WASHINGTON -- In October of 2000, all seemed possible in U.S. relations with North Korea. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made a groundbreaking visit to the North Korean capital to explore a missile deal with Chairman Kim Jong Il. There was even talk of a visit by President Clinton.
Six years later, the memory of Albright and Kim raising glasses to one another seems almost surreal as the two countries barrel toward what may be a serious showdown.
President Bush has labeled as "unacceptable" North Korea's claim that it conducted an underground nuclear weapons test over the weekend. He said the test "constitutes a threat to international peace and security" -- the type of diplomatic wording that often foreshadows decisive action.
In the long and usually frosty history of U.S.-North Korean relations, the current tensions may not be comparable to any period since the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with an armistice. Efforts by North and South Koreans to formally end that conflict with a peace agreement have failed.
The Albright visit clearly was a high point, but nothing came of the possible missile deal and Clinton never did make his proposed end-of-term visit to Pyongyang.
Any hopes for reconciliation with Kim Jong Il's regime under Bush dissipated quickly, highlighted by his inclusion of North Korea in early 2002 in an international "axis of evil," along with Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The sense of unease over the North Korean atomic test, apparently in the northeastern part of the country, evoked memories of the spring of 1994, when Pyongyang systematically curbed U.N. monitoring activities at its main nuclear site.
"We all thought we were going to war," said Lt. Gen. Howell Estes, the senior U.S. Air Force officer in South Korea at the time. He was quoted by Don Oberdorfer, a veteran Korea watcher in his book, "The Two Koreas." A hastily-arranged, calm-the-waters visit to Pyongyang by former President Carter in June 1994 helped ease tensions.
A breakthrough occurred in October 1994 when U.S. negotiators persuaded North Korea to freeze its nuclear program, with onsite monitoring by U.N. inspectors. In exchange, the United States, with input from South Korea and Japan, promised major steps to ease North Korea's acute energy shortage.
These commitments were inherited by the Bush administration, which made clear almost from the outset that it believed the Clinton policy ignored key elements of North Korea's activities, especially the threat posed by the hundreds of thousands of troops on permanent duty along the Demilitarized Zone with South Korea.
Trust between the two countries, never high to begin with, hit a low point in October 2002 when the State Department charged that North Korea had violated the 1994 agreement by secretly pursuing nuclear weapons through a uranium enrichment program.
In the ensuing months, North Korea defiantly ejected U.N. nuclear monitors, withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and restarted a nuclear reactor that U.S. officials said was designed to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
In the U.S., there was an undercurrent of partisanship over the issue. Democrats blamed administration policies for the increasing tensions in Asia and insisted on direct U.S.-North Korean talks. The administration countered that direct U.S.-North Korean discussions in 1994 under Clinton ended with an agreement that was brazenly flouted by Pyongyang not long after it was signed.
In 2003, the administration began seeking North Korean nuclear disarmament through a six-nation negotiation. In September 2005, the six countries seemed to make substantial progress on a deal for the verifiable dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear program in exchange for steps to ease the country's economic isolation. But Pyongyang has been boycotting the talks since last November, blaming financial sanctions imposed by Washington.
James Lilley, a Reagan era ambassador to China and South Korea, says Bush won't respond to the current crisis the way Clinton did to the one in 1994.
The difference, he said, is that people now aren't thinking of "buying them off, so much as thinking of making them pay a price."
Daniel Poneman, a senior National Security Council official under Clinton, says direct talks without conditions are in order.
"I believe that it's very much in our interest to express our views directly, especially to a regime as isolated as this one," he says.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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