Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell ended a four-day Asia trip today having made little public progress in his efforts to rally support for U.S. strategy on North Korea and Iraq.
Powell reported that he sowed goodwill and smoothed out some discord in the relationship with the new South Korean president, Roh Moo Hyun. But he failed to win any visible pledges of support in South Korea, China or Japan for Washington's moves toward an invasion of Iraq or its hard line against North Korea's nuclear program.
Am I the only one that notes something of an irony here? In the case of Iraq, critics claim that the U.S. is being unilateral yet when the U.S. calls for a multilateral solution to the North Korean nuclear issue, no one seems interested and everyone insists instead that the problem should be resolved by the U.S. and North Korea alone. Of course part of the reason for China and the ROK to be reluctant to engage in multilateral diplomacy is their sense that the American mind is already made up and that the pursuit of multilateral solutions is merely window dressing for predetermined American policies.
