North Korea intensifies bid for US attention

What Kim of the North wants, experts say, are talks with the US - part of its bid for recognition by the most powerful player in the international community and the backbone of the military force in the South. The White House has said it will not hold talks under threat of "nuclear blackmail."

Incoming president Roh Moo-hyun was elected in December on what seemed to be, in part, a wave of sentiment against US forces. He has strongly supported outgoing President Kim Dae Jung's "Sunshine Policy" of engagement with the North, which stresses dialogue and diplomacy to end the Korean divide.

Since taking office, the Bush administration has been more skeptical of the Sunshine approach, and more critical of the North, than either the Clinton administration or the Kim administration here - at one point labeling the North a member of the "axis of evil," along with Iraq and Iran. Such statements were used as fodder for anti-US feelings among an increasingly proud and assertive younger generation of South Koreans.

How the Bush White House and the Roh Blue House will work together in the midst of the nuclear and diplomatic crisis is a significant question for coming months. Sources in Seoul say the Bush team is far more willing to "give [Mr. Roh] room" than some among the incoming South Korean team seem to be aware of.

On Thursday, for example, Roh reacted to news first reported in The New York Times describing White House planning for sanctions against North Korea using a variety of finely tuned measures. The sanctions would be imposed by the UN Security Council, something North Korea has said is an act tantamount to war. Roh spoke against any plans for sanctions on North Korea; he added that South Korea can "express a different view if doing so will prevent a war."

Yet in recent weeks the US has not officially advocated sanctions, and sources here argue that planning for sanctions is something that would be carried out routinely in Washington and is not in itself determinative of future actions.

Sources say that Powell's visit will in part address these issues.

Still, as one senior South Korean observer worried here Thursday after the North Korean jet incursion: "I think there is a drift apart between two allies [US and South Korea] and the way they see things. To the US, trying to maintain security through an armistice, this kind of activity looks threatening. To the South Korean government, trying to coax the North through dialogue, it does not. I'm worried that things are getting sour."

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