WASHINGTON -- One legacy that U.S. President Bill Clinton will not rush to claim credit for is a surfeit of Asian candidates for the likely first foreign-policy crisis inherited by the new Bush administration -- Taiwan, Indonesia and India and Pakistan among them. But certainly North Korea is near the top of the list.
Seven months after the North-South summit last June, the promise of a "new" North Korea primed for change appears ambiguous at best. So do the prospects for peace and Korean reconciliation in what remains of the world's most potentially explosive flash points.
As underscored by minimal progress in recent North-South ministerial talks in Pyongyang, North-South relations appear to be settling into an uneasy pattern of what can be charitably termed "creeping reconciliation," with the North playing many of its old games of raising complaints and demands designed to insure a lack of progress while trying to create the impression that the South is to blame. Similarly, the failed "bait and switch" gambit of North Korean paramount leader Kim Jong Il to lure Clinton to Pyongyang with a missile deal that looked more suspect the closer one got to the fine print leaves much uncertainty in U.S.-North Korean relations.