For Vice President Dick Cheney, the question of how to deal with would-be nuclear powers in Iran and North Korea is disarmingly simple.

"We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it,'' Cheney reportedly pronounced, dismissing a State Department bid in late 2003 to make a deal with North Korea. A similar prescription was offered when moderates in the Iranian regime made a secret approach that year to begin talks with the United States.

The long history of the Cold War is replete with the issue of whether -- and how -- to talk with a mortal foe. U.S.-Soviet relations froze time and again. For two decades, there was no dialogue at all with Communist China. But in the end, American policymakers have always chosen the path of negotiation.

For Cheney -- and for President George W. Bush -- sitting down at a table with the likes of North Korea's Kim Jong Il would be an act of weakness, a lessening of American power and prestige that granted undeserved legitimacy to despised regimes.

In recent months, and most prominently last week, the Bush administration has appeared to reverse its stance, opening the door to direct talks with North Korea and Iran.

These moves are carefully constrained, reflecting in part the ongoing divisions in the Bush administration about the advisability of going down this path. Contacts with both regimes will take place only within the framework of multilateral talks and focused solely on the issue of their nuclear programs. One-on-one talks on a broader agenda, including establishing basic diplomatic relations, have been explicitly ruled out, for now.

The decision to talk seems driven in large part by the realization that defeating evil has proven to be more difficult than some in the administration assumed. After Iraq, the use of military force against Iran -- and even more so against a North Korea already probably armed with nuclear weapons -- is highly unlikely. Potential allies in imposing economic and political sanctions -- the Europeans, Russians and Chinese, along with South Korea and Japan -- won't even consider such steps without a greater show of American willingness to negotiate with the evil enemy.

Limited as it is, the significance of this shift has to be seen against the backdrop of deep resistance to such diplomatic engagement in the Bush administration.

"There is a fundamental disagreement over how to approach the North Korea problem,'' explained Richard Armitage, who served as deputy secretary of state from 2001-05.

"'Those of us at the State Department concluded: From the North Korean point of view, the nuclear issue is the only reason we Americans talk with them,'' Armitage recounted in a recent interview with the Oriental Economist newsletter. "Therefore, the North Koreans would be very reluctant to let go of the nuclear program. We knew it was going to be a very difficult process. But you have to start somewhere. You start by finding out what their needs and desires are, and seeing if there is a way of meeting those needs and desires without giving away something that is sacred to us.''

But the White House and others in the administration blocked at every turn their attempts to open direct dialogue with Pyongyang. "There is a fear in some quarters, particularly the Pentagon and at times in the vice president's office, that if we were to engage in discussions with the North Koreans, we might wind up with the bad end of the deal,'' Armitage said. "They believe that we should be able to pronounce our view, and everyone else, including the North Koreans, should simply accept it. This is not a reasonable approach.''

Six-party talks

The compromise was the decision, through the good offices of China, to convene six-party talks that included surrounding countries such as Russia, South Korea and Japan. Administration officials have argued that this format rallies others to back the United States in pressing the North Koreans, effectively isolating them.

The same argument was made for the United States to support, but not directly join, until this past week, European negotiations with Iran. As recently as April, Bush was still publicly wedded to this logic.

"With the United States being the sole interlocutor between Iran, it makes it more difficult to achieve the objective of having the Iranians give up their nuclear weapons ambitions,'' Bush said in answering questions following an April 10 speech. "It's amazing that when we're in a bilateral position, or kind of just negotiating one on one, somehow the world ends up turning the tables on us.''

Arguably, however, the opposite has been true. In the case of Iran, the Europeans, including Great Britain, have consistently urged the United States to talk directly to Iran.

An excuse not to talk

All the other partners in the six-party talks, including the closest U.S. ally, Japan, have held their own direct talks with Pyongyang and pushed the United States to do the same. Ultimately, it is the United States that has found itself isolated.

North Korean experts in the State Department had warned against relying only on this approach.

"In the case of negotiating with North Korea, more is not merrier and certainly not more efficient,'' says Robert Carlin, a longtime CIA and State Department intelligence expert on North Korea who participated in virtually all negotiations with the North from 1993-2000. "The more parties and people at the table, the greater the likelihood of posturing, and the harder it is to make concessions.''

In his view, the insistence on a multilateral approach was initially an excuse not to talk. "They didn't want bilateral talks with Pyongyang and they certainly didn't trust the State Department to conduct any such thing.''

These divisions have persisted. Last September, with the backing of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department's chief negotiator was finally allowed to meet his North Korean counterpart. This led to an agreement in the six-party talks last September, a compromise that conceded in principle the North Korean right to have a nuclear power reactor.

That deal prompted a backlash from Cheney and others, according to senior officials within the administration, and fresh curbs on direct contacts with Pyongyang. But the new proposal to Iran apparently also includes an offer to supply power reactors.

What still has resonance is the belief that direct talks with North Korea and Iran amount to acceptance of the regimes in power in both countries.

Resistant to deal

"Ultimately the president is, on this issue, very, very resistant to the idea of doing a deal, even a deal that would solve the nuclear problem,'' Flynt Leverett, who dealt with Iran for the Bush National Security Council, said in a recent interview. "You don't do a deal that would effectively legitimate this regime that he considers fundamentally illegitimate.''

The administration may calculate that this offer of talks will only serve to isolate Iran and shore up ties with Europe. But it may have stepped onto a slippery slope toward a bargain that will necessarily involve painful concessions to Iran and lead toward a resumption of diplomatic relations broken off almost three decades ago.

Opposition to negotiating with the enemy is deeply embedded in the Bush administration. There is, however, a precedent for a sea change -- Ronald Reagan. President Reagan came to office in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Dialogue with the Soviets was halted and the staff of the Reagan National Security Council opposed any contacts with Moscow.

Reagan himself, in a famous 1983 speech, referred to the Soviet Union as an ``evil empire,'' followed two weeks later by the launching of the "star wars'' missile-defense program. Soviet leaders, we learned later, were convinced that the United States might launch a first strike. In August of that year, Soviet fighter aircraft shot down a Korean Airlines passenger jet that had strayed from its flight path, a sign of sharply increasing tension.

In the Reagan administration, against fierce internal opposition, Secretary of State George Shultz pushed to resume dialogue with the Soviets, beginning with achievable steps such as resuming grain sales. Reagan ultimately agreed, starting down a road that led to the series of dramatic summits from 1985 with incoming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reagan's willingness to sit down with the "evil'' foe flowed from a sense of conviction in American strength. It is not yet evident that his Republican successor shares the same sense of confidence.

The Middle East seems to occupy all the attention of our foreign-policymakers these days. But there are other parts of this globe that are probably more important, and potentially no less dangerous.

One of these is the Taiwan Strait. That narrow passage of water separates China from Taiwan, in Chinese minds a renegade province that must eventually be returned to its control.

The Chinese communist leadership dreads the prospect that Taiwan's democratically elected government might make the island's de facto independence a legal reality. China's heated military buildup in recent years is largely focused on creating the muscle to intimidate Taiwan and to seize the island if that fails.

A war across the Taiwan Strait makes the American top-five list of security dangers. The U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan is ambiguous, but it is not hard to imagine us being drawn into a conflict. And a war in the strait could easily expand to include Japan.

That is why the mayor of Taipei, Taiwan's capital city, got such a rousing welcome last week in Washington. Ma Ying-Jeou, or Mayor Ma as he is popularly known, does not threaten to upset the apple cart of cross-strait relations by pushing Chinese buttons with talk of independence, as the Taiwanese government loves to do.

Sitting down with Ma for breakfast as he made his way home to Taiwan, I could see why he was received with open arms at senior levels of the Bush administration. Ma, the leader of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party, is the front-runner in polls to win the 2008 presidential elections. He is articulate, a Harvard Law School graduate with movie-star looks and a reassuring message for Americans.

"We support maintenance of the status quo, which is also U.S. policy,'' he told me.

A KMT-led government would not waver from the "Five Nos,'' a pledge made by President Chen Shui-bian not to take steps toward a declaration of independence. He offers in addition a program of ``Five Dos'' should it return to power.

First, the KMT hopes to resume negotiations with the mainland, based on a 1992 agreement that while there is one China, there are different interpretations of what that means. Second, it will try to reach a peace agreement, lasting from 30 to 50 years. Third, the KMT would expand the already massive economic ties between Taiwan and the mainland into a possible cross-strait common market. Fourth, the KMT would try to create a formula to allow Taiwan to participate in international affairs, including global organizations, short of being an independent state. Last, it would expand cross-strait cultural and education exchanges.

Ma downplays the threat from Beijing these days. "Their goal is no trouble,'' he told me. "They are not interested in unification right now.'' But, he said, the Chinese do worry about "the further drifting away of Taiwan.'' That drift, he fears, could inadvertently force a conflict that might drag in the United States.

That charge is aimed at the government in Taipei. And it is a concern shared by U.S. officials who are visibly unhappy these days with Chen. The warm reception for Ma was intended to send that message to Taipei -- and also to Beijing, ahead of the visit next month of Chinese leader Hu Jintao.

Reassuring as Ma's words may be, there are reasons to be cautious about his message and his prospects.

Taiwanese nationalism may rattle the status quo, but so does China's military buildup. As does the failure of Taiwan to adopt a significant U.S. defense package, offered five years ago, to counter that buildup. The KMT blames the current government for this impasse but the party, which now controls the legislature, has blocked passage of the budget.

Deepening economic ties with China are a market reality, as Taiwan's electronics industry shifts production to low-wage China. But ultimately that could make them another Hong Kong, a satellite of Beijing that must bend to its political will.

Taiwanese are deeply divided. The KMT, the party of mainlanders who fled to the island after the communist victory in 1949, ruled Taiwan for decades as the exiled government of China. But democracy, which came in the 1990s, brought to power native Taiwanese who want to preserve their separate identity.

Ma may prove to be a political leader who plays better in Washington than back home. But if Taiwanese embrace his vision of the status quo at the ballot box, all the better. Ultimately, his mandate must come from Taiwanese, not Americans.

The nuclear deal reached during President Bush's recent visit to India unleashed a predictable wave of criticism. From editorial and op-ed pages to Congress, led by the left but supported on the right, the administration has been assailed for making a bad bargain.

Under the agreement, which still needs congressional approval, India would open much of its nuclear facilities to international inspections in return for gaining access to the world's supplies of uranium and U.S. nuclear expertise.

The attacks on the deal reflect the view of the nonproliferation lobby -- the experts and policymakers whose central concern is to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. I share their aim. But American arguments against the India deal are misleading and only expose the deep contradictions, if not hypocrisy, of our own nuclear policies.

There are two main criticisms of the agreement: first, it undermines the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the NPT, and second, it permits, even encourages, India to expand its nuclear weapons production.

The NPT issue is particularly sensitive at a time when the international community is trying to persuade Iran to give up certain nuclear technologies which many nations fear are part of a secret bomb program.

The NPT created two sets of global rules -- one for the five nuclear weapons powers it recognizes (China, the United States, Russia, Britain and France) and another for everyone else. The five, for example, allow only "voluntary'' international safeguards on their civilian nuclear facilities. They have no obligation to open their military programs to any kind of scrutiny. And the NPT places no real limits on their arsenals, other than a vague commitment to reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons.

The rest must open their nuclear energy programs fully to international inspection and agree never to build bombs. In exchange, they gain access to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

Iran -- and North Korea -- made that bargain and can be held to account for breaking the rules. But India consistently regarded that as an unequal trade-off and never signed the NPT; neither did Pakistan and Israel, two other nuclear weapons states.

India's nuclear program is the product of decades of largely indigenous effort; it did not result from secretive proliferation in violation of the NPT.

The deal with India turns the five into six. It treats India as a de facto member of the inner club. The deal would require changes in U.S. law to remove existing restrictions on the transfer of nuclear energy technology, changes that would allow India to be treated no differently from China.

That does not weaken the NPT -- it strengthens it. It brings it more into accord with reality and gives India a stake in a system it had previously rejected as unfair. It paves the way for India to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the international organization that controls nuclear exports.

The critics are right that the deal enables India to expand its production of fissile materials to make nuclear warheads. Eight of India's 22 power reactors will remain outside international controls, along with a new breeder reactor. The Indians fought for that exemption because they feel their nuclear arsenal may not be large enough to deter a nuclear first strike by Pakistan or China in the future. Critics fear that with increased access to uranium and limited inspections, India will set off an arms race in South Asia.

Again, the agreement simply treats India like the five. Nonproliferation experts claim that unlike India, however, the five have halted their production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium that could be used to build new weapons. This is true, but misleading.

The five have massive stockpiles of fissile material built up during the Cold War. "If I've got a full pantry, it's easy for me to swear off trips to the supermarket,'' said Michael Levi, an arms-control expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Moreover, the United States has embarked on a new program to rebuild its nuclear weapons production capability, including creating new facilities to produce plutonium cores for warheads and to assemble them.

India has agreed to back a global pact to cut off fissile-material production. But the Bush administration does not support a treaty that would actually verify this is taking place. And the U.S. Senate has refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that would permanently halt any new testing of nuclear weapons.

A Congress that can support those policies is hardly in a position to challenge the administration's agreement with India. Rather than block the U.S.-India deal, it makes more sense to improve it. This could include reaching agreements for cooperation between the two countries to ensure the safety and security of nuclear facilities, including those for military purposes, suggested Stanford Professor Scott D. Sagan, a leading expert on nuclear safety and nonproliferation. "Reducing the risk of terrorist theft of nuclear materials or weapons in India would also help protect the United States,'' argues Sagan.

Beyond that, the six acknowledged nuclear powers should begin to seriously fulfill their part of the NPT bargain -- to cap fissile-material production, to ban nuclear testing, and to eventually radically reduce stored arsenals of nuclear weapons and materials.

When India spectacularly burst into the headlines via its nuclear explosions in May 1998, then US president Bill Clinton had openly vented his fury before aides in the White House. "We are going to come down on those guys like a ton of bricks," he had remarked. Clinton's "volcanic fit" found its echo in the White House statement that expressed "distress" and "displeasure", culminating in Washington imposing a slew of sanctions against India.

These images from the past, culled out from Engaging India, then deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott's book, appear incredible now. Especially as India readies itself to accord a warm reception to US President George W. Bush next week. The entente, the product of laboriously conducted diplomacy as much as geopolitical shifts that yoked the two together as 'natural allies', is now taking deep root. Sure, there will be protest rallies, strident voices will rail against Bush's hegemonic designs, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be cautioned against any tight clinch with Bush. Yet even these voices arise from the awareness that there's a growing relationship between the US and India, realized through knots of strategic partnership and cooperation in every conceivable field - from economy and nuclear technology to education, space and agriculture.

Bush's visit next week prompted Karl Inderfurth, who was assistant secretary of state for South Asia in the Clinton administration, to say, "All of this represents a refreshing degree of continuity in US foreign policy, based on a recognition by the last two American presidents that India is a country that will be a key player in the 21st century." Similarly, Robert Hathaway, of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, is impressed that "two successive Indian governments representing different political views and parties... both came to the same conclusion that it is in India's interest to forge a better relationship with the US."

From imposing sanctions against India to laying out a blueprint for nuclear cooperation, both New Delhi and Washington have come a long way in an inordinately short time. Ironically, it was Clinton who provided the impetus for this transformation. Talbott says the former president, after coming to terms with the Pokhran II realities, found it "downright distasteful and counterproductive" to impose sanctions against a country he was trying to improve relations with. Consequently, Talbott, Inderfurth and senior director in the National Security Council Bruce Riedal were entrusted with the task of pulling out Indo-US relations from the abyss in which it had been languishing from the beginnings of the Cold War era.What followed was a dialog between foreign minister Jaswant Singh and Talbott, both seeking to convey to each other the security and strategic interests of their respective countries.

The dialog started yielding dividends immediately, even during the Kargil conflict. Clinton's confrontation of then Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif at their July 4, 1999, meeting in Washington took trust patterns between the US and India to a new level. "Throughout this period, we kept the Indian government informed of what we were doing to try to ease the crisis," recalls Inderfurth, who played a key role in the dialog with Sharif. "All of this turned into an important confidence-builder in our new relationship with India."

"The July 4 meeting was the turning point," agrees Michael Krepon of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. "It demonstrated that US engagement in the India-Pakistan imbroglio would not be detrimental to New Delhi's interests, and it shifted the Clinton administration's focus from proliferation to engagement." The trust was manifest in Clinton's spectacularly successful visit to India in March 2000. An enabling factor in the budding Indo-US romance, says former ambassador Richard Celeste, was the now-forgotten Y2K factor. "The crisis introduced India's enormously talented manpower to our business leaders. Today, the 24/7 bond between companies in the US and service providers in India is the stuff of books and myth-making."

The budding romance acquired a new meaning with the advent of Bush in the White House. His most perspicacious decision was to appoint confidant Robert D. Blackwill as ambassador to India. Blackwill appealed to the popular imagination; his unequivocal pronouncements against Pakistan for fomenting terrorism in India further bolstered the trust between New Delhi and Washington. More importantly, he sought to impart a new heft to the relationship by putting his formidable weight behind the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership", which envisaged cooperation between the two countries in civil nuclear energy, hi-tech trade, space and dual technology. "If Clinton was the pioneer of the new relationship, Bush is its architect," says Teresita Schaffer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The impulse for the new relationship is linked to the question: why has India started to matter to the US? Inderfurth cites three reasons: India will become the world's most populous nation, it may well have the world's fastest growing economy by 2020, and it is the world's largest democracy. Krepon adds one more to the list: intellectual capital. "The world expects India to do more heavy lifting," he says.

Ultimately, a relationship in international affairs hinges on convergence of interests. Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who's now advising under secretary of state R. Nicholas Burns, listed a string of "common interests" at a congressional hearing last year. These included:

preventing Asia from being dominated by any single power that has the capacity to crowd out others and which may use aggressive assertion of national self-interest to threaten American presence, American alliances, and American ties with the states of the region; eliminating the threat posed by state sponsors of terrorism; protecting the global commons, especially the sea lanes of communications, through which flow not only goods and services critical to the global economy but also undesirable commerce such as drug trafficking, people smuggling and weapons of mass destruction technologies.

So, isn't China the "single power" that Tellis thinks could threaten American interests in Asia? He denied this assumption to Congress, but many feel China is indeed the factor behind Washington's attempts to assist India in becoming a major world power.As author Sunil Khilnani, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, says, "Many current inhabitants of the Pentagon see an India allied to the US as a potential bulwark to a China whose ambitions are still difficult to read." Washington's long-term view is that since China will not support the US war on terror, it's a threat against which the US needs a counterweight. "Japan has proven it does not have the emotional and intellectual muscle to face China. Hence, India should play that role," explains Rafiq Dossani of Stanford University.

The Bush regime's keenness on India also springs from the disaster his other foreign policy initiatives have been. "Bush would like to leave at least one foreign policy achievement as his legacy. He'd like to claim that he 'delivered' India to the US, just as Nixon could earlier claim the same about China," says Khilnani.

These reasons apart, the relationship has gathered great momentum from business-to-business links over the last decade. Says Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation in Washington, "India's abandoning of its social democratic economic model, derived from the Nehru period, in favor of globalization and free market economics has made it much more attractive to investment and ideologically sympathetic to the US." Indeed, the more the two countries deepen their economic interdependence, the more each will have a stake in the other. And this economic interdependence can deepen, says Stephen P. Cohen of the Brookings Institution, through the removal of obstacles to US investments. "Infrastructure, (inadequate) liberalization, and education are three real obstacles. These (improvement in the three areas) will make it easy to implement the strategic relationship."

That India matters to the US is no longer a promise of the future. At a recent conference, former state department official Walter Andersen pointed out two US decisions that underscored India's enhanced importance. First, the four-country tsunami relief efforts involving the navies of the US, Japan, Australia and India. Two, the Bush administration's efforts to exempt a nuclear-capable India from exports restrictions on nuclear and dual use technology.

The blossoming ties have enabled significant partnerships in the international arena too. India has supported the war on terror in Afghanistan; its navy protected high-value US cargoes through the Straits of Malacca; more recently, India voted with the US at the International Atomic Energy Agency to declare Iran in "non-compliance" with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

All this doesn't mean the US and India will automatically collaborate on every problem dogging them. "Nobody expects a perfect alignment ever, but increasing alignment is something we hope will come naturally," says Schaffer. Partly this alignment can be brought about through changes in the conduct of foreign policy. For instance, the US, Hathaway admits, needs to recognize that India expects to be treated on a basis of equality. Similarly, Khilnani contends, a section of Indian political elites need to shed its instinctive anti-Americanism. "This does not mean renouncing a critical position, or an independent assessment of our own interests. It means engaging more deeply and confidently, and picking battles more selectively and prudently," he says.

Obviously, like any two countries, there will be disagreements. "Indeed, there have been over the past few years on a number of issues, including the war in Iraq," says Inderfurth. But, he adds optimistically, "the fact that this has not disrupted the upward trajectory of our relationship is a good sign and a promising one for future relations."

The United States and India have gone a long way from Cold War days of wariness and suspicion to genuine friendship and incipient global partnership. The visit of President Clinton to India in 2000 marked a breakthrough in Indo-U.S. ties, which had been set back by India's decision to conduct nuclear weapons tests in 1998.

President Bush, to his credit, broadened the road opened by Clinton and paved it with a more solid foundation. Cooperation in a range of areas, from military ties to joint scientific work, is well established. A presidential visit puts a personal seal on that budding partnership -- even if it is a couple of years late.

When it comes to Indo-U.S. relations, however, there are three pitfalls to avoid: the India card; democracy matters; and it's the economy, stupid!

The India card

Washington has a surplus of geo-strategists. As Kissinger famously played the "China card'' against the Soviet Union, the strategists imagine cleverly using an India card against a rising China.

There is one small rub in that grand design -- India isn't interested in being an instrument of an American containment strategy against China. As Robert Blackwill, former Bush administration ambassador to India, put it recently: "There's no way better to empty a drawing room in New Delhi of Indian strategists than to start talking about this idea.''

Indians eagerly compete with China for economic leadership in Asia. They have a legacy of tensions, from border wars to nuclear rivalry. But Indian policy is to engage China and create the best relationship possible.

The president is avoiding India card talk. But it is no secret that some inside the administration harbor these illusions. Let's hope they keep their mouths shut for at least this week.

Democracy matters

Beyond cliches about the world's two largest democracies, both governments have a habit of forgetting that democracy really matters. Witness the up-to-the-last-minute effort to salvage a deal from July to open India's civilian nuclear program to international inspection in exchange for access to nuclear energy technology and fuel.

The Bush administration did little to sell that deal in Congress, either ahead or afterward. Opposition has mounted on both sides of the aisles from those who fear it would undermine nuclear proliferation controls, particularly when Iran is claiming its own right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology.

The United States has now toughened its requirements. But the coalition government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faces rising resistance in parliament, encouraged by the prestigious nuclear establishment, to any deal that would significantly restrict India's ability to develop and build nuclear weapons.

I favored the July deal and support any reasonable new agreement that would separate a significant part of India's civilian nuclear program from its military one. Hopefully, the negotiations will succeed, but even if they do, both governments need to do a much better job selling it in their feisty democratic systems.

It's the economy, stupid

The biggest threat to this emergent partnership is to forget what brought the two countries together -- not geopolitics but shared interests. Some of those are security-driven, not least a common foe in Islamist terrorism. But the real driver has been economics.

Since India decided to open its protected economy in the early 1990s, the country has taken off, producing sustained growth rates nearing double digits. Led by the high-technology industry, foreign investment and trade with India is rising rapidly. The Indo-Americans who thrive in Silicon Valley form a powerful cultural and economic bridge between our two countries.

India's billon people include a middle class of 200 million to 300 million, equal to the population of this country, with an increasingly sophisticated appetite for Western consumer goods. In contrast to China, India has a young population, half of them under 25 years old.

For the United States, there are added opportunities -- and competitive challenges. As is evident from the Saturday morning phone calls from telemarketers in Chennai trying to sell me a new mortgage, India has a great resource in its English-speaking educated elite. That has meant job loss in the United States but also openings to create new businesses and new jobs.

Both governments need to focus on what is needed to accelerate the kind of virtual integration between India and the United States we see in Silicon Valley. If we do that right, the geopolitics will follow naturally. If we mess that up, all the strategic castles in the sky will come crashing to Earth very soon.

What is South Korea's strategic posture in East Asia?

After the Korean War ended in 1953, South Korea and the United States established a political and security alliance that has lasted more than half a century. "For a number of decades, South Korea primarily defined itself as a U.S. ally, with the enemy to the north," says Donald Gregg, president of the Korea Society and a former U.S. ambassador to Korea. However, South Korea is now trying to create a new role for itself in Asia. Seoul is exploring a growing economic relationship with China--which passed the United States in 2003 to become South Korea's largest trading partner--and its policy of engagement and growing cooperation with North Korea is pulling it away from the United States. "All we know for sure is that South Korea's role is no longer junior partner to the U.S.," says David Kang, a visiting professor of Asian studies at Stanford University. "The days when they would just unquestioningly follow the U.S. are over."

Kang and other experts say Seoul is beginning to shift its focus towards increasing regional ties with its Asian neighbors. The U.S.-South Korea relationship, while still strong, is not as exclusive as it has been in the past. "South Korea is still an ally of the United States ... nevertheless, it has been the most active country in promoting East Asian cooperation and integration, and will probably continue to do so," says Charles Armstrong, professor of history and director of the Center for Korean Studies at Columbia University.

What are South Korea's biggest foreign policy challenges?

Dealing with North Korea while preserving its relationship with the United States, maintaining relations with Japan, and addressing potential long-term military or economic threats from China, experts say. But "the major issue for Seoul is overwhelmingly North Korea, and everything else gets filtered through that lens," Kang says. South Korea looks to its northern neighbor with the goal of eventual reunification, and therefore seeks economic cooperation and political engagement to smooth relations and slowly move down that path. The United States, on the other hand, is primarily seeking to prevent North Korea from gaining nuclear weapons, and has refused to engage with Pyongyang until that issue is resolved.

Other experts see a disconnect between how South Korea views its role in the region and how other nations see it. South Korean officials talk of playing a "balancing" or mediating role in regional disputes, including tensions between China and Japan and the nuclear standoff between the United States and North Korea. But South Korea's "actual ability to mediate and balance is limited," says Armstrong. And while South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun has expressed hopes of building Seoul into a logistics and business hub for the region, existing tensions on the peninsula--including international fears that North Korea is amassing a nuclear arsenal--cloud any long-term economic plans. As things stand, South Korea has the world's 11th largest economy, but not a corresponding level of political clout.

How is South Korea dealing with North Korea?

Through a policy of active engagement. In 1998, Former President Kim Dae-Jung introduced the "Sunshine Policy" aimed at improving ties with North Korea while assuring Pyongyang that Seoul is not trying to absorb it. Since then, "the degree of economic interaction between south and north has substantially increased," Armstrong says. Kim and North Korean President Kim Jung-Il met at a historic summit in 2000, and increasing progress has been made on a range of issues, from economic--increased rail links and joint projects like the Gaesung industrial complex--to social and symbolic, including cross-border family visits and Korean athletes marching together under a single flag at the Olympics. Trade between the two countries reached $697 million in 2004, and South Korea is now Pyongyang's second-largest trading partner after China.

South Korea sees engagement with North Korea as yielding far more benefits than confrontation. "South Korea is reorienting itself toward reconciliation and eventual reunification of the peninsula," Gregg says. South Korean officials say reunification would reduce the burden on each side of maintaining huge armies, help improve living standards, draw international investment, create employment, and help avert the worst possibility: open war on the Korean peninsula.

What is South Korea's relationship with China?

South Korea is developing increasingly warm relations with its giant western neighbor. "There is a real fascination with China in South Korea, and the flow of investment, exports, students, tourists, and businessmen going to China from South Korea has exploded in the last several years," Armstrong says. Bilateral trade between Seoul and Beijing reached $90 billion in 2004, a 42 percent increase from 2003. The two countries also agree politically on issues ranging from opposition to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni war shrine, to accord on how to deal with North Korea's nuclear ambitions. China is also choosing the path of engagement with North Korea, and helping Pyongyang find a "Chinese way" to develop: that is, increasing economic openness without sacrificing political control. "On the whole, [South Korea and China] see pretty much eye to eye on the major geopolitical issues," Kang says.

Beijing, like Seoul, is investing in North Korea, which has ample natural resources--including coal, iron, and gold--and a low-cost labor force. In 2003, Chinese investment in North Korea was $1.1 million; in 2004, it ballooned to $50 million; and in 2005, it was expected to reach $85-90 million. The volume of trade between China and North Korea reached $1.5 billion in 2005, making Beijing Pyongyang's largest foreign trading partner. North Korean leader Kim Jung-Il, who rarely travels, emphasized Beijing's importance to his country by visiting China in January.

South Korea is positioning itself to be closer to an ascendant China, but trying to do it without jeopardizing existing ties with the United States. South Korea's biggest worry, experts say, is being pulled into a conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan.

What's the relationship like between South Korea and Japan?

"Very bad at the moment in terms of public diplomacy and popular opinion," Columbia University's Armstrong says. South Korean wariness of Japan dates back at least to 1910, when imperial Japan invaded Korea and ruled it as a colony for thirty-five years. During the occupation, Japanese efforts to suppress Korean language and culture earned Korean enmity. During World War II, the Japanese practice of using "comfort women"--women from occupied countries, mostly Korea, who were forced to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese army--increased the anti-Japanese feeling.

South Koreans, and others across the region, are also infuriated by Koizumi's annual visit to the Yasukuni shrine. The site honors more than two million Japanese war dead, but includes the remains of more than a dozen convicted war criminals. South Korea also has disputes with Japan over territory. Both countries claim a group of islands--and the fishing and mineral rights around them--in the Sea of Japan that the Koreans call Dokdo and the Japanese call Takeshima. And many critics in South Korea and across Asia accuse Japan of whitewashing its wartime atrocities in its grade-school textbooks.

But much of the South Korean conflict with Japan may be for domestic political consumption, some experts say. "Under the surface, I would say the degree of interaction [between Seoul and Tokyo] remains high and, in the economic realm, is rather good," Armstrong says.

How is South Korea dealing with the United States?

While experts say most South Koreans still consider the U.S.-Korean alliance the backbone of their security relationship, time has passed and attitudes are shifting. A new generation of South Koreans, assertive and nationalistic, are less mindful of the Korean War--and less grateful for American intervention in the conflict that left nearly three million Koreans dead or wounded--and more resistant to what they see as a U.S. attempt to impose its values and Washington's singular focus on terrorism. The United States has opposed South Korean engagement efforts with North Korea, and has also moved to increase its ties with Japan. The Bush administration's foreign policy, including the war on terror, its punitive stance toward North Korean nuclear weapons, and particularly the invasion of Iraq, is highly unpopular in South Korea, according to opinion surveys there.

South Koreans are also increasingly demanding more control over their country's military and political affairs. In 2004, the United States returned several military bases to Korean control, and agreed to withdraw 12,500 of the 37,500 U.S. troops currently stationed in Korea by 2008. U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had been pushing for South Korea to take more of a role in the defense of the Korean peninsula, to free up U.S. forces for deployment elsewhere. But, all differences aside, Seoul is still eager to cooperate with the United States. South Korea, with some 3,000 troops in Iraq, is the third-largest member of the U.S.-led coalition there, behind the United States and Britain.

What is the recent history of the region?

Poised between China and Japan, fought over by the United States and Russia, the Korean peninsula long has played a central role in Asia's geopolitical affairs. After World War II, Japanese colonial rule gave way to U.S. and Soviet trusteeship over the southern and northern halves of Korea, respectively. The peninsula was divided at the 38th Parallel. In 1948, the southern Republic of Korea and the northern Democratic People's Republic of Korea, under Kim Il-Sung, were established.

In 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea, starting a conflict that brought in China on the North Korean side and a U.S.-led UN coalition on the South Korean side. While an armistice was agreed to in 1953, a formal peace treaty was never signed. In 1954, the United States agreed to help South Korea defend itself against external aggression in a mutual defense treaty. U.S. troops have been stationed in Korea since then. In addition to this important security relationship, shared interests in the last fifty years have included fighting communism and, since the 1980s, establishing a strong democracy and fostering economic development. However, in recent years strain has emerged on a range of issues, none more important than how to handle Pyongyang.

Pre-emption used to be the watchword of Bush foreign policy. The world's sole superpower would not hesitate to wield force against an imminent threat to its security. The old doctrines of the Cold War era -- of containment and deterrence of a potential enemy -- were disdained as weakness.

Now, facing the most serious national security challenge since the end of the Cold War -- the nuclear weapons programs of Iran and North Korea -- the administration is reaching back to those oldies but goodies.

The determination of Iran and North Korea to develop nuclear weapons has so far been largely unchecked by this administration. The North Koreans, since breaking out of the freeze agreed to during the Clinton administration, have been steadily producing plutonium, and presumably warheads. The Iranians, after the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reversed their deal to suspend uranium-enrichment activities, the crucial step toward nuclear weapons.

Diplomatic negotiations in both cases have produced little movement. But a military strike on their nuclear facilities is almost inconceivable. The danger of potentially horrendous retaliation and the sapping of American will and resources in Iraq have almost killed that option.

"As shaky as a policy of containment is, it is certainly preferable to confrontation, 'rollback,' or 'regime change' through military force,'' wrote conservative national security expert Thomas Donnelly in a recent analysis. "Containment is, in fact, regime change by tolerable means, and the solution to the problems of Iran and North Korea lie in an indirect approach.''

While we try to contain a nuclear Iran and North Korea, suggested Donnelly, we should surround Iran with movements for democratic change in Iraq and Afghanistan. North Korea, he believes, will be changed through Chinese influence.

Donnelly cautions that there may be circumstances when containment proves even more risky than intervention -- say if Iran tries to slip nuclear materials to Islamist terrorists. Iran is less stable than the Soviet Union, though it is worth remembering that the first 15 years of the Cold War brought us to the brink of nuclear war once and close to it several times.

For the administration, this is a stealth policy shift. That is no surprise. It flows directly from the mess in Iraq, a mistake the administration can never really acknowledge.

For those who once touted American global domination, it is still hard to face the reality that containment is impossible without allies and partners. By ourselves, we cannot press those regimes by cutting off their access to investment and advanced technology.

The administration is rightly moving to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council to seek a mandate to enforce the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency. North Korea is undoubtedly watching this carefully.

China and Russia, who have veto power in the Security Council, are reluctantly going along. But they still resist any move to impose economic sanctions against Iran. Nor are the Europeans, Japanese and others who depend on oil and gas from Iran eager to halt their investment and trade.

Similarly in the case of North Korea, the Chinese and South Koreans are not prepared to cut the flow of economic aid and investment into the otherwise isolated North Korean state. This is less a case of economic interests than a fear that sanctions will escalate to greater confrontation, even war.

"The strategic challenge the Bush administration faced was to convince the rest of the world that Iran is more dangerous than the United States,'' says nuclear proliferation expert George Perkovich. "They finally did it -- and it took Ahmadinejad to do it,'' referring to the inflammatory rhetoric, including threats to "wipe Israel off the map,'' issued by the Iranian leader.

The administration made some headway down the same path with North Korea by engaging in direct talks with that regime this past fall, dispelling the image that the United States was unwilling to negotiate. But that progress has been undermined recently because hard-liners inside the Bush administration pulled the plug on such talks.

Managing an effective containment partnership will be a huge challenge. And there is still tremendous resistance inside the administration to engaging and negotiating -- and compromising -- with the enemy. But that was always a part of making containment succeed, even at the height of the Cold War.

Containment is no silver bullet. It is merely, as Donnelly puts it, "the least bad alternative, but not by a lot, and not under all circumstances.'' And right now, it is the only game in town.