[EDITORIAL]Rice ends Asia tour

On the final stops in her week-long Asian tour, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice left mixed messages. In Korea, she visited a "bunker" which will become the command center for Korean and U.S. forces in the event of war with North Korea while a joint semi-annual exercise was underway between allied troops, including 17,000 flown here from U.S. bases. In meetings with the media, she dismissed the use of military to resolve the North Korean nuclear arms development problem, although she refused to retract her designation of the North as an "outpost of tyranny."

In Beijing, Rice asked Chinese leaders to use their leverage on North Korea to persuade it to abandon its nuclear program. But the top U.S. diplomat raised objections to Beijing`s threats of attack on Taiwan, now with a new law to justify it, and expressed long-standing concern over Chinese human rights practices. She asked the European Union not to sell sophisticated arms to China that could one day be used against the United States.

In her roundtable with Internet-based journalists in Seoul, Rice set forth democratic values as the goal of U.S. foreign policy. She expressed confidence in the U.S.-South Korea and U.S.-Japan alliances founded in the common dedication to democracy and supported the greater global role of Japan and South Korea, two affluent democracies in Asia.

Rice`s meetings in Seoul with President Roh Moo-hyun, Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon and Unification Minister Chung Dong-young were chiefly concerned with the North Korean question, including the North`s announcement it possesses nuclear weapons and its boycott of the Beijing six-way talks. They were rather eclipsed by her visit to the underground command post "Tango" and her hour-long discussion with Internet journalists, instead of those from major conservative dailies.

U.S. Embassy officials who arranged the roundtable might have thought that the on-line journalists represent Korea`s liberal voice that is generally skeptical about the future of the South Korea-U.S. alliance. That she wanted to speak to the audience which can be reached via the Internet press indicated she had some apprehension about the status of bilateral relations with South Korea despite her expressed confidence in the alliance.

By visiting the important military facility south of Seoul and by opening it to press coverage for the first time since its establishment, Rice and the second Bush administration might have wanted to demonstrate to the world that the two allies here are maintaining a strong deterrence against North Korea and more implicitly that the United States is ever ready to use its military to resolve global troubles, whether in the Middle East or on the Korean Peninsula.

On her first Asian tour since assuming the office, Secretary Rice held out a warmer invitation to Pyongyang to join in the six-way talks by calling it a "sovereign state" and reiterating what it can gain when it makes the "strategic choice" to give up nuclear arms development. But the implied warning to the North of the consequences of continuing to ignore the call was stronger than at any time before. The question is how those in Pyongyang perceived the message.