Word: korean
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...there is another force driving the Bush team to pivot: the ticking of the clock. "It's very hard to do things at the very, very end," said Wendy Sherman, who coordinated North Korean policy in the Clinton State Department. "If the President wants to end eight years and have people say, 'You lost Iraq, you lost Iran, you lost North Korea, and you made the Middle East worse,' it's not a good moment in history. And so the pragmatists are predominant at the moment. This is their window...
...those confused by the strange sight of suddenly friendly American and North Korean diplomats hitting a Broadway show together in New York this week, take comfort that in Asia Pyongyang is still a diplomatic migraine. As part of the agreement reached in the Six-Party talks last month, Japan and North Korea met yesterday and today in Hanoi for bilateral discussions aimed at normalizing relations between the two nations. (Like the U.S., Japan has never established official diplomatic connections with North Korea.) But while American negotiator Christopher Hill happily characterized his meetings with the North Koreans earlier this week...
...sticking point is one that has dogged relations between the two nations for the last several years: the fate of Japanese citizens who were abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. Tokyo insists that there are at least four Japanese still unaccounted for in North Korea. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe - who built his career on his tough stance against Kim Jong Il - has repeatedly insisted that there can be no diplomatic normalization or aid provided as part of any nuclear deal with North Korea unless the abductions are resolved first. That means the safe return...
...doubtful, however, that Japan would be ready to listen. The abductions were tragic - as anyone would know who has heard the elderly parents of abductee Megumi Yokota tell of their daughter, snatched near her home at the age of 13 by North Korean agents, never to be seen by her family again. But under Abe the quarter-century old kidnappings are increasingly taking precedence over the North Korean nuclear program on Japan's foreign policy agenda - and that is not healthy. His administration has connected Japan's tough sanctions against North Korean trade not to nuclear weapons...
...subject. That Japan's Prime Minister is seen as calling on North Korea to come clean on the kidnapping of a handful of Japanese while casting doubt on his own country's responsibility for the trauma suffered by possibly hundreds of thousands of sex slaves - many of them Korean - doesn't exactly help his negotiation position...