By Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 12, 1998; Page A20

As he watched world events unfold during his long years of exile, Kim Dae Jung became convinced that dictatorial governments respond more positively to engagement and inducement than efforts to isolate or bottle them up.

Now that he is president of South Korea, he said several times during his first state visit to Washington, he intends to put that belief to the test by reaching out to North Korea.

His determination to do that, he said yesterday, resulted in the only disagreement between his policies and those of the Clinton administration that surfaced during an otherwise warm and amicable visit.

"We are in complete agreement on the subject of engagement in principle," Kim said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters at Blair House. "We have some differences" over tactics, he said, but added, "We can resolve them."

Kim has long advocated efforts to engage North Korea, which previous South Korean governments generally treated as an implacable enemy. When he took office, Kim published a policy statement saying his administration "hopes to improve intra-Korean relations by promoting peace, reconciliation and cooperation."

Before leaving home, Kim signaled his intention to urge the United States to join him in a more forthcoming policy toward the communist regime in Pyongyang by easing the economic sanctions that this country has maintained on North Korea for nearly half a century.

Kim did not raise the sanctions issue directly in his meeting with President Clinton on Tuesday, Clinton said in their post-meeting news conference.

"What he asked me to do," Clinton said, "was to work with him to support a policy of reciprocity which would enable us to move forward with the reconciliation of the North and the South. And I said I would be prepared to do that."

According to senior U.S. officials, however, Clinton brought up the subject of sanctions himself. The president promised to support Kim's effort to draw North Korea out of its Stalinist shell, a senior U.S. official said, but expressed reservations about unilateral gestures.

"Our relationship and our history prove that once you do something with the North Koreans, they will pocket it and there's no reciprocity," a senior official said. He said the United States is less optimistic than Kim that North Korea will respond constructively to gestures such as easing sanctions.

But in the interview yesterday, Kim offered examples from history: President Richard M. Nixon's visit to China, the U.S. policy of detente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and the postwar U.S. engagement with Vietnam. "You lost the war," he said through an interpreter, "but now through diplomacy and economic development you have made Vietnam almost a pro-American country."

Virtually all U.S. trade with North Korea has been barred since the country invaded the South to start the Korean War in 1950. In addition to restrictions under the Trading with the Enemy Act, North Korea is under sanctions as a communist state and is on the State Department's list of countries that sponsor terrorism.

The idea of easing some of these U.S. sanctions as part of specific agreements with North Korea is not new. Under the 1994 agreement between Washington and Pyongyang that froze North Korea's nuclear weapons development, the United States modified the economic sanctions to permit direct phone communications and allow steelmakers to import North Korean magnesite, a mineral used to line blast furnaces.

According to a State Department paper, "the United States is committed to further easing of its sanctions . . . as progress is made in implementing" the nuclear agreement.

But Kim made clear in an address to a joint session of Congress that he would like to see Washington go beyond the nuclear agreement to seek a much broader engagement with North Korea, on the theory that "to get a man to take off his coat, sunshine is more effective than a strong wind. We are going to promote cooperation . . . under the principle of separation of politics and economics. We want America's support in this effort. Both our nations need to be more confident, coordinated and composed in our relations with North Korea."

Before meeting with Clinton, he said, "I believe U.S. cooperation is crucial for the success of this policy."

"It's almost like a role reversal," said Joel Wit, a former U.S. negotiator with North Korea now at the Henry L. Stimson Center. "We have become like previous South Korean administrations, where they didn't want to do anything with the North. Now the new South Korean government wants to change . . . and we are stuck in the past."