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[/align]McCain could be tougher than Bush with N. Korea
By FOSTER KLUG, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 18 minutes ago
[/align][/align]WASHINGTON - President Bush seems certain to leave for his successor one of the most vexing issues of his presidency: how to rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons.
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[/align]But it is Barack Obama, the Democrat, not Bush's fellow Republican, John McCain, who is likely to follow Bush's approach more closely.
Like Bush, Obama has emphasized the need for multinational talks to persuade North Korea to give up its atomic program. McCain, while not suggesting an end to negotiations, has cast doubt on whether they can succeed and could bring a tougher tone to the often deadlocked, acrimonious international disarmament talks.
"More than Obama, McCain would rely on pressure"_ including the application of U.N. resolutions "” "to augment, not replace, diplomacy," said Bruce Klingner, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation who is not affiliated with either campaign. McCain favors engagement over isolation, he said, but sees in the Bush approach "an overeagerness to reach an agreement at all costs."
Much about future U.S. policy on North Korea will depend on whether the six-nation disarmament talks result in the North giving up its nuclear bombs. As the November U.S. presidential election nears, the talks are stalled and on Friday, North Korea accused the U.S. of failing to fulfill its obligations and said it was preparing to restart its nuclear reactor.
Still, the current approach of face-to-face U.S.-North Korean talks within the framework of the international negotiations has led to the North to account for its nuclear activities and destroying its nuclear cooling tower. Because that progress gives the administration leave to keep an intense focus on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the multinational negotiations probably will continue, barring a surprise diversion by the North.
Obama has regularly supported discussions with North Korea. Early in the presidential campaign, Obama said he would be willing to meet, without precondition, with North Korea's leader. His campaign later said such a meeting would come only after diplomatic spadework.
Hazel Smith, a professor at the University of Warwick, in Britain, who spent nearly two years working for the United Nations in North Korea, recently wrote that Obama seems to have fewer problems with adopting a Republican policy. "Ironically, it is Senator McCain who may likely want to repudiate the Bush administration's success in foreign policy," she said.
McCain has questioned North Korea's commitment "to verifiable denuclearization" and aligned himself with conservatives wary of a February 2007 nuclear deal with the North.
He also strongly criticized the Clinton administration's 1994 "Agreed Framework," where the North was to have received two light-water reactors in return for freezing its nuclear facilities. That accord fell apart in 2002, Bush's second year in office, after the United States claimed North Korea had embarked on a secret highly enriched uranium program.
Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown University's school of foreign service, was the lead U.S. negotiator in the 1994 agreement and now is an Obama adviser. He said he worried that McCain's skeptical "instincts" about the North would lead him to reject negotiation for "a much tougher, provocative approach, which I don't think will produce the outcome we want and runs the risk of another military engagement."
Seeking to distance himself from the Clinton administration, Bush took an initial hard-line stance on a country he called, in 2002, part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. After a 2006 North Korean nuclear test, the Bush administration turned to engagement.
Some conservatives who once cheered Bush's position on North Korea say the administration has since been quick to accommodate the North's demands when nuclear talks have become deadlocked. They strongly criticized Bush's decision to begin the process of removing Kim Jong Il's communist-led government from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terror after North Korea handed over its nuclear declaration.
The North has long coveted that, but the administration is refusing to finalize the move until Pyongyang agrees on a method for the West to verify the nuclear declaration.
This is somewhat interesting, I like this article.
This is one thing that appears won't be "4 more years of Bush", actually, there is, Obama is 4 more years of Bush when it comes to North Korea, if this reporter's argument is true.
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McCain would be tougher than Bush on N Korea
Does anyone think we can afford to wait half a century with Iran?
