Word: pyongyang
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...very same day President Barack Obama was giving a utopian speech in Prague about his vision for a nuclear-free world - even the President's engagement-oriented advisers on East Asia were furious. They happily went to the U.N. to press for even tighter sanctions against Pyongyang, got them, and then sat back and waited to see if the North's tone would change. (See rare pictures from inside North Korea...
...regime did begin to soften, beginning with former President Bill Clinton's trip to Pyongyang in August to bring back two hapless American correspondents detained for entering North Korea illegally. Obama responded by sending his special envoy, Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, to Pyongyang in December bearing a private letter from the U.S. President to Kim Jong Il. In it, Obama offered the North a new era of relations with the U.S. if it first agreed to return to the six-party talks and agree (for the third time since 2005, and the fourth time since 1994) to dismantle its nuclear-weapons...
...Given the North's long-established record of following periods of belligerence with a willingness to talk, Pyongyang's current sound track has been greeted warily in Seoul and Washington. Intense wariness is now deeply ingrained in the diplomats now dealing with the regime. Several senior South Korean officials tell TIME that, at best, they are now, as one put it, "skeptically optimistic, if that makes any sense...
...North, as one adviser to President Lee Myung Bak put it recently. One senior diplomat adds that his "gut instinct" is that the North will in fact return relatively soon to the nuclear bargaining table. But even if that happens, Seoul concurs with Bosworth's assessment, on returning from Pyongyang last month, that the sequencing of reciprocal steps by the two sides is likely to prove nettlesome when talks resume...
...Pyongyang's Jan. 11 statement seeking a peace treaty only reinforced the impression that the North may want to put the cart before the horse. U.S. officials, sources tell TIME, have tried to communicate to Pyongyang via its key ally, China, that it's nukes first, then everything else (economic and energy aid, negotiations toward a peace treaty, formal diplomatic ties...