(AP) Obama: N. Korean rocket test would isolate regime
By BEN FELLER
AP White House Correspondent
SEOUL, South Korea
Warning North Korea from its doorstep, President Barack Obama said Pyongyang risks deepening its isolation in the international community if it proceeds with a planned long-range rocket launch.
Obama spoke fresh off his first visit to the tense Demilitarized Zone, the heavily patrolled no-man’s land between North and South Korea, where he peered long and hard at the isolated North.
Obama looked noticeably fatigued after essentially one long day that involved a 17-hour flight from Washington, a helicopter ride to the border zone, two sets of diplomatic talks, the news conference and an official dinner.
From the DMZ, Obama returned to Seoul for a private meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and a joint news conference. Both leaders warned there would be consequences if North Korea proceeds with its plans to launch a satellite using a long-range rocket next month, a move the U.S. and other powers say would violate a U.N. ban on nuclear and missile activity because the same technology could be used for long-range missiles.
Obama said the launch would jeopardize a deal for the U.S. to resume stalled food aid to North Korea and may result in the tightening of harsh economic sanctions on the already-impoverished nation.
The planned launch is yet another setback for the U.S. in years of on-again, off-again attempts to launch real negotiations. The announcement also played into Republican criticism that Obama had been too quick to jump at a new chance for talks with the North Koreans.
North Korea walked away from international disarmament talks in 2009. Years of fitful negotiations had succeeded in ending part of North Korea’s nuclear program but failed in stopping it from building and testing nuclear devices and long-range missiles that might be able to carry bombs.
The United States is a party to the stalled talks, along with China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The negotiations were aimed at offering North Korea economic and diplomatic incentives to give up threatening elements of its nuclear program.
China has the greatest leverage in the talks as North Korea’s only ally and benefactor
Obama was blunt Sunday in assessing China’s success so far in promoting better behavior from North Korea, saying its approach over the past decades has failed to alter the North’s behavior. Obama said he planned to raise the issue during a meeting Monday with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
China maintains that it must move slowly in influencing North Korea, and says its political influence is limited.
Obama said he is sympathetic to China’s main argument for going slow: The potential of political chaos and a refugee crisis on its border with North Korea if the Pyongyang regime collapses. But he held out China as an example of economic success, an achievement, Obama said, that it reached by “abandoning some of the practices that North Korea still clings to.”
Obama’s trip comes as North Koreans mark the end of the 100-day mourning period for longtime leader Kim Jong Il, who died of a heart attack in December. Since Kim’s death, son Kim Jong Un has been paying a series of high-profile visits to military units and made his own trip to the “peace village” of Panmunjom inside the DMZ earlier this month.
Obama said he had not yet been able to make a full assessment of the North’s new leader, saying the political situation there appeared to be “unsettled.”
Lee, too, said it was “premature” to assess the North’s new leader. He said that while he had some expectations that the young Kim might take a different approach than his father, he found news of the rocket launch to be a “disappointment.”
Obama opened his trip to South Korea with a visit to the border separating the Korean peninsula. The zone is a Cold War anachronism, a legacy of the uncertain armistice that ended the Korean War nearly 60 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of troops stand ready on both sides of the border zone, which is littered with land mines and encased in razor wire.
Obama shook hands and spoke briefly in the dining hall at a U.S. military camp just outside the 2.5-mile-zone, saying the troops were working at “freedom’s frontier.”
The United States has more than 28,000 troops in South Korea.
Obama and other world leaders were gathering in Seoul this week for meetings aimed at securing nuclear material and preventing it from being smuggled to states or groups intent on mass destruction. Progress has been uneven since 2010, when Obama set an ambitious goal of locking down vulnerable nuclear materials by 2014. No breakthroughs are expected now.
Obama has called nuclear terrorism the gravest threat the United States and the world may face. North Korea is a prime suspect in the proliferation of some nuclear know-how, along with missiles that could be used to deliver weapons of mass destruction. Iran is suspected in the arming of terrorists with non-nuclear weaponry, and the U.S. and other nations suspect Iran’s nuclear energy program could be converted to build a bomb.
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AP National Security writer Anne Gearan and AP writers Jean H. Lee and Hyung-jin Kim contributed to this report.
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