considerable attention on the US vows to militarily defend its Asian allies and its warning that North Korea should forgo a test firing of a Musudan medium-range missile.

Advertisement



But the United States has also postponed tests of an intercontinental ballistic missile and toned down its statements in recent weeks to try to create an atmosphere in which talks with North Korea might begin, a theme that Kerry emphasized on Sunday.

‘‘What we really ought to be talking about is the possibility of peace,’’ he said in a joint news conference on Sunday with Fumio Kishida, Japan’s foreign minister. ‘‘And I think there are those possibilities.’’

Speaking with reporters later in the day, Kerry said that before talks could begin, North Korea needed to take tangible steps to demonstrate that it was serious about denuclearization.

But it seemed unlikely that that precondition for talks would be met by North Korea, given the country’s announcements that it considers itself to be a nuclear state and its dedication to a ‘‘military first’’ stance that channels resources to its armed forces.

One ironic feature of the Obama administration’s North Korea policy is that the White House has been willing to conduct direct talks with Iranian officials and sought early in President Obama’s first term to forge a constructive relationship with President Bashar Assad of Syria.

Advertisement



But the administration has remained unwilling to meet openly with top North Korean officials unless they first committed themselves to denuclearization, a policy that some have dubbed ‘‘strategic patience.’’

Kerry indicated there were some circumstances in which he could imagine sending a representative to talk to North Korean leaders or engaging directly with the North Koreans through a diplomatic back channel.

Diplomacy, he said, requires risk-taking and secrecy, such as when President Nixon engaged China in the 1970s or US back-channel talks were able to end the Cuban missile crisis a decade earlier.

‘‘I am open personally to exploring other avenues; I particularly want to hear what the Chinese have to say,’’ he added. ‘‘I am not going to be so stuck in the mud that an opportunity to actually get something done is flagrantly wasted.’’

‘‘But fundamentally the concept is they’re going to have to show some kind of good faith here so that we are not going around and around,’’ he said. ‘‘They have to indicate that seriousness of purpose to go toward the denuclearization, and there are ways that they can do that.’’

Tokyo is the final stop on Kerry’s six-nation tour, and it was his third destination in Asia. As part of its regional diplomacy, the United States has also been urging Japan and South Korea, its two main regional allies but who remain divided by history, to cooperate on North Korea.

Advertisement



Before returning to the United States, Kerry gave a speech Monday in Japan on the Obama administration’s Asia policy.

In his news conference in Tokyo, Kerry expanded on his remarks on Saturday that the United States would be willing to withdraw some of the antimissile defenses it recently deployed if China were able to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Those remarks, made at a news conference in Beijing, were seen as a lure to elicit China’s cooperation.

‘‘The president of the United States deployed some additional missile defense capacity precisely because of the threat of North Korea,’’ Kerry said. ‘‘And it is logical that if the threat of North Korea disappears because the peninsula denuclearizes, then obviously that threat no longer mandates that kind of posture.’’

“But there have been no agreements, no discussions; there is nothing actually on the table with respect to that,’’ he added.

So far, Kerry’s comments and his endorsement of South Korea’s efforts to open a dialogue with Kim’s government in the North have produced nothing but scorn from North Korea’s leaders.

On Sunday, North Korea rebuffed a South Korean proposal for dialogue, calling it ‘‘empty’’ and a ‘‘cunning trick.’’

‘‘If South Korea truly does want to have talks, it should first change its confrontational stance rather than playing on words,’’ a spokesman of the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency. ‘‘It will depend on the South Korean authorities’ attitude whether there will be dialogue in the future.’’

Advertisement



Republican lawmakers in Washington have generally backed the Obama administration’s efforts on North Korea.

On Sunday, Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said on CBS’s ‘‘Face the Nation’’ that he was encouraged by Kerry’s China visit and that he hoped ‘‘we can get the Chinese to care more about this issue.”