South Korea's Lee to get warm welcome in Washington
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - South Korean President Lee Myung-bak will get a warm welcome on Friday when he sees President George W. Bush, who embraces the new, conservative president's tough stand toward North Korea.
Lee, a former construction boss and mayor of Seoul who was sworn in on February 25, is the first South Korean president to be invited to Camp David, the U.S. presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains.
While there are many issues on the table, including a dispute over U.S. beef exports and the fate of a bilateral free trade pact, the key topic is the multilateral effort to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
U.S. officials have made clear the U.S. president is more at ease with Lee's harder line toward the poor, communist nation than he was with the relatively accommodating policies pursued by his two immediate predecessors.
Lee has said he will tie economic cooperation with the North to progress on denuclearization. Since his inauguration, the North has responded with a torrent of invective, including threats to reduce the South to ashes.
While acknowledging that Kim's stance has had a "short term cost," a senior Bush administration official said that "in the long run, this is clearly a far more reasonable policy."
"One of the problems that the South ran into was that there were no consequences for bad behavior on the part of the North in the South's old policy," said the official, who spoke on condition that he not be named.
"The president will find himself more comfortable with this (new) policy of the South because the South is saying there are consequences and you North Koreans need to understand that," he added. "If you are willing to move ahead with denuclearization ... there will be positive benefits to this and if you are not, it'll make it harder to take advantage of the benefits."
The multilateral effort to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions is at a delicate stage as the United States seeks to coax a long-over due declaration of Pyongyang's nuclear programs from its secretive leaders.
If it makes the declaration, the United States is expected to respond by easing two of the many sets of sanctions on North Korea -- those flowing from its presence on the U.S. state sponsors list and from the U.S. Trading With the Enemy Act.
The administration then hopes to make progress toward getting North Korea to dismantle its nuclear facilities and toward abandoning all nuclear weapons and programs before Bush leaves office in January.
By all accounts, Bush -- who has never met Lee -- is more in sync with his views on North Korea than he was with the two previous South Korean presidents, Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung.
Kim, a proponent of the "sunshine" policy of engagement with the North, had a disastrous initial meeting with Bush in 2001 when he pushed the new U.S. president to continue former President Bill Clinton's talks with North Korea.
Roh was viewed with some skepticism in Washington, both because he rode to power on a wave of anti-Americanism and because he continued Kim's policy of engaging the North.
"Especially in comparison with visits by President Roh, the United States is very enthusiastic about Lee Myung-bak," said Heritage Foundation South Korea expert Bruce Klingner.
"They welcome his emphasis on repairing the strained relations," he added. "There is clearly a difference in tone from a president that says the U.S.-ROK (Republic of Korea) alliance is the bedrock of South Korea's security and from a president who said what's wrong with being anti-American."
(Editing by Philip Barbara)
