U.S. Signals Willingness to Engage North Korea

In talks here with Japanese officials, the Bush administration indicated Friday that it is willing to pursue rapprochement with North Korea if the Communist regime moves toward a formal agreement on limiting sales and export of its long-range missiles, a senior U.S. official said.

The North Korean deal is one of the most important foreign policy initiatives left hanging at the end of the Clinton administration after the first direct visit by a U.S. secretary of State to North Korea in October.

That visit led to agreement on the framework for a missile deal, and then-President Clinton had even hoped to go to Pyongyang, the North’s capital, as his final foreign trip to wrap up an accord. But time ran out amid the protracted electoral process.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conveyed the Bush administration’s intentions to Japanese Foreign Minister Yohei Kono during their first talks at the State Department on Friday.

Powell indicated that the United States will “proceed step by step as North Korea meets the concerns that we have about missiles, about military forces and tension on the peninsula,” the senior administration official said.

For several years, the United States, South Korea and Japan have worked to end the threat posed by North Korea in Northeast Asia by urging disarmament in exchange for humanitarian assistance and an end to isolation.

A breakthrough came in 1994 with an agreement on freezing Pyongyang’s nuclear energy program--which the U.S. believed had allowed North Korea to develop a nuclear arms capability--in exchange for “safe” nuclear reactors to provide energy.

Dealing with North Korea’s missile program and its missile exports to countries such as Iran was the next important step in the ambitious diplomatic initiative.

Earlier this week, President Bush spoke with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung as one of his first dozen courtesy calls to his counterparts. The two sides agreed to meet soon to discuss North Korea and the reunification of the Koreas, according to a statement from Kim’s office. Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his peace initiative with North Korea.

The Bush administration is widely expected to take a tougher line than its predecessor had toward North Korea. In his Senate confirmation hearings this month, Powell said the new administration won’t “be afraid to engage.” But he also said it won’t move on normalization of relations with “any sense of haste” or without a “clear-eyed realism about the nature of the regime.”

And he pledged that Washington won’t give way on any issue “unless we get something that is really valuable to us in return,” including an end to the missile program and an end to both the conventional and unconventional threat.

North Korea’s missile program is the main reason behind the Bush administration’s push for a national missile-defense system.

In blunt language, Powell also called North Korean leader Kim Jong Il a dictator whose regime is unable to feed its people and which “bears no relationship to what’s happening in the 21st century” worldwide.

Powell’s testimony triggered an angry response from Pyongyang, which labeled the remarks slanderous. “He dared make such reckless remarks going against the elementary common sense as slandering our supreme leadership as dictator of North Korea,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman told the official Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea “cannot but interpret what he said as a statement reflecting the sinister intention of big war industrial monopolies and other conservative hard-liners in the United States to keep U.S.-North Korean relations in the hostile and belligerent relationship forever,” he added.

The spokesman warned that North Korea would respond in kind. “If the U.S. brandishes a sword at us, we will counter it with a sword, and if it shows good faith, we will reciprocate,” he said.

Powell’s North Korea comments came the same day that new Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pledged that the Pentagon will proceed speedily with the national missile-defense system.

“The president has not been ambivalent about this,” Rumsfeld said. “He intends to deploy.”