SEOUL, South Korea — SEOUL, South Korea - President Barack Obama took North Korea’s untested new leader, Kim Jong Un, to task Monday, demanding that China curb his recent behavior and declaring that South Korea’s success will inevitably triumph over the failure and isolation of the North.
In a 90-minute meeting with China’s president, Hu Jintao, before a nuclear-security summit in South Korea, Obama pressed the Chinese leader to use his influence over Pyongyang to stop it from proceeding with a satellite launch next month, according to a White House official.
Obama was clearly stung by North Korea’s announcement of the impending satellite launch, which the United States said would be a breach of its international obligations and which came only 17 days after the Obama administration had tentatively agreed to send North Korea desperately needed food aid.
But the president, the senior official said, was also latching on to the change in leadership in Pyongyang to try to break what Obama called a long cycle of provocations that were rewarded by countries eager to ease tensions with an erratic nuclear state.
“We need to have a serious conversation with the North Koreans where they understand that we’re going to do things differently in the future,” said the senior official, Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser.
Hu told the president that China shared his concern about the satellite launch and had conveyed that to North Korea, Rhodes said. But Hu appeared surprised by the vehemence of Obama’s message, according to senior officials.
In that meeting, as well as an earlier one with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Obama was trying to budge two countries that have been the greatest impediments to more aggressive action against North Korea, Iran and Syria, where a bloody crackdown by President Bashar Assad against his opponents is nearly 13 months old.
The president’s mind seemed most fixed on a young man he has never met: Kim Jong Un, the new leader of North Korea, who ascended following the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in December.
Speaking to 400 students at a foreign-affairs university in South Korea, Obama challenged Kim Jong Un and his subordinates to give up their belligerent behavior and “have the courage to pursue peace and give a better life to the people of North Korea.”
The president spoke at length about a potential future reunification of the Korean Peninsula, describing the Koreans as “one people” and saying, “If just given the chance, if given their freedom, Koreans in the North are capable of great progress as well.”
Obama, who held the first nuclear security summit in 2010, offered a report card on his campaign to prod countries to curb the spread of nuclear material and reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism.
Addressing Pyongyang directly, Obama said: “Your provocations and pursuit of nuclear weapons have not achieved the security you seek; they have undermined it.”
The United States, he said, bore North Korea no “hostile intent.” But if the regime did not change course, he said, it would face “more broken dreams, more isolation, ever more distance between the people of North Korea and the dignity and the opportunity that they deserve.”
There was no immediate reaction to Obama’s remarks from Pyongyang. The North’s state-run Korea Central News Agency’s website was monopolized Monday by dispatches about grief-stricken North Koreans participating in ceremonies marking the 100-day mourning period for Kim Jong Il.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 03/27/2012