Washington ? The high-seas seizure and quick release of a shipload of Scud missiles bound from North Korea to Yemen demonstrates the difficulty President Bush faces in enforcing his hard line against one part of what he calls the “axis of evil.”

“Every administration starts out being hostile and, sooner or later, finds out that doesn’t work,” said Leon Sigal, an Asia scholar who has written extensively on the prospects of disarming North Korea.

“The question is,” he added, “is this one going to figure that out, or are we going to stumble into a war that we don’t want?”

In dealing with North Korea, the Bush administration has rejected full-scale negotiations and instead sought to build outside pressure to shun the communist regime to persuade it to change its ways.

At the State Department on Wednesday, spokesman Richard Boucher said the administration had no plans to change its course.

“I don’t know of any particular diplomatic contact with the North Koreans at this point,” Boucher said. “The channel is open as necessary. But I think they’re fully aware of the concerns the United States has had for many years.”

The United States and its allies had tracked the ship carrying the North Korean missiles for days, finally boarding it only to release it after Yemen declared it had bought the missiles and wanted them delivered.

“We don’t have to like everything North Korea does,” said White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, “but that doesn’t mean that we have the right to change international law out of convenience.”

The release of the missiles in no way undermines the U.S. belief that “North Korea is a proliferator and presents dangerous problems to the United States,” Fleischer said.

And he dismissed any notion that the incident was a setback to U.S. efforts to stop North Korea’s sale of missiles and other weapons technology.

All the worldwide attention, Fleischer suggested, may indeed “represent a new way” in the anti-proliferation campaign.

“The fact that we will adhere to international law, in the end, helps strengthen international agreements that fight proliferation efforts like this,” he said.

Other analysts, however, suggested the incident could, at least in the short term, push the administration to other actions.

“This could give the power to those who argue within the U.S. government to take a harder stance toward North Korea,” said Yuki Tatsumi, a Japanese scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

And it could give Japan a similar push, she suggested.

History of negotiation

The Clinton administration, which initially took a hard line toward North Korea, decided quickly to negotiate instead.

In 1994, the administration made a deal with Pyongyang designed to limit its nuclear weapons program by helping with nuclear energy.

And in his final days in office, President Clinton sought to ease long-standing tensions by reaching out diplomatically to North Korea and, eventually, dispatching Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang.

But the new Bush administration, after a few mixed signals, pulled back. And the relationship further soured last January, when Bush lumped North Korea together with Iraq and Iran in his “axis of evil.”

The United States has long monitored North Korea’s missile exports but was shocked at the regime’s disclosure in October that it had broken the 1994 agreement with the United States and had been secretly developing nuclear weapons.

“It’s a brutal Stalinist tyranny, erratic, that sort of prides itself on its erratic, intimidating qualities,” said a senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Its missile program is quite advanced, the official said, and is a major “source of its prestige, its ability to scare everybody else.”

“Its style is to raise hell and use that as leverage over South Korea,” the official said.

South Korean anxiety

So with an economically depressed but heavily armed North Korea to the north, and an economically robust and heavily armed and U.S.-reinforced South Korea to the south, the demilitarized zone that divides them remains one of the world’s most dangerous demarcations.

In South Korea, tensions abound, including a rising tide of anti-Americanism in advance of the Dec. 19 elections.

South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a historic summit with North Korean President Kim Jong Il, is retiring, and his “Sunshine Policy” of reunification has stalled during the campaign to succeed him.

“Policy has been on hold,” said Daniel Pinkston, a senior research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California. “Two candidates have quite different views on how to deal with North Korea.”

Economic issue

In North Korea, the economically battered regime remains desperate for cash.

“Back in 1992, the North Koreans were in effect telling anybody that would pay attention: ‘We’re in the business of selling missiles. We just do it for hard currency, and if somebody would make us a better offer we’d stop,”‘ said Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York.

“I know of no other way to fix the missile export problem than to negotiate an end to it with them, and they’ve said they’re willing to,” he said.

In 1993, Israel nearly struck a deal with Pyongyang for the North Koreans to stop selling missiles or missile technology in the Middle East, Sigal said. But the new Clinton administration ” intent on taking a hard line against North Korea ” along with South Korea urged the Israelis to drop the effort. They did.

Clinton later decided to negotiate with the North Koreans, coming to an agreement on nuclear programs in 1994 and nearly completing a deal in 2000 that would have stopped Pyongyang’s missile programs, Sigal said.

Relatively short-range

North Korea’s continued missile business should have been no surprise, analysts said, pointing to reported past sales to Pakistan, Iran and Syria, and even Yemen.

But, some analysts noted, the latest Scuds being sold are relatively short-range missiles that are not primarily associated with the delivery of weapons of mass destruction.

“The administration must have judged this not only to be not a transfer that they could stop without legal questions arising, but also one that wasn’t particularly dangerous,” said Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, who negotiated the 1994 framework agreement with North Korea.

Still, he said, the Bush administration is undoubtedly worried that North Korea might sell more medium-range missiles like those that have gone to Iran and Pakistan.

The best way to prevent that, Gallucci suggested, is through renewed negotiations.

“You cannot expect us to make any progress in getting North Koreans to behave in a way we would like them to, if you don’t talk to them and deal with them,” he said.

“This is more evidence of the kind of thing we wish they wouldn’t do.”