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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tadsamillionaire who wrote (37807)	8/14/2002 2:07:47 PM
From: Rascal	Respond to of 281500

Bush plan working. N.Korea and S. Korea in Talks, Koreas agree to talks NOT Bush: No Detente with North Korea NewsMax.com Sunday, March 25, 2001 President Bush has taken a tougher stance toward Communist North Korea, even at the expense of the South Korean president's "face" abroad and at home. It came about because President Kim Dae-jung badly misjudged the new American president, whom he apparently assumed would follow neatly in the footsteps of former president Bill Clinton's policy of support for South Korea's "sunshine approach" toward the military dictatorship in the North. Indeed, Bush's own secretary of state, Colin Powell, had led Kim to believe the Bush-Cheney administration would simply pick up where the Clinton-Gore administration had left off in negotiations with North Korea. So off-policy were both Powell's and Kim's assessments of how Bush is prepared to deal with North Korea that Powell, on the president's instruction, had to leave the Oval Office meeting with Bush to reverse his earlier position with the press corps. According to an account in the Sunday issue of the New York Times from its reporter in Seoul: On his way to Washington for his first meeting with the new American president, Kim "was bubbling with ideas about how to sustain the momentum in his quest to reconcile his nation with its long-hostile neighbor" up North. For example, Kim was full of talk about: • Signing a joint peace declaration with the North. • Formally ending hostilities a half-century after the end of their civil war. • Possibly supplying electricity to the energy-poor North. • Promoting a return visit to Seoul this spring by the North's leader, Kim Jong-il. That was then. Now, two weeks after Kim's return from the White House, his tail between his legs, his meetings with Bush administration officials is being characterized by South Koreans as "an abrupt and sobering end to the most active phase of their president's groundbreaking policy of reconciliation with the North." Kim has only two more years left in his term of office – not much time in which to revamp his entire approach to dealing with North Korea – and he cannot succeed himself. So his trip to Washington has pretty much stymied his grand plans for reconciliation with the North. Despite efforts in the White House to paper over the realities of the Bush-Kim meeting, there's no denying it got off on a bad foot when Bush let Kim know the United States looked with disfavor on a memorandum Kim had written in apparent agreement with Communist China's opposition to Bush's plan for a U.S. missile defense. When Kim tried to explain that was not how it really was, Bush said, in so many words, that's good news and Kim could make that clear when the two met with the press. Kim did. And when Bush took the occasion to state U.S. opposition to North Korea's positioning of conventional artillery and armor on the border with the South, saying he wants to see it withdrawn as an indication of good faith on North Korea's part, Kim was taken by surprise. So apparently were others on the Korean Peninsula. Jin Wook Choi, director of North Korean studies at the Korean Institute for Unification Studies in Seoul, said: "The artillery are a threat that we want to resolve, but it is not an immediate issue, and some people wonder why the United States is being so tough on such an issue all of a sudden." That may not be so difficult to explain: George W. Bush is not Bill Clinton, (THAT'S FOR SURE and both North and South Korea are in for a new, firmer policy * in this new, firmer White House. *ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF bUSH'S NOT-INVENTED-HERE GOVERNMENT STYLE.