Word: koreas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...vaunted reputation as the world's "Hermit Kingdom" - the ostensibly inscrutable nation that leaves the outside world guessing about what goes on inside its borders - North Korea can also be predictable. Since at least the early 1990s, Pyongyang's relations and level of engagement with its neighbors and with Washington have swung wildly from outright hostility toward rapprochement and back again. No matter how tense things get, Kim Jong Il (like his father Kim Il Sung before him) always steps back from the ledge and tries to re-engage...
...marked the start of the latest North Korean charm offensive, with Kim trying to play the affable host to the serious ex-President of the U.S. It continued when Pyongyang released a South Korean businessman it was also holding as a hostage, and it intensified last weekend, when North Korea sent a delegation of officials - including its chief spymaster, head of intelligence Kim Yang Gon - to the funeral for the late South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. The delegation stayed an extra day, requesting and getting a meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung Bak. According to South Korean news...
...first months of the Administration took Washington by surprise. It returned the hostility by tightening financial sanctions against the North and by insisting, in the phrase of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, that there was no chance the Administration would buy the "same horse twice" in negotiations with North Korea. That is, it was not going to offer more inducements to get the North to do what it had already agreed to: stand down its nukes. (See rare pictures from inside North Korea...
...details of the message that the former President carried from Kim Jong Il are not yet known. But make no mistake, the whiff of horse flesh is again in the air. For now, according to diplomats and officials in Seoul, both the Obama Administration and its allies in South Korea are in agreement: under no circumstances will they back off their demand for complete denuclearization in the North. But a senior official in Seoul tells TIME that South Korea will allow the disbursement of economic aid to the North "in parallel" with the progress North Korea makes on denuclearization...
Seoul remains wary of the North's plea for direct negotiations with Washington, given Pyongyang's long history of trying to drive a wedge between South Korea and the U.S. But the official in Seoul stressed that should bilateral talks occur, Lee has confidence that the Obama Administration would be completely transparent in sharing information and in shaping any policy response in conjunction with its close ally in Seoul. South Korea, in other words, won't object strenuously to direct talks should they come...