The agreement among six negotiating powers to denuclearise the Korean peninsula announced yesterday in Beijing is good news for East Asia and for worldwide efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
That it came on the day the International Atomic Energy Agency met in Vienna to consider a similar issue with Iran shows that multilateral diplomacy can work in defusing and settling such conflicts. And the Beijing agreement has added significance after last week's failure to make any progress on nuclear non-proliferation at the United Nations world summit in New York. This is one of the most pressing dangers to international security.
North Korea has agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, rejoin the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and accept IAEA investigation teams. It has been prompted to do so by a statement from the United States that it does not have nuclear weapons in South Korea and does not intend to attack North Korea. Japan has made a similar statement. These, along with China and Russia, undertake to provide the secretive Stalinist state with a civilian light-water reactor at an appropriate time. They have also committed themselves to give oil and energy aid as well as security guarantees. Details are to be worked out at future meetings and will be difficult to agree and implement because of the lack of trust involved. But yesterday's breakthrough sets up a platform on which it can develop.
The agreement is a real achievement for China and South Korea, which have put most emphasis on a multinational approach, rather than the more hardline reliance on military pressure supported by the United States and Japan over the last three years since the crisis first erupted. The dominant school of thought about North Korea has assumed it is driven by a fundamental need to survive following the disastrous famine 10 years ago, and is therefore amenable to such a carrot and stick approach - as well as to the emergency humanitarian aid Concern and other agencies have been supplying, which the North Koreans now want to discontinue. The alternative neoconservative view says such a totalitarian regime cannot be trusted and must be militarily contained.
Time will tell which view is more accurate. But this agreement could set a precedent for a more constructive approach to the Taiwan issue between China and the United States as well as, more obviously, for Iran's nuclear confrontation with the IAEA. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's defiant speech to the United Nations on Saturday, warning against the imposition of an "apartheid regime" against his country on nuclear energy and resources, contained an implicit threat to retaliate as North Korea did by withdrawing from talks and leaving the non-proliferation treaty.
As yet there is no firm evidence that Iran is in breach of the treaty and several indications it wants to avoid UN sanctions. The North Korean deal should encourage them to do so.