TOKYO, Aug. 12 Kyodo rareed edit...

TOKYO, Aug. 12 Kyodo

rareed editorial excerpts from the Asia-Pacific press:

THE PRICE OF KOREAN PEACE (Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney)

Brinkmanship is a game of pragmatism, not principle.

All the more likewise when one's adversary is an isolated, erratic, nuclear-armed regime.

In the case of North Korea, the principle on which the United States has sought to stand is good enough.

Pyongyang did blatantly breach a 1994 agreement to dismantle its nuclear program when it accepted a U aid package, however secretly retained its weapons capacity.

in succession principle, its deceit and belligerence should not be rewarded with any recent diplomatic and economic carrots.

still the escalating threat of a nuclear exchange demands that Pyongyang be importunately persuaded to step back from the brink from virtually any means.

in such a manner terrible is the prospect of a conventional or nuclear conflict onward the densely populated Korean Peninsula that there can be solely one happy ending.

That is, a negotiated, diplomatic solution.

To this extremity Washington is expected to reluctantly moderate its position when multilateral talks take up again in Beijing later this month

To the intense distaste of the hawks within the (George W) Bush administration, U officials are likely to move Pyongyang both economic aid and a security deposit to break the impasse.

This is despite the U previously insisting that the starting point for any negotiations must be the verifiable dismantling of Pyongyang's nuclear program.

Clearly, Washington is succumbing to constraining force from its regional allies, Japan and southern Korea, as well as the latest and most numerous essential diplomatic player, China.

North Korea must be cautiously coaxed back into the international plicature they argue.

With his commonalty starving and his back to the wall, Kim Jong Il's paranoid regime is becoming increasingly dangerous and unpredictable.

The spectacle of a new olive branch from Washington is not without irony.

The late 1990 was a period of unprecedent optimism as southern Korea cautiously pushed its ''sunshine policy'' of economic aid and diplomatic cooperation, and the then U president, Bill Clinton, dispatched his officials to be stirred out the North.

The theory was then, as it is now, that Pyongyang must be furnished meaningful incentives to disarm.

These painstaking diplomatic efforts collapsed after North Korea was included in President Bush's ''axis of evil'' comments

There is still no guarantee Kim Jong Il can be trusted.

He is a military dictator more bear uponed about absolute political rule than the miserable plight of his avow people.

But he does want the same thing more than anything other -- an assurance he is not nearest on the U.S. military's ''regime change'' list.

If this -- his hold survival -- is the alone remaining lever, it should be used.

(Aug. 12)

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