Word: pyongyang
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Since joining multilateral talks over Iran and North Korea, the U.S. has failed to persuade Russia and China, who wield veto power in the U.N. Security Council, to agree to specific sanctions against either Tehran or Pyongyang. The gap between the U.S.'s priorities and the rest of the world's stretches beyond those two challenges. The war on terrorism has provided a neat ideological framework for U.S foreign policy in the Bush years, but it has distracted the attention of the U.S. from developments in other areas--Asia, Russia and its former satellites, and Latin America--where new international...
...overwhelmingly opposes the use of force against the North. Despite the fact that the government of South Korea has little to show for it, polls there suggest people still support the "sunshine" policy, in place since 1998, which amounts to an all-carrots, no-sticks approach to relations with Pyongyang...
...post-9/11 Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), in which the U.S. and its allies concentrate on intercepting weapons of mass destruction, has made Pyongyang a key target because of the government's past sales of missiles to Pakistan and Iran. The big fear is that North Korea could be tempted to sell nuclear material to al-Qaeda, which would have no reluctance about using it. Former Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gallucci says Pyongyang "might figure that selling fissile material to a terrorist group would be relatively safe and profitable...
...international banking system. For the past year, the Treasury Department has put intense pressure on international banks doing business with North Korea. Last year it helped shut down dozens of accounts at the Macao-based Banco Delta Asia, which was suspected of counterfeiting and laundering money for Pyongyang. Some diplomats in Beijing, in fact, suspect that the financial pressure the U.S. has been applying was the main reason for Pyongyang's defiant missile launch...
...President has always equated Kim's nuclear saber rattling with blackmail, and a face-to-face engagement would seem tantamount to caving in. But when Bush entered the Oval Office, North Korea had two nuclear warheads; now the CIA estimates that Pyongyang has enough plutonium to make as many as eight and is hard at work on the technology that would deliver them to American shores. North Korea is slowly but surely building its nuclear capability, making the world steadily less safe, and it's not clear what anyone can do about it without trying something entirely different...