Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Indeed, the former President's trip to Pyongyang evokes the never-ending back-to-the-future quality of dealing with North Korea. "They've repeated the same pattern over the past two decades," says Yun Duk-min of the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul, a Foreign Ministry think tank. Ratchet up the nuclear tensions, declare diplomacy dead, and then hope to win even bigger concessions as talks reconvene later. But since taking office, Obama has proved no slouch at playing the game from the other side. In the wake of the nuclear test this past spring...
...great victory. It will probably say the former President's trip showed that the Dear Leader brought Washington to its knees to beg for the release of the two journalists. In fact, it shows that the diplomatic reset button is about to be hit - yet again - in Pyongyang and in Washington. Clinton almost certainly bore a message that Washington wants to talk again, in some forum. And while the U.S. might not want to "buy the same horse" now, who knows what it might be in the diplomatic market for several months hence? As for Pyongyang, as the former President...
Shortly after former President Bill Clinton finished having dinner with Kim Jong Il on Aug. 4 in Pyongyang, North Korean's state-run news agency issued a release saying that the two men had met and that Clinton had brought a message to the North Korean leader from President Barack Obama...
...with that, the questions about the former President's visit to Pyongyang - and about where relations with Kim's North Korea go from here - begin. As expected once he arrived, Clinton departed North Korea Wednesday morning with the two American TV journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, that he had come to spring from detention there. A senior Administration official revealed on Aug. 4 that the North Koreans had, in effect, directly requested that the former President visit Pyongyang. If Clinton did visit, the North Koreans told their two prisoners, they would be granted "amnesty" and freed. (See pictures...
...release removes one obvious thorn between Washington and Pyongyang, whose relations in the past six months have sunk to a level "that's as bad as I've ever seen them," as Clinton's former ambassador to the U.N., Bill Richardson, said on Tuesday. Now the question of the moment is, Will the former President's visit reverse that deteriorating dynamic? Clinton met with Kim for 3½ hours on Tuesday evening. Even if the former President didn't - as the White House insisted - bring a specific message to Kim from Obama, it's safe to assume...