So complicated as to defy concise explanation  

Brent Snowcroft and Arnold Kantor have an editorial in tomorrow's NYT calling the Beijing talks between the US and the DPRK a surprising success. But on balance, they don't seem to be particularly optimistic. Fundamentally their plan is about trading disarmament for a security guarantee - something the US has so far been unwilling to do:

United States objectives likewise remain the same. We will not pay blackmail, and we will not buy the same horse twice. But we do want to stop North Korea from being a threat to peace and security in northeastern Asia and a supplier of weapons of mass destruction elsewhere. To realize these goals, we must dismantle the North Korean nuclear and missile programs in a way that is realistically irreversible and verifiable.

In return, we should be willing to join with others in providing credible assurances to North Korea that it need have no concern about its own security, so long as it does not threaten others. We should also make clear that we would be prepared to take a leading role in ending North Korea's political and economic isolation. Such a proposal would be a deal about a whole new horse, going far beyond the 1994 Agreed Framework.

This all sounds good, but how how is the US going to provide credible security assurances to North Korea after the invasion of Iraq and Donald Rumsfeld's rhetoric about the vindication of preemption as a military strategy? And, given the latter, is this really something the United States is willing to offer? I find it interesting that they haven't even released the details of the "considerable" demands in the latest North Korean offer (which has been rejected).

The North Koreans are increasingly looking like the reasonable party in ths dispute. Their demand - a guarantee that the United States won't attack them - is understandable given US policy in the past year or so. And it's pretty clear where this is all going to go eventually. As Fareed Zakaria points out, "We all know the solution is the Clinton solution. There's a light at the end of the tunnel; there's just no tunnel. Nothing's going to happen until the U.S. presses the issue."

By the way, Brent Snowcroft definitely does not speak for the Bush administration - in fact, I'm tempted to read this editorial as a way of patching up the dmaage done by Snowcroft's criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Does calling the meetings with North Korea a surprising success have something to do with the Bush family's paranoid obsession with loyalty? Or is it just a different rhetorical tack?