U.S. and North Korea Vow to Improve Ties

The Clinton administration and North Korea on Thursday took one of the biggest steps in nearly 50 years toward ending their bitter hostilities, issuing a historic joint communique asserting that they had decided to “fundamentally improve” their relations.

They also announced that President Clinton is likely to make a groundbreaking visit to North Korea before he leaves office in January.

“The U.S. and the [North Korean] sides stated that they are prepared to undertake a new direction in their relations . . . free from past enmity,” the two governments said in the communique, issued at the end of a visit here by a senior North Korean military leader. Such a written communique carries weight and enduring importance well beyond that of routine presidential utterances.

North Korea did not, for now, win its objective of being taken off the U.S. list of states that support terrorism. That designation prevents the economically hard-pressed North from obtaining international loans.

The United States did not win a permanent commitment from North Korea to stop its missile-development program, only for a continuation of the qualified, temporary freeze on launches.

The governments appear to have set aside the settlement of such issues so they can be announced by Clinton and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il when Clinton visits the Asian nation.

“These issues are left to be decided by the leaders,” said a South Korean diplomat.

Thursday’s communique did appear to set the stage for the establishment of formal diplomatic liaison offices soon by the North in Washington and the United States in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. It said the two governments had agreed on “the value of regular diplomatic contacts.”

For Clinton, the possibility of a trip to North Korea offers an opportunity to bolster his foreign policy legacy during his final months in office. Over the past eight years, Clinton can claim credit for a series of far-reaching new trade agreements but fewer changes in the overall structure of U.S. diplomacy.

Clinton is scheduled to visit Vietnam in November, but that trip will merely put the final presidential imprimatur on a rapprochement that was slowly worked out by the State Department in the early and mid-1990s. The North Korea diplomacy has been far more recent, more rapid and more surprising.

During two days of talks with Cho Myong Nok, the first vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, “we took a very substantial step away from the frozen and distant relationships of the past,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told a news conference here Thursday.

Albright is scheduled to visit North Korea later this month to meet with Kim and pave the way for a Clinton trip.

This week’s breakthrough follows by four months the historic visit to Pyongyang by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung.

Explaining why Washington and Seoul are moving so fast to upgrade their relations with the North, a South Korean diplomat whose government prohibits him from being quoted by name said Thursday, “You need a bulldozer approach, to break down these barriers of the past five decades.”

There was some irony in the fact that the Clinton administration is following the path blazed first by the South Korean leader.

Throughout most of the past decade, North Korea tried to establish a new, warmer relationship with the U.S. while cutting South Korea out of the process. Officials in Seoul complained regularly that North Korea was trying to meet one-on-one with Americans while bypassing them.

However, the U.S. insisted that North Korea must deal with its southern neighbor as well as Washington. And in the late 1990s, the Clinton administration, wary of Republican opposition in Congress, balked at North Korean overtures.

Finally, North Korea earlier this year switched direction and decided to move first to upgrade its relations with South Korea. The summit of the two Kims produced the impetus for a change in policy by the Clinton administration.

Thursday’s announcement was all the more startling because of the historically stormy relations between the Clinton administration and North Korea.

Over the past eight years, Washington and Pyongyang have come close to war and have lived through a traumatic leadership succession and virtual economic collapse in North Korea.

In March 1993, soon after Clinton took office, North Korea provoked a crisis by saying it would pull out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty rather than submit to international inspections of its nuclear program.

A year later, the administration negotiated a deal in which North Korea would freeze its nuclear program in exchange for energy supplies and two civilian nuclear reactors.

Kim Jong Il also took power in 1994 with the death of his father, Kim Il Sung. A year later, a series of floods brought widespread famine to North Korea.

The economic downturn brought with it the beginnings of a change in North Korea’s relations with the rest of the world. None of the big powers near North Korea--Japan, China or South Korea--wanted to face the consequences of a North Korean collapse.

“It would be hard to bring about a collapse of North Korea without South Korea, Japan and China, and none of them were interested,” Marcus Noland, a Korea specialist at the Institute for International Economics, said Thursday.

As a result, the Clinton administration decided to begin providing food aid to North Korea, the first step toward helping the Pyongyang regime survive.

Thursday’s communique said the goal now is to “formally end the Korean War by replacing the 1953 armistice agreement with permanent peace arrangements.”