Word: kim
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Throughout his presidency, George W. Bush has tried pretty much everything to get North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to come out of his cage. He has tried to coerce him with economic sanctions and schoolboy bluster - a policy course that ended in 2006, when Kim tested a nuclear weapon, precisely the opposite of the result Bush intended. Since then, the Administration has tried bribery, offering blandishments like free food and fuel oil in hopes that North Korea would stand down its nuclear program. Kim has responded a bit - his nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, which produced the fissile material...
...briefing in Washington for the North's motivation in helping Syria build a reactor: "Cash," said a CIA official. The North is a gangster state. It earns hard currency anyway it can-including selling weapons and its expertise in producing them. The point of the diplomacy is give Kim sufficient incentives-both economic and diplomatic-to get to a point where he and his regime don't need to do that anymore to survive. A return to what used to be called, in the early years of the Bush Administration, a "strangulation" strategy, only increases the incentive for Kim...
Dealing with Kim's regime is an arduous, sometimes humiliating process. Christopher Hill privately has let it be known that it drives him nuts to be portrayed as aiding and abetting such an odious crowd. But bribing Kim is the only realistic strategy. When the next Administration takes over in January, with its own North Korea policy, it's going to come to the same conclusion, whether the President is named Obama, Clinton or McCain...
...Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the U.S. point man for North Korea talks, still believe the only sensible path is the one they have been on for the last two years: trying, oh so patiently, to come to a deal with Kim that will at least eliminate his regime's plutonium program and the weapons it produced. Everything else, they believe, is secondary, a "sideshow," says a South Korean diplomat...
...hawks were delighted with yesterday's presentation about the Syrian connection, hoping that the North will be so angered by it that Kim will abandon the six-party talks, bringing down the curtain on what Bolton and others believe has been a feckless effort by the State Department. But Administration officials insist they don't expect that to happen. They believe North Korea 3.0 - the "shame on you" policy - may pay off. "I doubt they're walking away," says one diplomat involved in the talks. Yes, they say, North Korea's obvious and serial proliferation is a huge problem. That...