US gives in, but North Korea may want more

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http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=MTM1NDI4MjEwNQ==

Published Date: April 30, 2007
By Anne Gearan

The Bush administration has caved to escalating North Korean demands that threatened a breakthrough nuclear disarmament accord, but there are signs that North Korea is still angling for a better deal. Washington has also largely held its tongue as the North blew a deadline to begin shutting down a key nuclear reactor and seemed to drag its feet in response to US overtures on a banking investigation. President George W. Bush said Friday the delicate diplomacy has "hit a bump in the road" over the banking matter. Still, he defended the deal the US helped broker in February to trade economic and energy aid for a gradual standing down of the North's nuclear capability.

Bush said the world's patience with North Korea and its leader Kim Jong Il is not infinite. "I think it's wise to show the North Korean leader ... that there's a better way forward," he said. "I wouldn't call that soft." The administration's about-face on North Korea is an example of the growing strain of pragmatism and flexibility in foreign policy that has also produced new willingness to engage unpalatable regimes in Iran and Syria, and to change some tactics in the Iraq war.

It divided several elements of the administration, pitting hawks such as White House adviser Elliot Abrams against diplomats at the State Department, and leaving get-tough law enforcement chiefs at the Treasury Department feeling misused. Several administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, acknowledged the rifts and said what was once an ideological difference of opinion became a bigger problem because of the mishandling of a complex financial investigation.

Bush had maintained that the investigation into a Macau-based bank suspected of doing Pyongyang's dirty work was divorced from international efforts to get North Korea to trade away its nuclear capability. The two issues were always linked for the North Koreans, who boycotted arms talks for more than a year after the Treasury Department blacklisted the bank in 2005. The administration acknowledged as much last year, and won the North's return to talks by agreeing to resolve the bank matter. Thereafter, each new red line that Washington tried to draw about what would happen to the bank and $25m in frozen funds was erased in the face of North Korean intransigence.