Quotes of the Day

In the subtle semantics of diplomacy, the meaning of the word "success" must sometimes be broadened to include anything short of outright failure. Such was the case last Saturday at the close of the second round of six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear program. After four days of intense negotiations at a secluded guesthouse in Beijing, officials from each of the participating countries—China, Japan, North and South Korea, Russia and the U.S.—expressed their satisfaction with a process the chief achievement of which was to have avoided falling apart entirely. "There was no breakdown but no breakthrough," says Lee Chung Min, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul. "It was another round of shadow boxing."

Still, the outcome of the talks—which included a commitment to confer again before July and to set up a working group to hammer out an agenda beforehand—was an improvement over the last such session. The six countries met for the first time last August, but those talks ended on a belligerent note after North Korea threatened to conduct a nuclear test. Last week, according to a statement issued by Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi, all parties could at least agree that they had committed themselves "to a nuclear weapons-free Korean Peninsula."

The road to that goal may prove excruciatingly long. The two main antagonists—North Korea and the U.S.—remain at an impasse. Pyongyang says it will freeze its nuclear program only if Washington drops its "hostile stance." Meanwhile, the U.S. demands "complete, verifiable and irreversible" dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear program before it will discuss any thaw in bilateral relations. But time is on North Korea's side: while talks drag on, it can quietly continue developing nuclear weapons. Says Peter Hayes, a North Korea expert at the Nautilus Institute, a California think tank: "The longer we wait, the higher the price we have to pay to buy them out." Sometimes, talk can be anything but cheap.

• Susan Jakes | Beijing
• In negotiations on North Korea's nuclear program, achieving little is better than achieving nothing at all