Instead, North Korea’s willingness to resume negotiations partly reflects the Americans’ decision to stop insisting on the “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear program as a pre-condition for talks on normalizing relations. The Bush administration has accepted that North Korea is a nuclear power and that outsiders can do little about it, so the United States has shifted its diplomatic stance from the hard-line Japanese approach to the more flexible and stability-oriented Chinese position.