Don't misunderstand, said Paik Hak-soon, director of North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute. "If Obama seriously engages North Korea, with enough incentives, there's a chance we can denuclearize North Korea."
Paik says that the Bush administration, in its final months, hardened its position. "Bush policymakers tried to warn the Obama administration," he says. "They were trying to project North Korea's image as a bad guy."
Particularly upsetting, he said, was a comment by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that, "You'd have to be an idiot to trust the North Koreans."
Harrison, arriving in Beijing after talks with senior North Korean foreign ministry officials, told reporters the North "wants friendly relations with the United States." North Korea and the U.S. "can become intimate friends," he said.
But North Korea made clear it would not yield to U.S. demands for "verification" of its nuclear inventory. It called for for "denuclearization of the whole Korean Peninsula" in "a verifiable manner," a phrase that means the onus is on the U.S. and South Korea to prove the U.S. has really withdrawn all its nuclear weapons from South Korea as announced by then-President George H.W. Bush in 1991.
North Korea has a powerful advocate of its position in prominent liberal, Kim Dae-Jung, who was president of South Korea from 1998 to 2003 and initiated the Sunshine policy of reconciliation which helped earn him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Kim, in a message for Obama, delivered in remarks to foreign journalists here, called on the U.S. to "secure North Korea's agreement on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, including the complete abandonment of its nuclear program, abandonment of long-range missiles, and establishment of a durable peace structure on the Korean peninsula."
The way to achieve that aim, said Kim, is "through a declaration of the end of the Korean War" and a peace treaty to replace the Korean War armistice signed in July 1953 – a favorite longstanding North Korean demand.
It was "an indisputable fact," Kim went on, that Kim Jong-Il "aspires to improve North Korea's relationship with the United States." He implied that the U.S. had taken too tough a stance in talks, saying, "If the U.S. conducts give-and-take negotiations and builds mutual trust, the North Korean nuclear issue and related matters would be brought to a successful end."
As it gears up for the Obama administration, North Korea has also launched virulent attacks on the South's president, Lee Myung-bak, who has upset the North by taking a hard line on verification and also on the North's record of human rights abuses.
Accusing "traitor Lee Myung-Bak and his group" of "confrontation," a North Korean officer declared on state TV that "our revolutionary armed forces are compelled to take an all-out confrontational posture to shatter them." North Korea vowed to "preserve" its rights in the Yellow Sea, the scene of bloody clashes in 1999 and 2002 over a "northern limit line" that North Korea refuses to recognize.
South Korea has responded by placing troops on alert on its side of the demilitarized zone that has divided the two Koreas since the Korean war, but analysts do not believe a major clash is imminent.
"North Korea wants to say, if Obama is not handling North Korea too actively, North Korea will create a problem on the Korean Peninsula," says Choi Jin-wook, chief North Korea analyst at the Korean Institute of National Unification. "This is just verbal provocation. It shows the intention of North Korea to talk to the U.S."
