U.S. and S. Korea Won’t Placate Regime

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung told President Bush on Friday that North Korea’s decision to restart its nuclear power plants and remove international monitoring equipment is “unacceptable,” a White House spokesman said.

Bush agreed that the move is “very serious,” but the leaders offered no insight on how they would avert a looming crisis over the North’s nuclear programs. In a 10-minute phone conversation, Bush and Kim “agreed to continue seeking a peaceful resolution, while not allowing business as usual to continue with North Korea,” White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said.

He defined “business as usual” as “the expectation that the more North Korea violates agreements, the more the world will double over backward to placate North Korea, and the president will not do that.”

The White House reaction came a day after North Korea vowed to reopen the facilities, which were shuttered as part of a 1994 agreement that required the communist regime in Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for energy assistance.

The president, Fleischer said, “will not engage in allowing North Korea to violate its agreements and then have the world come rushing to North Korea to say, ‘How can we help you?’ ”

But at the moment, Washington is continuing its strategy of diplomatic encirclement, urging North Korea’s four key neighbors -- China, Japan, South Korea and Russia -- to join the U.S. in using a cutoff of trade and aid to pressure the country to dismantle its nuclear programs.

“We will be patient,” a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell telephoned his Russian and Chinese counterparts Friday, and Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld plan to meet with the Japanese defense and foreign ministers Monday. Officials said North Korea strategy will be a top item of discussion at the meeting.

“In the end, even North Korea is going to have to face reality” and acknowledge that none of its neighbors will accept its having nuclear capability, a senior administration official said.

“That may take a while to sink in, but it will,” the official said. “In the meantime, we’ve been pretty restrained.”

In Vienna, Mohammed Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the North Koreans have not asked IAEA staff to leave the country, but neither have they agreed to requests for talks about how the country’s nuclear facilities should be monitored if they are restarted. On Thursday, Baradei requested a meeting with technical experts in North Korea to discuss inspection protocols.

Meanwhile, Washington’s advice industry was abuzz with counsel for the president.

Some urged Bush to stand firm against what is seen as North Korean brinkmanship, arguing that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is a rational player who will continue to threaten and bluster as long as he is rewarded for doing so.

Others argued that Pyongyang has staked its very identity on standing up against all odds to what it sees as foreign bullies, and they urged Bush to offer a face-saving exchange for North Korea: respectful and serious negotiations about its integration into the international community in exchange for forswearing its recently disclosed uranium-enrichment program.

Balbina Hwang, a Korea policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, said Pyongyang’s threat Thursday to restart its nuclear reactors and its demand that the IAEA remove its seals and monitoring cameras from nuclear facilities show that the Bush administration’s no-nonsense line on North Korea is working.

The North Koreans have “backed themselves into a corner, and I think they know that now,” she said. The last thing the U.S. should do is to respond by turning it into a crisis, she said.

The regime “has learned the lesson of throwing tantrums,” she said. “That’s what the Bush administration has to stop.... North Korea is the one that wants something from the international community. So the rest of the world needs to stand firm, and as long as they do, I think North Korea is going to be the one to blink.”

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a fierce foe of North Korea, said the administration should go further and announce that it will not help North Korea build two light-water nuclear power plants as promised by the Clinton administration in the 1994 agreement. In a statement, Markey derided the past administration’s agreement for “transferring two potential nuclear bomb factories to North Korea.”

But many veteran Korea watchers said the hard-line Bush strategy will end in stalemate unless North Korea is offered a face-saving way to back down.

“I don’t know anyone who knows anything about North Korea who doesn’t advocate negotiation in some form. The trick is the timing,” said L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington. “Right now, the administration seems to be intent on forcing a unilateral North Korean capitulation and rubbing their nose in it” by forcing North Korea to submit to intrusive inspections of the sort the IAEA is now conducting in Iraq.

“The only way out of this is forcing unilateral North Korean capitulation but giving them a face-saving back door that says, ‘If you capitulate, we are prepared to reevaluate the [U.S.-North Korean] relationship, treat you with respect and negotiate with you,’ ” Flake said.

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Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin in Vienna and Maura Reynolds in Washington contributed to this report.