WASHINGTON -- "The sure way to miss success is to miss the opportunity," a wise man once observed. Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura asked U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to visit Japan "at the earliest possible opportunity" during a bilateral security meeting in Washington on Feb. 19. When that visit takes place, Machimura must urge Rice to take the above maxim to heart if the United States, Japan and their regional allies are to be successful in bringing North Korea back to the six-party negotiating table.
Pyongyang's Feb. 10 proclamation that it has manufactured nuclear weapons was an undisguised demand for the U.S. to take the Korean nuclear crisis off the diplomatic back burner. In early January, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, called North Korea the "No. 1" proliferation threat in the world.
Yet, in step with his administration's long-standing hands-off policy toward the Korean Peninsula nuclear standoff, U.S. President George W. Bush only mentioned North Korea in passing in his State of the Union Address, saying that he and allies were working "to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions."