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After a recent speech in Washington, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill was asked which was harder: negotiating with Pyongyang or trying to forge a coherent North Korea policy within the Bush Administration. Hill laughed, but it was no joke. More than five years and one North Korean nuclear test after George W. Bush said he "loathed" Kim Jong Il, the U.S. stance toward Pyongyang has now flip-flopped. No longer is Washington trying to isolate the dictator's rogue regime. Instead, on March 5 and 6 Hill held talks with the North's Vice Foreign Minister...
...lacks hard evidence, it intends to press Pyongyang for "complete clarity" on the program. Indeed, rather than lightening up on the North, U.S. Treasury Department officials appear poised to issue permanent sanctions against Banco Delta Asia, the Macau bank where about $24 million in assets allegedly belonging to North Korean officials have been frozen on grounds that the money is linked to illicit North Korean businesses, including counterfeiting. Pyongyang has been adamant that economic sanctions be lifted in exchange for cooperation on nuclear talks. But Hill told reporters in New York that he has made it "abundantly clear to them...
...choice, having played to acclaim at the Cannes and New York festivals. The film's plot is also pretty splitty: part old-time sea- or sewer-mutant movie in the tradition of Godzilla and Them! and part trigenerational comedy-drama about a weird family--sort of a Little Miss Korean Sunshine. The difference is that instead of a dead old man in the van, the Park family has a little girl (Ko A-sung) missing in the belly of the beast. Then director Bong Joon-ho sets one more plate spinning, with easy-to-spot political metaphors for U.S. influence...
...York on March 4, U.S. and North Korean diplomats began discussing normalization of relations, while Treasury Department officials in Macau were in discussions aimed at allowing Banco Delta Asia to unfreeze North Korean accounts frozen at Washington's behest. (The accounts allegedly belong to high ranking North Korean officials involved in a variety of illicit businesses, including narcotics smuggling and the counterfeiting of United States currency...
...focus for now remains on getting the North to verifiably dismantle its existing reactor, which has allowed it to build the six to ten bombs the U.S. believes it has. Getting to the point where the alleged uranium program is the only stumbling block to a nuclear-free Korean peninsula would be, by itself, a significant diplomatic victory. But as Hill himself is the first to acknowledge, it's a long way from here to there...