EXCEPT THAT THE PRC IS THE LAST BIG PIECE OF UNFINISHED BUSINESS:

Across Asia, Korea talks have wider ambitions (Jim Yardley, March 18, 2007, NY Times)

For more than three years, the grinding, often exasperating negotiations over North Korea's nuclear weapons program have been about taking the bomb away from Kim Jong Il. As if that were not complicated enough, the agenda is now becoming more ambitious. One new goal could be loosely described as cleaning up the 20th century.

Starting Monday. That is when diplomats from the United States, North Korea, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia will reconvene in Beijing with a docket that is still dominated by nuclear disarmament but that also now includes unresolved disputes that have bedeviled Northeast Asia for decades. [...]

"We are dealing not only with denuclearization," Hill said at one news conference during negotiations in Beijing last month, "but we are dealing with some of the problems in the region, some of the problems in the region caused by the region's difficult history. This type of ambitious undertaking hasn't been tried before."

The end must be to denuclearize China, either peaceably or by force.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 18, 2007 9:41 AM