Diplomacy yielding results for the US

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's new emphasis on old-fashioned diplomacy appears to be bearing fruit.

On Monday, North Korea's vice foreign minister, Kim Gye Gwan , will meet in New York for unprecedented talks with US officials on normalizing relations, after North Korea pledged to dismantle its nuclear program in exchange for $400 million in fuel oil and other aid. The breakthrough was reached Feb. 13 after the Bush administration eased its opposition to one-on-one talks with North Korea and after China pressured the regime to accept a deal.

US officials also say they are seeing some success on Iran after months of diplomatic haggling with allies at the United Nations that led the world body to impose sanctions over the country's nuclear program in December.

Working with allies meant diluting the resolution considerably to accommodate the demands of other key countries. At first, some US officials worried that the resolution would be too weak to have a significant impact.

But the unanimity of resolution, which prevents the sale of weapons-related equipment to Iran, has prompted Iranians to begin to debate the value of proceeding with a nuclear program, State Department officials said. It also had helped feed rising opposition inside the country to Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"The fact that the resolution passed the way it did was a very serious wake-up call for the Iranian regime," said a State Department official who closely follows the issue. He asked not to be identified because he has not been authorized to speak on the record. "Wiser heads in Iran clearly understood that Ahmadinejad had been completely wrong in his predictions that it would not pass."

Specialists on international relations, as well as current and former US officials, describe the developments as small victories in the decades-long diplomatic battle to prevent Iran and North Korea from building nuclear arsenals. Many credit a new spirit of compromise and greater US openness to work with both allies and adversaries. For years, senior US officials equated offering aid in exchange for disarmament as tantamount to extortion.

"This is the lesson that every leader learns, " said Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. "It takes longer and you are going to have to compromise, but if you are going to get something that is going to be effective and stick, you are going to have to work with others."

Barbara Bodine, a former senior adviser in the State Department's Bureau of Political Military Affairs who left the Bush administration in 2004, called the new attitude a "tactical change" from the early days of the administration. At that time, she said, senior advisers argued that the United States should not shy away from using unilateral military force even if its allies did not support it.

"There was this belief that we knew better in terms of what needed to be done and how it should be done, and that somehow working with others was a moral compromise," said Bodine, now a visiting scholar at the MIT Center for International Studies. "There was a sense of not political righteousness, but moral righteousness, and that if somehow people didn't go along with us, they were hostile. It was 'You are with us or against us.' "

Several former US officials and analysts said the overwhelming difficulties of the war in Iraq had forced the US government to gradually embrace a more flexible approach on North Korea and Iran. Others said the departures of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and UN Ambassador John Bolton contributed to a change in attitude.

Bolton and Rumsfeld believed that giving North Korea aid in exchange for ending its nuclear program was tantamount to appeasement and surrender to blackmail. Both men also were deeply skeptical about efforts by France, Germany, and Britain to offer similar economic incentives to Iran in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program.

Despite their opposition, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threw US support behind the European offer to Iran in March 2005. When Iran refused the offer, the Europeans cooperated with the US push in the Security Council to impose sanctions. Rice also agreed in principle to a plan to give aid to North Korea in exchange for disarmament in September 2005.

Bolton and Rumsfeld continued to oppose those deals. They left the administration late last year.

"You have the departure of Rumsfeld and the replacement by [Robert] Gates, and suddenly things start happening," Slaughter said. "It's not so much a change of direction as the removal of the obstacles."

Michael Green , who served as senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council from January 2004 to December 2005, said the administration had been migrating toward giving its envoys greater freedom to negotiate a North Korea deal, but that Rumsfeld's departure "made a big difference."

Green said President Bush did not share Rumsfeld's and Bolton's philosophical opposition to reaching out to the North Korean regime. For instance, Bush publicly supported the construction of a railroad from South Korea to North Korea, which the two countries agreed to build as part of a larger plan to bring the North peacefully out of its isolation. Rumsfeld opposed it.

"For some in the administration, like John Bolton, there is an allergy to talking to communists and mullahs, but that was never where the president was," Green said.

It remains to be seen whether the Bush administration and its allies will see a similar breakthrough on Iran, which rejected the incentives offer, or how far senior officials will go to support their diplomatic efforts.

This week, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack did not rule out the possibility of a face-to-face meeting between senior US officials and their Iranian counterparts at a meeting of Iraq's neighbors this month.

Not everyone is thrilled with the willingness of the United States and its allies to offer incentives to what the United States has called rogue governments.

Nile Gardiner , a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, said the European efforts to negotiate with Iran had wasted valuable time in efforts to roll back Iran's nuclear capabilities.

"It's a European policy of appeasement," he said. "Appeasement never works."