Bush's policy on North Korea still murky
By Bill Nichols and Judy Keen
USA Today
WASHINGTON — Despite signs that his administration is backing away from its refusal to offer North Korea incentives to end its nuclear weapons program, President Bush has yet to settle on a policy, U.S. officials and outside experts say.
Associated Press
U.S. officials and analysts close to policy discussions say a split remains between the State Department and hardliners elsewhere in the administration over whether to engage North Korea or try to further isolate the communist regime. Some senior officials simply want to stall any major new initiative until after a decision is made in the coming weeks about going to war with Iraq.
South Korean police officers took away a student who was demonstrating yesterday against U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly's visit to Seoul.
"I don't see any evidence that the U.S. government has pulled together a policy," says former State Department official Joel Wit, who helped craft a 1994 agreement between the United States and North Korea. In that deal, Washington promised energy aid for North Korea in exchange for Pyongyang shutting down its nuclear weapons program. The United States says North Korea admitted in October that it had violated the agreement.
"Every meeting has been a dogfight," says Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea with knowledge of the administration's current discussions.
Gregg says Bush's recent declarations that the North Korea crisis can be resolved through diplomacy are "absolutely right" but have been "undercut and in some cases diminished or drowned out by other members of his administration who have no sense really of how Asia works."
State Department officials want the White House to talk with North Korea, which has heightened tensions in recent weeks by taking steps to begin producing weapons-grade plutonium and by announcing its withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
These officials believe dialogue is the only real option because a military strike would probably result in a North Korean counterattack that would kill thousands of South Koreans and U.S. soldiers.
This pro-dialogue faction successfully pushed last week for the administration to issue a joint statement with South Korea and Japan offering a meeting of U.S. and North Korean officials. The administration had previously ruled out talks unless North Korea first shut down its nuclear weapons programs. The statement stressed, however, that such talks would not be negotiations and that the United States would offer no incentives for North Korea to back down.
That gesture was slightly amplified yesterday in Seoul when Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said North Korea might get energy aid from the United States and others if it ends its nuclear ambitions.
But at the Pentagon, on the National Security Council and on Vice President Cheney's staff, many officials say too much talking by the Clinton administration with North Korea created this crisis. They believe negotiations would reward North Korea for breaking the 1994 deal. They instead want to isolate Pyongyang.
The conflict between the two approaches remains unresolved, experts say. Former Clinton administration officials complain that while current policymakers ridiculed the 1994 pact as nuclear blackmail, they have no alternative.
"The administration started with a policy of benign neglect, then it adopted a policy of 'no carrots,' and then it removed the stick from its policy," says former Clinton State Department official Lee Feinstein, now at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Now it looks like it's ready to offer carrots again."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer denied yesterday any shift in policy and said Bush has pursued a consistent theme: "We are willing to talk, ... not negotiate."
