Japan - N Korea Breakthrough Upsets Bush Hawks

by Jim Lobe

Senior State Department officials have been urging Washington for months to send an envoy to Pyongyang to begin a serious dialogue.

But such a move has been blocked by hawks in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, especially since last January's State of the Union speech, when President George W. Bush lumped North Korea in with Iraq and Iran as an "axis of evil."

Koizumi's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, in which Kim surprised many by admitting and apologizing for the abduction of 11 Japanese citizens during the 1970s and early 1980s, is seen as a major opportunity for State Department "doves" to launch talks with Pyongyang.

Kim also pledged to indefinitely extend a unilateral three-year moratorium on missile tests -- a major concern of both Japan and the United States. And he reportedly asked the Japanese leader to convey to Washington that the "door is open for dialogue."

In exchange, Koizumi apologized for Japan's brutal occupation of Korea during the first half of the last century and indicated that Japan stood ready to provide reparations and other aid that could be worth as much as $10 billion over several years.

Both men pledged to work to normalize relations. A previous effort that began five years ago was aborted in 1998 when Pyongyang walked out after Japan insisted on an accounting of the abduction matter.

"This is a major opening," said John Gershman, an Asian specialist with Foreign Policy in Focus, a center-left think-tank here. "If the State Department wants to win one for a change, it has to get someone to Pyongyang to follow up."

"This will be another test to see who in the administration is calling the shots on key foreign policy issues," he added.

Praising the results of the summit, U.S. officials stressed to reporters that no decision has been made yet to send Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific John Kelly to Pyongyang.

"There are some matters that we will look forward to discussing at the appropriate time with North Korea," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher on Wednesday. "We're now considering what the appropriate time would be to get back to them."

Japan and South Korea are now expected to join in pressing the administration to follow up quickly to inject momentum into the normalization process and to coordinate their policies.

"They both want to see the U.S. engage, among other things so that [the North] can't play one off against the other," says Alan Romberg, a Northeast Asia specialist at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think-tank on international security.

But whether the Bush administration will oblige is another question.

Secretary of State Colin Powell had originally hoped to build on efforts by former President Bill Clinton to normalize ties with the north at the beginning of the Bush administration.

It was Clinton who originally approved the 1994 framework agreement by which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear program -- which U.S. officials believed was intended to build nuclear weapons -- in exchange for the construction of safer, light-water reactors by Japan and South Korea.

The accord led to tentative progress on other key security issues to such an extent that Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, travelled to Pyongyang in late 2000 to pave the way for a possible Clinton visit.

That would have signalled a final agreement both on missile testing and on ending North Korean missile exports, a major source of foreign-exchange earnings, to Iran and other "rogue states" in exchange for aid and access to loans from international financial institutions, like the World Bank.

Amid uncertainties after the 2000 election of George W. Bush, Clinton decided against going, but his Korea specialists strongly urged the new administration to continue the process.

To Powell's embarrassment, however, Bush, only six weeks into his presidency and immediately after greeting Kim Dae Jung at the White House, publicly denounced Kim Jong Il as untrustworthy.

The president's remarks, which humiliated the South Korean leader who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his "sunshine" diplomacy toward the north, marked the first major coup by the new administration's hard-liners, who had long charged Clinton with "appeasing" North Korea.

While matters have been frozen between the two factions since then, Powell met North Korea's foreign minister briefly at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations two months ago in what was seen as a sign of some U.S. flexibility.

But as speculation and infighting over U.S. intentions toward Iraq escalated in August and September, a widely anticipated follow-up trip by Kelly never materialized. Indeed, two weeks before Koizumi travelled to Pyongyang, John Bolton, the hard-line undersecretary for arms control and close ally of Rumsfeld and Cheney, went out of his way to denounce the north as an "evil regime".

The question now is whether Koizumi's trip will break the impasse within the administration and hand the initiative to Powell and the State Department.

The hawks remain deeply opposed to detente with North Korea in the absence of concrete concessions, particularly on U.S. demands that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) be permitted to inspect Pyongyang's nuclear facilities and plutonium stocks. But they also worry that any perceived softening of U.S. hostility towards the north could undermine the campaign against Iraq.

The betting here is that the hard-liners will have to go along with at least an exploratory trip by Kelly to Pyongyang in the coming months, if only to avoid being seen as too belligerent to the EU, the Russians and the Chinese whose acquiescence, if not support, it needs for any Iraq campaign.

In addition, the Pentagon brass is said to be increasingly concerned about rising anti-American feeling among South Korean youth, who see Washington as an obstacle to reunification and say the 37,000 U.S. troops based in South Korea are unwelcome.

"Sending Kelly could certainly offset, at least for a little while, some of the bad press they're getting on North Korea, the International Criminal Court, Kyoto, and so on, and would be another sop to the Russians and the Chinese, too," noted John Feffer, a Korea expert with the American Friends Service Committee.