US no-talks policy comes under fire

President Bush has made his stance clear: The US doesn't negotiate directly with its enemies.

But after North Korea's apparent nuclear test this week – and problems with getting severe sanctions approved by the UN – that stance is now setting off a vigorous debate.

"In my view, it is not appeasement to talk to your enemies," James Baker, secretary of State for the former President Bush, said this week.

In key election states, the Republican National Committee is offering a different view. It's airing TV ads showing Madeleine Albright, secretary of State for former President Clinton, clinking glasses with Kim Jong Il and presenting the North Korean dictator with a basketball signed by Michael Jordan. Its point: "basketball diplomacy" doesn't work.

The debate shows how the White House's policy of not directly engaging adversaries – whether North Korea, Iran, Syria, or organizations like the Palestinians' Hamas and Lebanon's Hizbullah – is under intensifying fire, including from friendly circles.

Now is probably not the moment for the United States to approve the kind of bilateral negotiations North Korea wants, many agree. "There's going to have to be a timeout chair for North Korea," says Michael Green, who served as Asia director in the Bush White House's National Security Council until last December.

But others say the North Korea nuclear crisis, following questionable US diplomacy on this summer's war in Lebanon and a stalemate with Iran over its nuclear ambitions, is raising new challenges for the Bush administration's "no-talk-with- enemies" diplomatic approach.

"The reason we're hearing so much about this right now is that the policies towards Iran and North Korea are not working," says Geoffrey Kemp, a national security expert at the Nixon Center in Washington.

The Bush administration in its second term has embraced "multilateralism" – six-party talks with North Korea and the European Union as a go-between with Iran – without accepting direct talks with parties President Bush has termed "evil," Kemp says.

He adds, "if the multilateral approach is not going anywhere either, that really does lead you back to bilateral discussions."

Some appear to think snubbing adversaries was invented by the Bush White House, while the more adamant Bush advocates would have us believe the Clinton White House never had a foreign enemy it didn't cozy up to. But some say the seesaw of pragmatic engagement with adversaries balancing a moralistic refusal to talk has been teeter-tottering at least since the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution.

"There is a moralist streak in American foreign policy, this idea that you don't talk to bad people, that is not new," says Kemp, who served on the National Security Council in the Reagan White House.

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