Word: pyongyang
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...issue of North Korea gave Bush an early opportunity to show off his foreign-policy mettle and break from his predecessor's strategy. The neocons had long suspected Pyongyang of cheating on a landmark 1994 deal to freeze its nuclear program. Yet Clinton had sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang in October 2000 and considered making his own visit. Vice President Dick Cheney summed up the Bush Administration's more muscular approach: "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat...
...literally true that diplomats in international capitals who have to deal with Pyongyang are those that draw the shortest straw. But it probably should be. No deal with the North is ever set in stone. And so it is again with the agreement Kim Jong Il signed last year to disable his nuclear bomb-making equipment and get rid of the nukes that Pyongyang has already produced - between 6 and 10, according to notoriously inaccurate CIA estimates. The government did disable the Yongbyon reactor, its key source of nuclear fuel, and blew up its cooling tower with the world...
...tantrum comes for two very specific reasons. In return for finally providing what was supposed to be a full accounting of its nuclear facilities and bombs earlier this summer, the Bush administration said it would, among other things, take North Korea off its list of state sponsors of terror. Pyongyang, sources say, was led to believe that the formal delisting would come August 11 - a deadline that has come and gone. U.S. and South Korean officials have said privately that the delay is a result of disagreements over how, exactly, the North's compliance with the nuclear deal...
...part, is doing what the State Department always does: It's working the problem. The Chinese have offered a compromise plan on verification that is now under scrutiny in Washington. Though anti-nuclear deal hawks remain in the Bush administration, and are adamantly opposed to meeting in the middle, Pyongyang has a vote, too, and it votes to stop complying. With his time running out, and his desire for a deal with North Korea obvious, most analysts expect another compromise from President Bush. And then - bet on it - watch Kim Jong Il angle for a better deal with whomever...
...charter members of Bush's "axis of evil" that the Administration had long sought to isolate. In late June, U.S. negotiator Chris Hill agreed to remove North Korea from Washington's list of state sponsors of terrorism in return for an as-yet-unverified declaration of the components of Pyongyang's nuclear program and the disabling of a key reactor. Bush cleared the way for Rice's top diplomat, William Burns, to break with a long-standing policy and meet face to face with the Iranians in Geneva on July 19. Rice says in public that these moves...