US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hinted at flexibility in next week's six-country talks with North Korea, saying the negotiations are part of a process and cannot be judged by one session.
"This is going to be a process and so I don't think we ought to try and judge the first step on its own merits but rather look at it as a part of a set of steps that we're going to take towards denuclearization," she said in an interview last night.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
She insisted that UN sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for an October 9th nuclear weapons test will continue to be enforced even if the six-country talks in Beijing show progress.
But Ms Rice indicated flexibility on resolving a dispute over what the United States says is Pyongyang's counterfeiting of US dollars and money laundering, which led to North Korean accounts at the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia being frozen.
"We're not going to allow them to continue to violate our laws, but obviously we'll look at the totality of all of this and see where we are after the next couple of rounds" of talks, Ms Rice said.
North Korea cited the US-led financial crackdown as a reason for boycotting nuclear negotiations for more than a year.
Washington's recent decision to set up a separate US-North Korea working group to address the financial assets issue helped spur Pyongyang's return to the six-party talks, which also include China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.
The planned resumption on Monday of six-country talks in Beijing on Pyongyang's nuclear programs has fanned speculation about a US-North Korea trade-off.
Some critics worry US President George W. Bush is still not prepared to show the flexibility needed to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear arsenal while advocates of a hard line against the North fear that Mr Bush, desperate for a foreign policy success, may give up too much.
There is no expectation of a major breakthrough in which Pyongyang would embrace Washington's demand to completely and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear weapons programs, US officials and experts have said.