By EVAN RAMSTAD And JAY SOLOMON
U.S. officials aggressively lobbied China, Russia and Japan and suspended a food-aid plan for North Korea following the death of the country's leader, aiming to gain a diplomatic foothold as control over the authoritarian, nuclear-armed country appeared to pass to Kim Jong Il's untested young son.
North Korea officially returned to its customary silence on Monday after announcing the death of its supreme leader early in the day, underscoring the world's anxiety over its trajectory under Kim Jong Eun, the former ruler's youngest son, whom state media says will now lead the isolated country.
The U.S. doesn't have a clear picture of what may happen next there, said a senior defense official in Washington. "A 27-year-old running a repressive regime with nuclear weapons: It's kind of hard to say you don't have some concerns," the official said.
The White House's stance on North Korea pointed to a brewing policy debate over the proper approach to a ruling family that has troubled U.S. administrations for more than 60 years.
Giving North Korea breathing room may produce stability at the expense of long-term reform. But a greater risk may lie in prodding for fundamental reform: Kim Jong Il's surviving family members and the North's ruling elite will likely face more difficulty maintaining power than when Mr. Kim himself took over after his father's death in 1994, and the prospect for the regime's collapse is now higher.
Underscoring those jitters, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that North Korea had fired a short-range missile into the Sea of Japan early Monday. The agency said the action appeared to be a routine test, unrelated to Kim Jong Il's death. South Korea's Defense Ministry declined to confirm the report.
Pentagon spokesman George Little said the level of alert for U.S. forces in South Korea was unchanged. Mr. Little said the U.S. has detected "no unusual North Korean military movements" since Mr. Kim's death.
The U.S. is closely monitoring events in North Korea and coordinating with allies, particularly South Korea, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney saidMonday.
President Barack Obama spoke with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak late Sunday, and senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, have spoken with their counterparts in Seoul.
Administration officials also devoted much of the day to closed talks with counterparts in China, Russia and Japan, then pledged to back a "peaceful and stable transition" in North Korea. Similar calls were issued by the other world leaders.
In a sign of the potential for the North Korean transition to become a subject of political debate in the U.S., Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney called on President Obama to take advantage of the opening for change.
"Cancel your Christmas vacation," Mr. Romney said he would counsel the president. "This is one of the great opportunities of the last 25 years as relates to that part of the world. And the president should be actively engaged with China, South Korea, Japan and potentially even trying to establish dialogue with North Korea," he said in an interview.
For the past three years, the U.S. and North Korea had little contact following the collapse of six-nation aid-for-disarmament talks. But in recent months, they made progress on deals for the U.S. to resume searches in the North next year for the remains of missing Americans from the Korean War of the 1950s. Talks were also moving quickly to resume U.S. provision of food aid to North Korea.
Mr. Carney said the White House hadn't ruled out food aid but that it was putting the plan on hold until safeguards for allocation were in place, a demand it had made before Mr. Kim died.
The prospect of pushing or pressuring the North Korean regime is unsettling to many. Instability, or even civil war in the North, would create economic and other difficulties for South Korea, a key U.S. ally, as well for China and Japan.
The North's ruling regime had little time to prepare to transfer power. The succession plan that Kim Jong Il designed for his son, Kim Jong Eun, is little more than a year old. By contrast, Mr. Kim had more than a decade in the public eye in North Korea at the time his father took charge.
Kim Jong Eun, born in 1983 or 1984, isn't as well known among the elite or the people as his father at the same juncture, nor as accomplished in the government and military.
A group of elder North Koreans is believed positioned to help. At the time of the younger Mr. Kim's public debut in September 2010, his father announced appointments for three of his contemporaries—his sister Kim Kyong Hui, her husband, Jang Song Thaek, and a trusted general Ri Yong Ho—as a kind of protectorate around the son.
They will be squaring off against some of the same forces, such as freer flow of information, that earlier this year drove sweeping changes in places like Egypt, Libya and Myanmar. In particular, North Korea's economy has become far more complex than it was in 1994, creating incentives in certain parts of the population to challenge the regime, though with some limits.
One clear difference from the 1994 transition has emerged as crucial for the Kim family: China now serves a far greater role as political and economic benefactor. It is in Beijing's interests to maintain a functioning government in North Korea, to avoid scenarios of refugees flooding into China, or of a regime friendly to Seoul and Washington taking over along its border.
"If China were a credit ratings agency, they'll see it as their duty to make sure Kim Jong Eun has triple-A status," said John Park, a specialist on northeast Asia at the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington. "They're likely to provide more political and economic capital to show legitimacy for the next North Korean government."
Early Monday in Asia, North Korea announced that Mr. Kim had died Saturday morning of a heart attack while on a train away from his home in the capital city of Pyongyang.
Mr. Kim, who according to varying accounts was 69 or 70 years old, suffered a stroke-like illness in 2008, recovered and, for the past two years, maintained a busy schedule of public appearances. His last such outing occurred on Thursday at a music information center and at a supermarket in Pyongyang.
On Monday afternoon, state media issued TV footage of citizens weeping at the news of the leader's death.
Some Seoul-based North Korea-oriented news sites, citing anonymous sources reached by cellphone inside the country, reported that the military deployed large numbers of soldiers along the North's border with China on Sunday, in an apparent attempt to thwart a rise of potential defectors.
The North's official news agency said Mr. Kim's funeral will be held on Dec. 28 but that foreign delegations won't be invited. That relieves diplomats in the U.S., South Korea and Japan—the countries that the North Korea government portrays as its mortal enemies—of potentially awkward decisions about who to send to Pyongyang.
"That confirms my suspicion that the regime will be inward-looking for some time," said Peter Beck of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "They're going to be jockeying for position...I'm not expecting a lashing out or a reaching out."
North Korea waited more than two days to announce Mr. Kim's death, a bit longer than the 36 hours it took to announce the death of Mr. Kim's father, Kim Il Sung, who started North Korea in 1948 and presided over it until his death in 1994.
The delay, in both instances, was seen as a sign of the need for the Kim regime to coordinate and solidify both the messages it wanted to send to its citizens and the outside world.
"It's particularly sobering because what the U.S., South Korea, China and all of us want to know is how is this guy doing. Are people lining up in favor of him? Does the government seem to be functioning?" said Jennifer Lind, a government professor at Dartmouth College.
Mr. Kim's funeral next week will likely provide the first visible signs of how the younger Mr. Kim is faring, and outsiders will watch carefully to see if he speaks and who is seated near him. "The funeral will show who's in and who's out," Mr. Beck said.
Much of the younger Mr. Kim's success depends on his ability to maintain economic stability. A two-track system developed under his father, in which the elite and military took over the remnants of the centralized economy, while most North Koreans subsisted with what food they could grow and what business they could do in informal markets that are technically considered illegal.
Mr. Park said the two-track economy has started to reinforce itself because each group has leverage over the other. "Lower-rung officials can sell their rations into the general markets," he said. "And those getting more wealthy in the informal markets have the ability to bribe officials."
—Adam Entous, Laura Meckler and Alex Frangos
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