In congressional testimony in February, the American Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, spoke reassuringly of the inevitability of direct talks with North Korea. That same month, while visiting Seoul to attend South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun’s inauguration, Armitage’s boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell, held out the olive branch of some forty thousand tons of food aid.
Offsetting these reassuring gestures have been a series of recent press reports that hawkish senior White House officials are opposed to bilateral engagement with the North, and may be winning President George Bush’s support for a much more explicitly confrontational posture.