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N. Korea the focus at Jiang, Bush summit
CNN White House Correspondent Kelly Wallace
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush hosts China's President Jiang Zemin at his Crawford, Texas ranch Friday for a casual get-together that is expected to focus on ways to convince North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, senior administration officials said. "One of the most important topics they will discuss is what to do about the situation in North Korea," Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary, told reporters on Thursday. "China has no interest in seeing a nuclearized Korean Peninsula." Bush and Jiang, in their third face-to-face meeting, will talk about ways to put pressure on the isolated regime, after Pyongyang admitted in early October that it has an active nuclear weapons program. China is one of North Korea's largest trading partners. Any decision by Beijing to scale back any trade with Pyongyang could significantly affect the country's already collapsed economy. "We need to see what common strategies we can employ to try and and get the North Koreans to live up to their international obligations, to recognize that they cannot, on the one hand, say... that they actually want to enter the international community, its economic benefits, its trade benefits, and on the other hand, brandish an illegal nuclear weapons program that is in clear violation of international obligations that they undertook," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice Wednesday. The Chinese president, who had lobbied for a personal invitation to the Bush ranch before he leaves his position next year, arrived in Waco, Texas Thursday evening, along with his wife, Wang Yeping. The two men will meet Friday morning (Saturday morning local time in Asia) for a 90-minute working session, which Rice said would be a "candid and constructive" discussion on other issues besides North Korea, such as the war on terrorism, trade, human rights, religious freedoms and Iraq. China, one of the five veto-bearing members of the United Nations Security Council, has not indicated whether it will support a U.S.-draft resolution, calling for Iraq to face "serious consequences" if it does not comply with a tough new U.N. weapons inspections regime. Ranch tourBush is expected to give the Chinese president a tour of his ranch in his pick-up truck, and then he and Mrs. Bush will host a lunch for President Jiang and Mrs. Wang. Saturday, Bush travels to Las Cabos, Mexico, to meet with other world leaders attending the Asian-Pacific Economic Summit. There, the president will meet with Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koyizumi and South Korea's President Kim Dae-jung, North Korea's neighbors, to discuss other ways to try and constrain Pyongyang. The administration has been facing questions about why it believes diplomatic pressure may work to deal with North Korea's nuclear program, but won't work to convince the Iraqi leader not to pursue weapons of mass destruction. Rice said that Iraq's history of invading its neighbors and using weapons of mass destruction on its own people makes the threat of military force against Iraq necessary, while North Korea's interest in improving its economy means diplomatic efforts are more likely to succeed. "We've always said that we were not going to have a cookie-cutter approach to our foreign policy problems," Rice said. "And North Korea provides opportunities, we believe, for a -- potentially a diplomatic solution because of the stake of the regional powers in a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, because of North Korea's having to reach out not because of any philanthropic impulses, frankly, but because it is a regime that has deep economic troubles and is trying to deal with those troubles." "We believe we have some leverage and methods in this case that we don't have in the Iraqi case, where for 11 years we have tried everything," Rice said.
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