Visiting Korea Base, Rice Sends Forceful Reminder to the North

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March 20, 2005
Visiting Korea Base, Rice Sends Forceful Reminder to the North
By JOEL BRINKLEY

OMMAND POST TANGO, South Korea, Sunday, March 20 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stepped off her airplane in Seoul on Saturday evening, boarded an Army Black Hawk helicopter and immediately flew to this underground command bunker from which military commanders would direct any war against North Korea.

"I wanted to come here to thank you for what you do on the front lines of freedom," she told more than 100 service members in the war room, carved deep inside a mountain south of Seoul. "I know you face a close-in threat every day."

The visit, a pointed reminder of American military capacity on the peninsula, came just hours after a speech in Tokyo in which Ms. Rice repeated that the United States had no intention of attacking North Korea. But Ms. Rice's aides are also making it plain that the administration has run out of patience with North Korea's continued refusal to rejoin nuclear disarmament talks.

A senior official traveling with Ms. Rice said she was trying to send a clear message that it was time to bring talks over the North's nuclear weapons program "to a satisfactory conclusion."

Ms. Rice's action was a departure from diplomatic protocol on several levels. It is highly unusual for a secretary of state's first destination in a country to be a military site instead of a diplomatic event, especially an American installation instead of a South Korean one.

Past presidents and secretaries of state and defense have traveled to frontline defenses against North Korea, but not to any underground bunker. And they have usually been careful not to come across as bellicose, accompanying their moves with conciliatory language, in part not to alarm South Koreans.

In contrast, almost everything about Ms. Rice's tour was direct. As she spoke in the bunker, its huge monitor screens and banks of computers were acting as the nerve center for annual war games being conducted by 20,000 American and South Korean troops.

While her first move on Korean soil was aimed directly at North Korea, the major push of her visit is to persuade China to "squeeze the North," as one aide said. China is North Korea's only ally, and Ms. Rice arrives there on Sunday. The United States and other parties to the disarmament talks say they are concerned that China is holding back, declining to pressure North Korea as effectively as it could.

"I hope China can play an even more important role," Nobutaka Machimura, the Japanese foreign minister, said during a joint appearance with Ms. Rice in Tokyo earlier Saturday.

On Friday, Ms. Rice said, "Well, I assume that because China says it wants a nonnuclear Korean peninsula" that "they are trying to be effective in their diplomacy." But she added that she would urge the Chinese to do more "when I get to Beijing."

In her Tokyo speech, which aides described as a major policy address, Ms. Rice pushed China to change its form of government, saying, "Even China must eventually embrace some form of open, genuinely representative government."

While in Beijing, her aides said, she intends to attend Palm Sunday services at a Protestant church - a potentially provocative act in a nation without freedom of religion.

Still, aides say North Korea will be the most important subject of discussions in Beijing with Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao on Sunday - before the services at Gangwashi Protestant Church.

As talks with North Korea have stalled, the Bush administration has grown frustrated over the suggestion of Chinese and South Korean partners in the talks that more incentives should be offered to get the North back to negotiations. China and South Korea want economic benefits granted to North Korea in the early part of a phased shutdown of its nuclear arms programs, and the United States favors such benefits offered only at the end of such a process.

The last session of the regional talks with North Korea was last summer, and the United States is not considered likely to wait past this summer before considering other options, like going to the United Nations Security Council for a resolution.

Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other hard-line conservatives in the Bush administration are said to be growing impatient with the North Korea situation. Internally, they are known to have opposed negotiations themselves as an unwise diversion while North Korea builds a nuclear arsenal.

Some conservatives in Congress, increasingly alarmed at the number of refugees flooding into China and elsewhere, are pressing the administration to mount an attempt to subvert the government of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il. Ms. Rice's action may have been a gesture to these conservatives as well.

Ms. Rice's visits to Japan and South Korea have been calibrated to prepare her way to Beijing, enlisting those nations' help in persuading China to try harder.

"China is the largest provider of many of North Korea's requirements," a senior official said.

But South Korea is providing goods and services to the North as well. Recently it agreed to provide a large quantity of fertilizer at the North's request, an idea that the Bush administration objected to in private. But Washington is not making a public case against the South.

Asked about that on Saturday, Ms. Rice said, "We have not told the South Koreans what they should or should not do with the North Koreans, but we are urging everyone to use whatever leverage they can to bring the North Koreans back to the table."

Last month, North Korea said it possessed nuclear weapons and had no intention of rejoining the talks with the United States, Japan, South Korea, Russia and China that it had walked out of in June. Ms. Rice and others insist that their present impatience with the North Koreans - and their demand that they return to the disarmament talks right now - should not be taken as an ultimatum, partly because they are not yet sure what they can do if the North continues to refuse.

A Japanese official said the next step would be to ask the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on North Korea, but added that the six-party talks must be pushed until even China believes that they are fruitless. That way, China would be less likely to veto a sanctions resolution.

Ms. Rice, answering a question after her speech in Tokyo on Saturday morning, said the penalty North Korea would pay by not returning to the talks would be continued isolation from most of the world. But an aide said he doubted the North would care. After all, he added with a shrug, "This is a government that's willing to starve its own people."


Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington for this article. New York Times