Mr Colin Powell travels to Japan, China and South Korea this weekend, following further escalations in the crisis over North Korea. Alarmist warnings by the communist state that nuclear war could break out at any time on the divided peninsula coincided with the intrusion of a North Korean ighter plane into South Korean airspace.
Mr Powell will have a difficult task convincing his hosts the best way to tackle the problem is by a multilateral deterrence policy rather than the bilateral talks favoured by China and South Korea.
Hovering over this issue is the larger one of Iraq, which the US is tackling by very different means. Many have asked why North Korea is not attracting the same US attention as Iraq. On the face of it the reactivation of North Korea's nuclear weapons programme, and now the threat to withdraw from the 1953 agreement which brought the Korean war to an end if the US imposes economic sanctions, are more immediately dangerous and threatening than that in Iraq. Observers are convinced these gestures are part of North Korea's attempts to force the US into bilateral talks in which it can extract concessions when Washington's attention is so concentrated on Iraq.
President Bush's decision to include North Korea in his "axis of evil" ensures that state will continue to attract US attention. It deserves to do so, since this is the world's most heavily militarised frontier. Hundreds of thousands of troops and huge concentrations of tanks and artillery face each other in the border region. An accidental war could break out if either side misreads the other's intentions.
Given the dire economic and humanitarian conditions in the North, that could trigger political disintegration which would have disastrous consequences for both peoples.
Mr Powell is to attend the inauguration ceremony of President Roh Moo-byun, who was elected last year on a platform criticising US policy for being too aggressive towards the North. He would prefer a policy of gradually opening up relations, avoiding conflict and allowing for a demilitarisation of the border zones, including the departure of US troops stationed there.
Such progress was stopped in its tracks when the crisis developed last year as a result of the change in the US approach. Mr Bush has since offered to talk to North Korea about energy and food aid, but only if he gets multilateral co-operation from China. Mr Powell now needs more support for this approach.