Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
Bill Clinton's mission to rescue the two journalists held captive by Pyongyang 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...
...long-range missile development program that continues despite a U.N. resolution calling for its end. The North, moreover, has already attached an important condition to its re-engagement: last week, its diplomats told New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under Bill Clinton, that Pyongyang would return to the negotiating table only if it could deal directly with the U.S. and not the other countries involved in the six-party talks...
...North, in other words, has now successfully placed the onus on Washington's shoulders. How will the U.S. respond? It's no secret that the Obama Administration came into office inclined to deal directly with Pyongyang. But the North's serial hostility in the 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...
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...