Rice Puts Pressure on N. Korea

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned North Korea today that if it didn’t return to nuclear disarmament talks the U.S. would “have to look at other options” to resolve the issue.

Rice did not give a deadline for North Korea to rejoin the stalled six-nation negotiations, nor did she specify what consequences the U.S. might be contemplating in case Pyongyang refused. While Rice has said the U.S. has no plans to attack North Korea, hard-liners in the Bush administration have been pushing for tough U.N. sanctions on trade and limits on aid unless North Korea becomes more cooperative.

“It goes without saying, to the degree a nuclear-free Korean peninsula gets more difficult to achieve, to the degree North Korea doesn’t [become more cooperative], we will have to look at other options,” she said at an afternoon news conference in Beijing after talks with Chinese officials. “Obviously everyone is aware there are other options in the international system.”

Rice’s veiled threat came on the final day of a weeklong, six-nation tour of Asia. Prodding North Korea to return to the talks was a major focus of the trip.

On Sunday in South Korea, Rice indicated that Washington’s patience was waning. “We need to resolve the issue,” she said. “It cannot go on forever.”

China, which has played host to previous rounds of the talks and is North Korea’s biggest trading partner and closest ally, is considered key to bringing Pyongyang back to the table. In her meetings with Chinese leaders, Rice said she had spoken “not just about getting North Korea back to the table, but getting them to the table ready to be constructive.”

Throughout her trip, Rice sought to balance raising U.S. concerns about certain issues in China -- such as a lack of religious freedom -- and not antagonizing Beijing at a time when the U.S. wants its cooperation on the North Korea issue.

On Sunday, Rice made a highly symbolic visit to the state-approved Gangwashi Protestant church in Beijing. The right to worship is heavily controlled in China, and that is a major concern among conservatives who supported President Bush for reelection.

But Rice chose not to make religious freedom a cornerstone of her Sunday meetings with China’s top leaders, opting to bring up the contentious issue at lower-level meetings today.

By courting China while heaping pressure on North Korea, Rice apparently is trying to signal that she means business in her new role as America’s top diplomat.

She also appears to be trying to blunt the effectiveness of two of North Korea’s timeworn tactics: dragging out talks until differences open up among the U.S. and its negotiating partners, and distracting its adversaries by complaining loudly over perceived offenses.

The Bush administration had to spend significant energy in 2002 calming the waters after Bush characterized North Korea as a member of an “axis of evil.”

In February, Pyongyang caused a stir by announcing that it had developed “nukes” and saying it was suspending participation in the six-party talks. Pyongyang has also strongly criticized a U.S.-South Korean military exercise now underway as a form of intimidation.

Rice appears determined not to respond to what U.S. officials regard as the North’s provocations. She has refused to heed the North’s call for an apology after she referred to the country as an “outpost of tyranny” during her January confirmation hearings, and says she won’t “get into a debate on semantics” with North Korea.

With threats and promises, including significant food and energy aid if the North renounces nuclear weapons, Rice hopes to alter a situation in which Pyongyang has largely set the pace over two years. The last round of talks, in June, ended in a deadlock.

But analysts say Rice is still learning on the job, and may find it difficult to deliver on threats. North Korea, they say, has lots of experience wearing down negotiating partners.

“There’s a limit here,” said Wu Xinbo, a security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Unless you’re willing to create a serious crisis and are confident you can control it, this sort of pressure doesn’t really work on North Korea.”

Rice’s tough public comments and the administration’s insistence on six-party talks -- rather than the direct talks with the U.S. that Pyongyang wants -- may not be the most effective tactics, Wu added.

“Allowing countries to save face, using low-profile diplomacy and persuasion are still the best way to go,” he said. “I hope the Americans can adopt a different approach, with more bilateral contact with North Korea even if it’s not formal, and [offer] some concrete benefits to them, [in] a less rigid stance.”

Another problem with Rice’s approach, Asia analysts say, is that reclusive North Korea has repeatedly shown it doesn’t respond to carrots or sticks as readily as a more open nation might. The threat of sanctions is not very effective, they say, because the country has little legal international trade.

The regime has inculcated its people with the ideology of juche, or self-reliance, and its people have learned to survive on very little. Political scientists have for years predicted the regime’s imminent collapse in the face of famines, floods and political crackdowns only to be repeatedly proved wrong.

Another difficulty with the threat of sanctions -- or even a U.S. military response as some have called for -- is that such options have limited backing in China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, the other parties involved in the six-nation talks.

Japan is probably the most supportive, having taken a harder line toward North Korea in recent months as public anger has grown over its agents’ abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s. Japan recently tightened trade with the North by requiring more insurance and better safety standards on arriving ships.

A senior Japanese diplomat, Akitaka Saiki, deputy director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, proposed last week at a conference in Shanghai that the other countries set a June deadline for North Korea to show up at the talks or be brought in front of the U.N. Security Council.

South Korea, in contrast, has vocally opposed a U.S. hard-line stance toward its northern neighbor and believes that accommodation and patience are the only long-term solution. Seoul has been unenthusiastic about the idea of sanctions.

Moon Chung In, a South Korean academic and foreign policy advisor to President Roh Moo Hyun, said after Rice’s visit, “If we transfer this to the U.N. Security Council, it won’t solve the problem and we will only have another year of heightened tension on the Korean peninsula.”

Rice finds herself walking a particularly fine line with Beijing, whose wholehearted support would be required for any bid to rein in North Korea through sanctions.

On one hand, the U.S. has been trying to manage its problems with China on human rights and other issues in a low-key way. For instance, the two sides seemed to have made a deal last week under which China agreed to release a Muslim businesswoman jailed on subversion charges for sending newspaper clippings overseas. The U.S., in turn, indicated it would not seek to censure China this year at the United Nations for its human rights record.

But Rice stepped up her criticism after complaints that the U.S. was going too easy on Beijing’s human rights record. She also went public with concerns about China’s efforts to modernize its military by acquiring advanced technology from Europe. And at today’s news conference, she did not shy from mentioning religious freedom.

She said her visit to the church “underscored for me that people must have the opportunity to exercise their religious beliefs ... in an atmosphere that is free from intimidation.”

She also rapped Beijing over a new law giving China a legal framework for attacking Taiwan if the island declares independence. The law clearly “did increase tensions,” Rice said.

Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said he hoped the U.S. would avoid raising tensions on the issue. “whether or not [this issue] can be handled will affect the smooth development of Sino-U.S. relations,” he said.

In spite of such differences, Rice expressed hope for the future in a Sunday meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

“I’m quite certain that we will be able to manage the issues before us ... in a spirit of cooperation and respect,” she said.

Times staff writers Barbara Demick in Seoul and Bruce Wallace in Tokyo contributed to this report.