Obama's crisis diplomacy hits North Korea hiccup

President Barack Obama's vaulting rhetoric over North Korea's missile launch ran into familiar resistance at the UN, exposing the cold reality confronting his vows of a new diplomatic dawn.
The Stalinist state's weekend launch of a long-range missile came just days after Obama's first talks with the Chinese and Russian presidents in London, posing an early test of the leaders' declared aim for a geopolitical reboot.
But while the US administration faced embarrassment over China's go-slow approach at the UN Security Council, analysts said Obama may be playing a long game with his North Korea policy still a work in progress.
"The (UN) session ended but the process didn't," said Richard Bush, head of Northeast Asian studies at Washington's Brookings Institution, after an emergency Security Council session Sunday.
"This is going to be a negotiation. Countries don't necessarily reveal their bottom line at the beginning of a negotiation," he said.
Bush added: "There is a value in their approach of maintaining the confidence of Japan and South Korea. And you do have to show a certain amount of firmness towards North Korea."
North Korea's launch of what experts say was an intercontinental ballistic missile gate-crashed a landmark speech by Obama in the Czech capital Prague where he called for a nuclear-free world.
"Rules must be binding," the president said, hours after the North Korean launch, which he said breached UN resolutions. "Violations must be punished. Words must mean something."
Backing the demands of its rattled Japanese and South Korean allies, the United States pushed for the Security Council session. But no meaningful UN action came Sunday after China, supported by Russia, called for "restraint."
The Security Council debate revealed the diplomatic limitations of Obama's rhetoric, but it also served as a chance for Washington to "close ranks" with the Asian allies, said John Park of the United States Institute of Peace.
"These are very difficult discussions that the US will conduct at the UN," the Korean-American analyst observed.
"But the direction is clear from the White House press statement issued after the launch: they want to get past this missile issue and get back to the six-party talks."
Those talks, aimed at dismantling North Korea's nuclear program, have stalled. Pyongyang's real motivation behind the missile launch may in fact have been to grab the attention of the new Obama administration.
"They ratchet up international tensions and the US comes to the negotiating table. It's worked in the past with the US," said James Person of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
According to Person, North Korea has always wanted to torpedo the six-party process, ditch Japan and South Korea from the talks, and deal with the United States bilaterally.
"This missile launch had been long in the planning. So I think there should have been a more calculated approach from the US," he said, questioning the wisdom of going the UN route despite the guaranteed objections of China.
The US State Department said Monday it wanted a strong response from the United Nations condemning North Korea's rocket test, but hinted it need not come through a Security Council resolution.
Such resolutions are generally legally binding, but the 15-nation UN body can also issue non-binding "presidential statements."
"We have to see what kind of unity the United States can forge with China. We're still in the middle of the game," Bush at Brookings argued.
"The goal is walking a fine line to get the Chinese on board to the extent that North Korea understands that it has miscalculated and can't get its way by provocation."