New push to resolve Korea crisis

Tonight's dinner in Washington between President Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun - and a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Crawford, Texas, next week - indicates the White House war on terror is expanding from the Middle East to North Asia.

Having toppled the regime in Iraq, a state that allegedly has weapons of mass destruction, the Bush team finds it unavoidable to deal with Kim Jong Il's North Korea - a regime eager to assure the world it has nuclear destruction capability.

The next few weeks are crucial to White House efforts to find a common approach to North Korea, both in its own policymaking ranks and among its Pacific allies, South Korea and Japan. Without a collective effort, it will be difficult to pressure or induce Mr. Kim to dismantle his two nuclear programs, experts say.

Yet a common approach has so far eluded this administration. The Kim regime has skillfully kept all sides off balance by a series of feints and jabs, as well as a roundhouse claim during American-North Korean-Chinese talks in Beijing that it now has nuclear weapons and reprocessed plutonium. Also, the liberal political winds that helped elect Mr. Roh last December and the very different sharp public fears in Japan over North Korea in recent months have made it difficult to achieve a common policy.

Washington itself has been "all over the map," as one official puts it, on the question of North Korea. With Roh and Mr. Koizumi set to visit, US officials say all options are on the table - from military strikes, to sanctions, to various packages of sticks and carrots.

Some Bush officials are said to feel privately that there are no options and that in coming months there may come a broad, reluctant realization that Kim's desire for nuclear weapons accession can't be stopped.

That would be "a total set-back," says Ashton Carter, a Korea and security expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass. "An administration that lets North Korea go nuclear will show a dereliction in the most important security question facing this country."

What will come out of the Roh and Koizumi visits, White House officials hope, is a common approach to bring Kim into the international mainstream - and the basis of new talks hosted by the Chinese. Secretary of State Colin Powell has been engaging in a series of phone conversations with his counterpart in China, Li Zhaoxing.

High-level sources say the White House wants both negotiations with the North and sanctions. Some sanctions will be informal - interdiction of North Korean drug smuggling and counterfeiting. But if the North demonstrates "nuclear weapons and completion of reprocessing, then formal sanctions [through the United Nations] will be inevitable," an official argues.

The 6 p.m. White House meeting Wednesday, followed by dinner, will be the first between the South Korean leader and the American president. The talks have been much anticipated in Seoul, and some US officials say the meeting is as important as any Bush will have this spring. As Korea observers look toward the array of issues regarding US presence in Asia - the problem of a divided Peninsula where North Korean artillery could turn Seoul into toast in a few hours, the problem of a nuclear North, and how to accommodate a new generation in the South that desires a more equal relationship with Washington and whose grassroots anti-US military sentiments helped elect Roh - they say that this meeting will set an important tone.

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