北韓已經成為布希最頭痛的問題之一，更嚴重的是，對美國而言，此問題可能沒有好的選擇，而且很可能在他下任前仍無法解決，成為布希任內遺留下的問題。北韓雖然一直是歷任總統的困擾，但是，對布希來說，在他任內花了六年以外交手段企圖說服北韓放棄核武，但，事情顯然愈來愈糟。
U.S. weighs its options, none good
By David E. Sanger The New York Times
Published: July 5, 2006
After a barrage of missile shots launched by North Korea, President George W. Bush and his national security advisers found themselves on Wednesday facing what one close aide described as "our familiar bad choices."
Bush could seek anew to enlist China to moderate the North’s behavior, but that is a tactic that has failed before.
He could drop his objections to direct, one-on-one talks with the North, a government he once said he "detests."
Or he could risk an escalation of a half-century-old confrontation that is now made more complicated by the widespread assumption that the North, despite its poverty and isolation, has successfully built a small but potent nuclear arsenal.
Already over the last six years, the Bush administration has tried at various times to ignore North Korea, to engage it and to squeeze its financial lifeline, and none of these have worked to persuade the government of Kim Jong Il to give up its nuclear program.
Now, "we’re at the moment when the president has to decide whether he wants an unconstrained, nuclear North Korea to be part of his legacy," said Jonathan Pollack, a professor of Asian and Pacific studies at the United States Naval War College, who has spent much of his career studying North Korea and its improbable strategies for national survival.
"Until now, the attitude has been: If the North Koreans want to stew in their own juices, let them. But it’s becoming clear that Mr. Bush may leave office with the North Korean problem much worse" than he found it in January 2001.
The North has long had an array of weapons that could destroy Seoul or hit Japan, including American forces based there. The only new element in the dramatic barrage into the Sea of Japan on Tuesday was the launching of its intercontinental-range Taepodong- 2, the missile that, depending on whose numbers one believes, could eventually hit the United States.
So far it has tested the Taepodong twice - the last time was in 1998 - and as Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it bluntly on Wednesday, "both failed dismally."
But what has become far more serious is the North’s ability to produce plutonium fuel, and perhaps - though no one is certain of this - to fabricate that fuel into nuclear bombs.
That prospect was the centerpiece of the last real crisis staged by the North Koreans, in January 2003, as American troops were flowing toward Iraq. It involved throwing out international inspectors and reprocessing the 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that those inspectors kept under seal into bomb- grade material.
At the time, top Pentagon officials briefed Bush on his military options, including bombing the North’s nuclear facilities.
"It didn’t take very long," one official deeply involved in that briefing said, "because it was pretty clear there wasn’t an acceptable military option - or, at least, a risk anyone was willing to take."
Bush had come to office determined that he would not negotiate, either. He often said that he distrusted the North Korean government, and detested how Kim treats its people.
In the first months of his presidency, he refused to endorse South Korea’s "sunshine policy" of luring North Korea out of its shell with economic incentives.
The same year, his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, dismissed as useless the 1994 agreement that President Clinton reached with the North, saying it "was front-loaded: We gave lots to the North Koreans and left the nuclear fuel in the country. Now we are paying the price."
Yet the isolation strategy ultimately failed: North Korea kept producing plutonium. So, in a major reversal, Bush reluctantly agreed to engage with the North Koreans at a distance, through "Six Party Talks" convened by China, and joined by Japan, South Korea and Russia.
Bush was betting that China - the North’s supplier of oil, food and security - would have sway. Time after time, Bush repeated that he and Jiang Zemin, China’s former leader, had agreed that a nuclear North Korea was "unacceptable."
But the reality has since settled in on the administration that China fears a chaotic collapse in North Korea more than it fears a nuclear-armed North.
"The big worry for the Chinese is five million refugees," said David Kang, a professor at Dartmouth and co-author of "Nuclear North Korea," which was published in 2003. "That’s why China always measures its pressure carefully."
Now it is likely to measure that pressure again. In firing the missiles, the North violated no treaties or international bans. It only violated its own commitment to Japan and other nations, and showed, once again, that in the North’s own lingo it will "meet pressure with pressure."
Even while negotiating with the North and reaching an agreement in principle on disarmament last September, the administration has kept up pressure of its own, closing down a bank in Macau that the North used as a main financial conduit for its trade in missiles and other goods.
Kim has complained about that action loudly, and said he would not rejoin the talks while the United States used such tactics.
But Bush is not likely to back down. And administration officials acknowledge that unless the Chinese and South Koreans go along willingly with new sanctions, they are unlikely to change the North’s behavior.
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