The United States has rejected a call by the new South Korean government for a "bold" initiative to engage North Korea, on a par with former president Richard Nixon's epochal 1970s overtures to communist China.
South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan offered the suggestion before talks with Secretary of State Colin Powell on the simmering crisis touched off by the Stalinist state's drive for nuclear weapons.
But Mr Powell said yesterday that the Bush administration had already shelved what it described as a "bold" approach of measures to engage North Korea, until Pyongyang agrees to stand down its drive for nuclear weapons.
Mr Yoon said he detected signs of future flexibility in the US approach to North Korea but that what was needed was a diplomatic coup comparable to the US opening of Mao Zedong's China.
"In the early 1970s, the Nixon government took a bold diplomatic initiative with China," Yoon said in a speech hosted by the School of Advanced International Studies.
"The same approach could be applied to North Korea."
Later, Mr Powell said that Mr Yoon had presented him with an "interesting" "roadmap" for engaging Pyongyang - but said bold US steps would have to wait until after the nuclear crisis.
"Those kinds of ideas and options and the kind of ideas and options the minister mentioned in his speech this morning are on the table it seems to me, once we deal with the issue of nuclear proliferation , proliferation of weapons and some of the other activities that are ongoing with in North Korea," he said.
AFP