U.S. OKs ‘Dialogue’ but No ‘Negotiations’ With N. Korea

Making a diplomatic overture aimed at defusing tensions with both Koreas, the Bush administration said Tuesday that it is willing to talk to North Korea and made no mention of the conditions it had demanded.

The new posture was announced in a joint statement by the United States, Japan and South Korea after meetings here. The United States reiterated that it won’t offer any rewards to North Korea to induce it to abandon its nuclear program, but State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, “We are laying out here how a peaceful solution can be found.”

Previously, the Bush administration had demanded that North Korea dismantle its nuclear weapons program as a condition for any talks, much to the distress of the incoming South Korean government, which is eager for a negotiated settlement.

The shift was cloaked in diplomatic language that differentiated between “dialogue” -- which Washington now says it will accept -- and “negotiation,” which it continues to reject.

“The United States is willing to talk to North Korea about how it will meet its obligations to the international community,” the statement said. “However ... the United States will not provide quid pro quos to North Korea to live up to its existing obligations.”

The statement came just hours after North Korea turned up the volume on its rhetoric yet again, warning that any economic sanctions against it would be interpreted as tantamount to war.

“Sanctions mean a war, and the war knows no mercy,” the official Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday.

Boucher said the Bush administration has no plans to seek economic sanctions.

The news agency also said it was hypocritical for Washington to portray the North’s missiles as an international threat.

“The U.S. tops the world’s list in producing and selling the weapons of mass destruction,” it said. South Korea’s stock market fell 2.2% Tuesday on the remarks.

Policy analysts said it was unclear whether Tuesday’s joint statement would be enough to induce North Korea to try to start talks with the United States -- or whether the Bush administration really wants them.

“It’s a start. The game continues. This will be clearly understood in Pyongyang for what it is -- an opening,” said retired Air Force Col. William M. Drennan, a Korea expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. “Now we’ll see if North Korea is serious about taking it.”

President Bush, while unveiling his new tax plan in Chicago, took a moment to insist yet again that U.S. intentions toward North Korea are peaceful.

“I believe that by working with countries in the region, diplomacy will work,” Bush said. “We have no aggressive intent, no argument with the North Korean people. We’re interested in peace on the Korean peninsula.”

The statement from the three countries elaborates on the joint position they have taken in the months since North Korea acknowledged having a secret uranium-enrichment program. They insist that North Korea has violated its international commitments to eliminate its nuclear program and that “relations with the international community hinge on its taking prompt and verifiable action to completely dismantle its nuclear weapons program.”

“Talking is one thing, but we expect people to honor obligations,” Boucher said. “We have said all along we were opposed to any kind of negotiation; we were opposed to paying again for the same agreements that have been reached before.”

The European Union released a strong statement Tuesday calling on Pyongyang to “refrain from escalation” of the standoff and to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and cameras to resume monitoring North Korean nuclear facilities.

The nuclear watchdog said Monday that it was giving North Korea one more chance to let inspectors back into the country before referring the issue to the U.N. Security Council, a step that could result in sanctions or even military reprisals.

But Tuesday’s joint statement could ease the confrontation, if only slightly.

“It’s a small bone they are throwing at the North Koreans -- a very, very small bone,” said Joel S. Wit, a former State Department official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Wit predicted, however, that the North Koreans will “keep pushing further to find the [American] bottom line, and they may not rush to the negotiating table.”

But L. Gordon Flake, head of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington, argued that the Bush administration’s position is essentially unchanged, because it is saying only that it will discuss how the North Koreans would go about disarming.

The administration succeeded in its key goal, which was to keep any daylight from dividing the three allies, Flake said. The joint statement made no mention of a reported South Korean peace proposal that would put Seoul in the position of mediating between the U.S. and North Korea.

“The U.S. doesn’t want [the North Koreans] to come to the table,” Flake said. “They want them dragged in front of the Security Council -- but not too quickly.... We want to internationalize this, to slow it down, but we do not want to be dragged into a forced shotgun negotiation with North Korea.”

Administration officials portrayed the move as a cautious but positive step.

“It’s a step out. It’s a step forward. It makes clearer some things that were less explicit,” a senior administration official said. But the official noted that there could be no progress without North Korea’s giving some sign that it might be willing to give up its nuclear aspirations.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic frenzy of the last two weeks appeared to be accelerating. South Korea dispatched its national security advisor, Yim Sung Joon, to Washington, where he was to meet today with senior State Department officials and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. And two key State Department officials, Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly, the point man on North Korea, and Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, in charge of nonproliferation issues, will head for Asia for yet more talks later this month.

South Korean media reported that Yim carried a proposal under which the North would be persuaded to abandon its nuclear program for U.S. security assurances and a pledge to resume fuel oil shipments.

In Washington, it was seen as unlikely that a Republican-controlled Congress outraged by North Korean behavior would reauthorize fuel oil shipments unless Pyongyang submitted to intrusive inspections.

However, the joint statement does not rule out the possibility that fuel oil or other inducements could be offered by some country other than the U.S.

There is precedent for the idea that the United States can engage in broad “dialogue” without being drawn into negotiations for a specific deal, said Larry Niksch, an Asian affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service. The first Bush administration held two years of such talks with communist Vietnam, exploring a “road map” for how the country might reengage with the United States, with the U.S. insisting that the first step be withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia.

Eventually, Niksch noted, those talks led to a Vietnamese withdrawal, easing of economic sanctions and, under the Clinton administration, full normalization of relations with a regime that had been an archenemy.

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Efron reported from Washington and Magnier from Seoul.