Word: pyongyang
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...Outside Pyongyang and a few big cities where the élite still live on government rations, the majority of North Koreans in urban centers get almost everything from officially sanctioned markets. "This is exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union in 1989," before it collapsed, says Leonid Petrov, a North Korea expert at the Academy of Korean Studies south of Seoul. "Nobody believes in the old socialist ideology anymore--they believe in money...
...fact that they have made the announcement verbally rather than through the more traditional route of actually testing a bomb leaves room for a measure of skepticism over just how nuclear they are. Still, the move signals the failure of the Bush administration's six-party talks strategy; Pyongyang is now restating its longstanding demand for one-on-one dialog with Washington, and the U.S. will likely find that South Korea, China and Russia all endorse this call for the administration to drop its aversion to talking directly to the regime of Kim Jong-Il. Hardliners in Washington are claiming...
...overtly threatening Kim Jong Il by talking about "regime change" or "regime transformation." That condition may have been satisfied, at least for the moment, by the moderate tone of the State of the Union address. Second, as in the past, China must offer a suitable financial inducement to Pyongyang to come to Beijing...
...never fear to negotiate." In its morbid fear of whatever nuclear arsenal North Korea may possess, the Bush Administration has been overly cautious about negotiating with North Korea, which, not unreasonably, is petrified of U.S. intentions and military strength following the Iraq war. With the greater fear in Pyongyang, the U.S. should refrain from issuing statements that only startle Kim, meanwhile putting aside its reluctance to sit down with the enemy...
...impoverished, paranoid, deeply misguided dictatorship. Interestingly, accepting North Korea as an established nuclear power may not be a bad idea in that it will give the country some self-respect. As for agreement on the tough issue of a nuclear inspection regime, that must await improvement in Washington-Pyongyang relations. But so long as North Korea does not precipitate a crisis by selling or transferring plutonium or nuclear weapons, there will be plenty of time for relationship building. A journey starts with a single step, and if Bush means what he says about settling the nuclear issue through negotiation, Washington...