U.S. Focus at Forum Is Security

Although economic development is the mission of the annual Asia-Pacific regional conference being held here this week, national security is intruding into the conversation -- especially when American officials are in the room.

En route to Chile on Friday, senior Bush administration officials aboard Air Force One said that the president intended to make North Korea’s nuclear arsenal the “top of the agenda” today by urging allies in a flurry of morning meetings to refocus on the issue and work jointly to step up pressure on Pyongyang.

President Bush meets today with leaders of China, Japan, Russia and South Korea -- all participants in the so-called six-party talks with North Korea. A senior U.S. official said the president planned to use his recent reelection to motivate his counterparts.

“What we’ll be interested in is having the president, coming off of an important reelection victory, sitting down with his partners in this process, and working with them to get all of them using the tools they have on North Korea,” the senior official said.

“There was a delay as the North Koreans tried to stall to see what would happen in the election,” the official said. “And now they know and all the others know, and we think this meeting is going to be very important for getting these other leaders and their governments on the North Korean case.”

The 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum will discuss trade liberalization. But Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell are signaling that the top of the U.S. diplomatic agenda, here and in the next four years, will be security issues, including the threat from North Korea and other weapons proliferation, border security and Islamic militancy.

En route to the meeting, Powell said that although Bush’s priority here was easing trade barriers, there was agreement that it was necessary to work together on counter-terrorism efforts.

“We have to work together on dealing with the potential for weapons of mass destruction, and there will be other nonproliferation issues that will be discussed among member states,” Powell said.

APEC has “increasingly turned its attention to security issues,” said another senior U.S. official.

Police made dozens of arrests as tens of thousands of anti-globalization and anti-Bush demonstrators marched through downtown Santiago on Friday.

“Our march has two objectives: rejecting Bush’s visit and calling into question the market model APEC stands for,” said Victor de la Fuente, a spokesman for the Chilean Social Forum, which organized an authorized march.

Police said 20,000 people attended the march, but organizers estimated the crowd at 70,000.

Besides his sessions with the six-party participants, Bush also is to meet this morning with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Indonesia has been an ally in fighting Islamic terrorism since the bombings of two Bali nightclubs in 2002.

The U.S. finds it very encouraging that security initiatives are “coming out of Beijing or Tokyo or Canberra or Jakarta,” a U.S. official said.

“They’re coming from across the region, and there’s now a real buy-in to this mission for APEC,” he said, noting the wide-ranging agreement on fighting terrorism that was reached at last year’s summit, and the annual discussions on halting proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

This year, one of the summit’s two leader “retreats” will focus on “human security.”

Yet officials have also noticed an undercurrent of grumbling that the security agenda, though of utmost interest to the U.S., may be drawing attention away from economic development concerns that are at the top of the agenda of less well-off nations.

“The have-nots are perhaps a little more interested in development, and the haves in self-protection,” said an official of one Southeast Asian country, who asked to remain unidentified.

In their one-on-one sessions this weekend, U.S. officials will also be offering encouraging words to countries such as South Korea and Japan that have provided troops for Iraq, at a time when some nations have been pulling out in the face of increasing violence.

On Thursday, APEC foreign ministers reached an agreement to take steps to end the manufacture and spread of shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles, such as U.S.-made Stingers. The missiles are blamed for dozens of attacks on civilian aircraft, and officials are worried that the weapons are an increasing threat in the hands of terrorist groups.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the ministers also discussed “export controls, and in particular export controls on materials that could be used for weapons of mass destruction.”

A joint statement from the foreign ministers said they would work to eliminate the threat of unconventional weapons proliferation, and would develop guidelines to enable the countries to monitor the movement of the missiles.

Downer also said that “there was general agreement that all of us in the region had to put increasing pressure on the North Koreans to participate in the six-party talks.”

After three meetings, the North Korea talks have stalled in recent months. It is widely believed that Pyongyang wanted a delay to see whether Bush would win reelection.

In Seoul, Gen. Leon J. LaPorte, the top U.S. military commander in South Korea, warned Friday that North Korea might sell weapons-grade plutonium to terrorists for much-needed cash, a move that would be “disastrous for the world,” Associated Press reported.

A senior Bush administration official said Friday that the president would remind his allies today of earlier U.S. proposals to act jointly to pressure North Korea to first end its nuclear program and later reap the rewards of acceptance in the global community.

Although the allies disagree over some details -- such as whether to deny aid to North Korea until it ends its program -- the official said Bush would move today to unify the effort.

“It doesn’t take much, but it takes steady, consistent pressure,” the official said.

Powell this week suggested that the North Koreans might be backing off from their insistence that the nuclear issue be solved one-on-one, rather than through six-party talks.

“We have seen a few signals coming out of North Korea where they have said, ‘No, we never insisted that it had to be solved in a bilateral way.’

“We’ll have to wait and see,” he said.

Powell said the meetings here might reveal what Chinese and South Korean officials have learned about the North Koreans’ intentions in recent days.

In addition to their talks on security issues, the APEC ministers this week declared their support for the swift resolution of talks aimed at a new World Trade Organization liberalization agreement.

They also set guidelines to limit the spread of regional or bilateral trade agreements, and called for reforms to reduce graft and increase government openness.

Times special correspondent Eva Vergara contributed to this report.