United States and North Korean officials emerged from two days of meetings in Geneva agreeing they had narrowed their differences about negotiating on the North’s nuclear program, but they parted without fixing a date for further bilateral or multilateral talks.

Speaking outside the United States mission after the talks ended on October 25th, Stephen W. Bosworth, the American special envoy and Civilitas honorary board member, called the talks “very positive and generally constructive.”

“We narrowed differences on several points and explored our differences on other points,” he reported. Where they made progress was in identifying “what has to be done before we can both agree to a resumption of the formal negotiations.”

His North Korean counterpart in the talks, First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan, speaking across town at his country’s diplomatic mission, said the two sides had made “big progress” in talks that focused intensively on trust-building but they had differences they couldn’t overcome. “We agreed to consider more and meet again,” he said, according to an unofficial translation of his comments.

The two sides plan to continue information exchange through “the New York channel” – North Korea’s mission to the United Nations. “There’s a long history of this relationship and we have many differences not all of which can be overcome quickly,” Mr. Bosworth said. With “continued effort” he was confident they could reach a reasonable basis for formal negotiations about a return to the six-party talks.