As U.S. President Bill Clinton was getting ready to head for Asia for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' meeting in Brunei, the White House confirmed that he would not be visiting North Korea on this trip after all, since the recent U.S.-North Korean missile talks in Kuala Lumpur, while "detailed, constructive, and very substantive," still left "significant issues . . . to be explored and resolved." The decision to postpone the trip is the right one, even if it has been made for the wrong reason.
This is not to imply that the U.S. effort to eliminate North Korea's potential missile threat is not important; it is. But there are more significant issues to be resolved before a presidential trip is warranted. An assessment of the impact such a visit would have on North-South reconciliation efforts is also needed. Without greater progress in intra-Korean relations and some genuine reciprocity toward Seoul on the part of Pyongyang, a U.S. presidential visit could easily prove counterproductive to U.S.-South Korean efforts to promote peace on the Korean Peninsula. It could also put undue pressure on Tokyo to rush its own normalization process with Pyongyang. This is why suggestions that Clinton may still try to squeeze a trip in before Jan. 20 are disturbing.
North Korea's international coming out has proceeded at a remarkable pace since the historic June 2000 summit meeting in Pyongyang between South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong Il. Most of the progress, as it should be, has been in North-South relations, including the symbolically significant meeting between both sides' defense ministers in South Korea in September although there has been welcome progress in traditionally tense U.S.-North Korean relations as well.