Six-Party Talks -- and Half a Dozen Doughnuts

President Bush greets workers, including manager Reynaldo Ramos, left, at a Dunkin' Donuts in Alexandria. (By Charles Dharapak -- Associated Press)

When the going on the Korean Peninsula gets tough, the tough go on a doughnut run.

President Bush, making his first public remarks since North Korea test-fired seven missiles in open defiance of the United States, boarded his motorcade yesterday for an unannounced trip to a doughnut shop in Alexandria -- to talk about immigration.

"The president went to the Dunkin' Donuts," White House press secretary Tony Snow said in the first item of business at his daily news conference. A few of the reporters laughed, perhaps thinking Snow was joking about the trip to the land of French Crullers and Munchkins.

He wasn't. After interpreting every gesture of Saddam Hussein as a casus belli , a changed Bush administration is taking the opposite approach with Kim Jong Il. Officials were determined not to give the little man with the big missile the attention he craves.

In Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice could have been channeling French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin when she spoke of "the wisdom of the six-party framework" and "a diplomatic infrastructure that can be used to resolve problems of this kind."

In New York, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton was saying things -- "We think we can proceed in a calm and strong and unanimous signal from the [Security] Council" -- that could make a neocon throw things at the television.

At the White House, Bush huddled with his National Security Council to talk about, er, Cuba. And Snow struck the tone of militant multilateralist. "It's been our policy all along," he lectured reporters, "that we do not act unilaterally." Further, he chided: "There are attempts to try to describe this almost in breathless World War III terms. This is not such a situation."

A few years ago, the administration was using breathless terms to describe Iraq. "We cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," Bush said then. The president said sanctions and isolation had been a failure, while Vice President Cheney described the U.N. Security Council's procedures as "a prescription for perpetual disunity and obstructionism."

Now? The administration finds itself before the Security Council, working on sanctions and isolation for North Korea. Bush could have been reading Kofi Annan's speech when he spoke yesterday about "acting in concert," about how "we must work together," and about why "it is much more effective to have more than one nation dealing with North Korea."

Administration officials sounded less like a superpower's spokesmen than parents worried about a badly behaving child. All but ruling out corporal punishment, they searched for a remedy: Calling a timeout? Withdrawing privileges? Negotiating? Ignoring the bad behavior?

"It is really a matter of the region saying to North Korea that it has to change its behavior," Rice said.

"This kind of behavior is unacceptable," Bolton said.