Alone on the Sidelines?(Nort Korea foreign relations)

The Japanese diplomats traveled to North Korea on a secret mission. Ostensibly, these envoys to the Hermit Kingdom--the first dispatched by Tokyo since 2002-- arrived last Tuesday to extradite a suspected drug smuggler. But the item likely topping the team's agenda was North Korea's recent offer to free the Korea-born children of five Japanese citizens abducted decades ago. (While the five adults were freed in 2002, Pyongyang held on to their children as bargaining chips.) A day later Pyongyang reportedly indicated that the families would be reunited by March 20--setting aside what, for the Japanese public, was the biggest obstacle to better relations with the North.

The announcement was but the latest in a string of recent North Korean moves to improve its standing ahead of critical six-party talks on the peninsula's ongoing nuclear crisis. Already this year, Pyongyang has opened its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon to an unofficial U.S. delegation, signaling both a nuclear capability and a willingness to deal it away. It also has proposed a nuclear "freeze" and--to applause in Beijing and Seoul--telegraphed a willingness to engage in another round of intensive diplomacy. Says Paik Hak Soon, of the Sejong Institute in Seoul, "North Korea looks proactive and flexible, while the U.S. looks passive and reactive."

Until recently, U.S. officials were confident that the North would be the odd man out in any negotiations. By restarting a covert A-bomb program in 2002 and subsequently subjecting the region to nuclear blackmail, went the logic, Pyongyang was handing Washington a ready-made coalition against itself. But the administration's position may be weaker than it looks. U.S. intelligence on the North's nuclear program is starting to show what one senior U.S. official calls "uncomfortable parallels" with Iraq. ("What do we actually know about the North's program? Virtually nothing," admits the official.) After picking up a whiff of plutonium reprocessing last summer, U.S. sensors have detected nothing since.

Even worse, deft North Korean diplomacy may be driving a wedge between America and its allies. "Some think, 'We will get these four other countries in the room and they will all gang up on North Korea'," says Joel Wit, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. "They are not just going to line up behind the United States."

While Pyongyang continues to signal its interest in dealing with ...