By Hong Soon-il

Moored at a pier of the Taedong River, which flows through the city of Pyongyang like the Han River does through Seoul, is an American naval vessel, the USS Pueblo, a legacy of the Cold War. North Korean patrol boats seized the craft, equipped with sophisticated intelligence-gathering equipment, in January 1968 off Wonsan, a port city on the Korean peninsula’s east coast, while it was on a spy mission. The boat was later brought to Pyongyang and put on public display as a trophy of North Korea’s strenuous struggle against "American imperialists."

The vessel’s seizure touched off a volatile standoff between North Korea and the United States and, for that matter, South Korea as well, because the incident took place two days after a score of North Korean commandos were captured just before they attempted a raid on the presidential mansion in Seoul. In a protracted deal to win the release of the 82 crew members 11 months later, the U.S. negotiator had to sign a statement of apology, admitting the ship had intruded into North Korean territorial waters. Washington, then helplessly drawn into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, was utterly humiliated since it could not afford to engage in another trouble spot in Asia.

The ongoing standoff between the United States and China over an American spy aircraft and its 24 crewmen, stuck in a southern Chinese island following a midair collision with a Chinese fighter jet, looks very similar in nature to the Pueblo episode, as well as the Soviet Union’s downing of a U-2 photo-reconnaissance plane in 1960, which resulted in the jailing of its pilot for nearly two years before he was freed in a swap for a Soviet spy.

However, it seems that the similarities are dwarfed by differences between now and the 1960s when the Cold War was at its height. Despite their bluffs, both Washington and Beijing are apparently seeking to resolve the incident without losing face, but also without ruining their huge and growing economic ties, a kind of glue that did not bind the United States and the Soviet Union, let alone North Korea.

For now, the Chinese, taking advantage of the incident, are obviously trying to test the new U.S. administration over such sensitive issues as an impending U.S. decision on arms sales to Taiwan, including four Aegis destroyers that can serve as a mobile platform to neutralize China’s missile threat, and Beijing’s long-standing call for an end to U.S. surveillance flights. In return, Washington may take punitive steps curtailing China’s trade privileges, derailing Beijing’s bid to host the 2008 Olympics, and going ahead with the arms export to Taiwan.

It has been generally known that the Chinese are pragmatic, probably more than Russians and North Koreans. Meanwhile, President Bush, who issued two general warnings after the incident flared up on April 1, soon backed off a bit to express regret for the loss of the Chinese fighter pilot. As China is discontent with a mere expression of regret and demands a formal apology, the ball seems to be in Washington’s court due to the fact that the U.S. plane was spying in airspace near China and, what’s more, the craft and its crew are held in China’s custody.

While the standoff is likely to take some time before it is resolved in one way or another, Koreans cannot but be concerned about how the confrontation between the two giants will affect them and, especially, inter-Korean relations that have already shown signs of slowdown. Since Bush took a hard line stance in his meeting with President Kim Dae-jung last month, raising outright skepticism about North Korean leader Kim Jong- il and shelving Washington’s deal with Pyongyang on missiles and other issues, Seoul has been faced with a conundrum as to whether it should keep up its efforts for reconciliation and cooperation with the North in defiance of its primary ally’s reservation.

Fundamentally South Korea, like many other countries, both America’s allies and adversaries, has been puzzled by Bush’s blunt and self-righteous foreign policy that is supposedly based on a "new realism," offering tough rhetoric but few details thus far about its plans. Some even suspect that the Bush administration may simply be trying to distance itself from the foreign policy of its predecessor headed by Bill Clinton, who not only supported Seoul’s engagement policy toward North Korea but also was serious about making a visit to Pyongyang in his last month in office.

True, conservatives in South Korea were encouraged when Bush took a hard look at the inter-Korean peace process, which they saw was laden with many problems, especially North Korea’s failure to properly reciprocate the South’s one-sided conciliatory gestures. Notwithstanding, Washington has yet to come up with a credible alternative, granting that many key members of its national security team are awaiting congressional confirmation.

Guarded observations are that, in due course, the U.S. administration might turn out to adopt an actual foreign policy, including policy toward Korea, quite similar to its predecessor’s with certain realistic elements added. On that course, Republican leaders would have to ponder their conventional perception of global involvement, which some American analyzed is framed in a friend-or-foe context of the Cold War era, to suit a new world order in which complex and ambivalent ties have become the norm. The current Sino-American face-off offers a precious diplomatic lesson to the Bush administration, which is hoped to reflect this sort of reality on its preconceived realism.

Hong Soon-il, a former editor and editorial writer of The Korea Times Seoul, writes columns in Seoul.