U.S., Allies See Gains in N. Korea Efforts : Asia: Tokyo, Seoul agree with Washington that diplomacy is the only way to deter missile test by regime.

As what are sure to be tense talks between the United States and North Korea begin in Berlin today, U.S., Japanese and South Korean officials have a message for concerned or frustrated observers: “To jaw-jaw always is better than to war-war.”

That famous remark by a British politician on the merits of diplomacy seemed to be foremost on policymakers’ minds last week, when North Korea signaled a willingness to negotiate over its threat to launch a second ballistic missile and then increased regional tensions anew by announcing that it was unilaterally redrawing its de facto sea border with South Korea.

Speaking with rare unanimity--even in private conversations--U.S., South Korean and Japanese officials insisted that diplomatic initiatives toward North Korea have made progress, however minuscule.

Moreover, they argued, there is no practical alternative to trying to draw the isolated Stalinist state into the international community--no matter how belligerent North Korea’s rhetoric, how bad its behavior or how agonizingly slow and seemingly fruitless the negotiations.

Diplomats and policymakers said it was far too soon to declare victory in their efforts to persuade North Korea to refrain from a missile test in exchange for an easing of punishing U.S. economic sanctions that have been in force for more than four decades. And they sought to lower expectations of what can be achieved in Berlin.

“The North has an infinite ability to disappoint us,” cautioned one U.S. official. “North Korea never gives us dramatic windfall victories.”

But the recent flurry of diplomacy, in which the U.S., Japan and South Korea have enlisted China and Russia in trying to make North Korea understand that a missile test would bring down the wrath of its neighbors, has not only lured the North to the negotiating table but also created a rare unity among Washington, Tokyo and Seoul.

So there is hope, officials said, that North Korea can be persuaded at least to postpone a launch that all fear would set off a new arms race in East Asia.

“They generally understand there is a red line in the sand and lots of bad things will happen if they fire the missile,” a second U.S. official said. “They sort of understand that Congress doesn’t like them and the [Clinton] administration is their best hope.”

Still, the politics of what can and will be offered in Berlin are fiendishly touchy.

Washington Anxious About Missile Program

For more than a month, U.S. officials have been indicating that they are prepared to ease some sanctions in exchange for some sort of North Korean missile moratorium. Washington has become extremely anxious to halt the North’s missile program amid intelligence reports that the new multistage Taepodong 2 missile would put Alaska and Guam within striking range.

The North, meanwhile, has insisted on its sovereign right to develop, produce, test and export missiles to defend itself against the threat posed by a hostile, nuclear-armed United States.

Implicit in that language is the potential for the North to engage in what exasperated U.S. negotiators have termed “salami tactics”--slicing its demands as thin as a sliver of salami and demanding separate concessions from the U.S. for agreeing to stop development, production, testing or export of its ballistic missiles.

In March, North Korea said it might consider halting missile exports if compensated for the $10 billion it said it would lose in sales over the next 10 years.

A South Korean source put the real value of North Korean missile exports to Pakistan, the Middle East and possibly buyers elsewhere at about $50 million to $100 million a year.

For political reasons, the United States could not pay “two cents” of what would be seen as North Korean extortion--but a noncash deal with third countries might be arranged, the South Korean source said.

In 1993, Israel offered to establish diplomatic relations with North Korea and give the regime $1 billion in investment and technical assistance to induce it to call off a planned sale of 150 Rodong missiles (an earlier version of the Taepodong) to Iran, scholar Leon V. Sigal writes in his 1998 book, “Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy With North Korea.” But the U.S. got wind of the deal and put a stop to it, unwilling to see the North paid off even by a third party, Sigal writes.

If the U.S. dropped its opposition, however, a new deal with Israel or Japan “could be arranged if North Korea demands cash,” the South Korean source suggested.

Independent analysts warn that North Korea’s founder, the late Kim Il Sung, drew his legitimacy from his success in standing up to the great outside powers who partitioned Korea and then tried to strangle the North. For his son, Kim Jong Il, to back down from the Communist nation’s missile program without at least appearing to have bested the Americans would mean an intolerable loss of face, they say.

The North Koreans also have little incentive to compromise, said L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington, because “they know they don’t have a lot to lose by rattling the saber of the missile test. The longer they rattle, the better, because the [Clinton] administration is trying to sell this as North Korean forbearance.”

The Clinton administration has concluded that “you’re not going to bamboozle or out-negotiate them--you have to come up with a plan to buy them out,” Flake said. But the administration is unwilling or unable to muster the political capital to do so, he said.

“The question is, do we want to go back to the brink again, and if not, how much are we willing to pay not to?” he said.

Face-Saving Important to U.S. and Pyongyang

The Clinton administration is beset by internal and external critics who are demanding more reciprocity from the North in exchange for U.S. aid and better relations. It could find making a dramatic overture equally difficult.

“Face-saving is quite important to both sides,” noted a senior South Korean Foreign Ministry official. “That is why the fine art of diplomacy is needed. The United States has also a very big face, much bigger than North Korea.”

On the other hand, this official said, “The North Korean leadership really needs something to sell to their domestic political constituency, to their people.”

Skeptics doubt that the North will be satisfied merely by an offer to ease sanctions as part of a “package deal” reportedly proposed by former U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry, the administration’s point man on North Korea, during his May visit to the capital, Pyongyang.

North Korea has insisted that the U.S. broke a promise to lift sanctions that Washington made as part of the “agreed framework” pact reached in Geneva in 1994. Under that deal, the North froze its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a pledge from the U.S., South Korea and Japan to construct two light-water nuclear reactors in the North.

The U.S. did lift a few token sanctions but has been unwilling to go further in the face of continuing North Korean military provocations, including sending spy ships and submarines into Japanese and South Korean waters and providing missile technology to Pakistan.

“All North Koreans would get out of [a new deal] is what they were already promised--or thought they were promised--in October 1994,” Flake said.

“If we really want a peace deal, why do we expect them to sell their missile program for what they already thought they were going to get?” he said.

It was Anthony Eden, onetime British foreign secretary, and later prime minister, who first noted that “jaw-jaw” was preferable to “war-war,” though Winston Churchill is credited with the remark, which he quoted in 1954 to defend negotiation with the Communists.

U.S. and South Korean officials used similar language last week in arguing that the alternative to diplomatic engagement is a military confrontation that could lead to the deaths of millions of people in Seoul, which remains within striking range of North Korean artillery, or a face-off with a nuclear Pyongyang.

In any case, one of the U.S. officials said, “our goal is not to bring down the North Korean regime. There are those who wish that was our goal, but it is not.”