Clinton, heading abroad, takes softer tone on N. Korea
ELMENDORF AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, en route to Asia on her inaugural foreign trip, struck a conciliatory tone toward North Korea on Sunday, saying the United States would have a "great openness" to the country if it gave up its nuclear ambitions.
"Our position is when they move forward in presenting a verifiable and complete dismantling and denuclearization, we have a great openness to working with them," Clinton said on her plane heading to Tokyo, the first stop on a tour of Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China.
"It's not only on the diplomatic front," she said, adding that the United States had a "willingness to help the people of North Korea, not just in narrow ways with food and fuel but with energy assistance."
Clinton's words did not represent a shift in United States policy, which is to offer the North Korean government economic aid and other incentives for abandoning its nuclear weapons program. But her tone was notably softer than previous pronouncements by American officials.
At the same time, she said the North Korean government needed to be more forthcoming about "the human tragedy" of Japanese citizens who had been abducted by the North in the 1970s and 1980s.
As Clinton departed Washington, North Korea was casting a shadow over a voyage that sought to build solidarity between the United States and Asia on issues like the global economic crisis and climate change.
North Korea has engaged in bellicose talk toward the South, and there were reports on Sunday that the North was preparing to test a long-range missile.
Clinton played down suspicions, long held by some in the Bush administration, that North Korea has a clandestine program to produce highly enriched uranium. What is not in dispute, she said, is that North Korea has plutonium, which it is using to manufacture nuclear weapons.
In China, Clinton said, she would pursue a partnership on climate change. She suggested, though, that she did not intend to press Beijing to accept mandatory caps on carbon emissions, as President Barack Obama supports.
She also praised the Chinese government for adopting a "robust" economic stimulus program. While she said she would raise human-rights concerns in Beijing, she does not plan to do so prominently.
Clinton also said she would meet with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, in two weeks for what she said she hoped would be a "positive start." She said the administration had made no decisions on whether to scale back a missile defense system in Eastern Europe that has caused tension between Moscow and Washington.
Clinton's choice of Japan for her first stop is heavily symbolic and meant to reassure the Japanese that they remain America's central allies in Asia. Japan looms large in efforts to recover from the global economic crisis and has pledged up to $100 billion in aid to the International Monetary Fund to help countries facing credit shortages because of the crisis.