North Korean standards, the invective issued over the past week has bordered on civil. Instead of near daily threats of nuclear annihilation for the "nest of evil" in the United States and promises to "press the button," the North in recent days has grumbled over a "crafty ploy" and "cunning trick" by America and its allies to strip the North of its nuclear arsenal.The United States and South Korea, meanwhile, have made a change of their own: putting a new focus on offering talks after weeks of meeting North Korean provocations with harsh warnings that included deploying nuclear-capable stealth bombers on a practice run over South Korea.
Security analysts in South Korea and the United States expressed cautious optimism this week that the shift in tone, however understated, is a sign that after weeks of escalating threats that raised fears of armed conflict, both sides might be ready to calm tensions.
"I wouldn't say the crisis has passed, but maybe we're in a less dangerous phase," said Evans J. R. Revere, a former State Department expert on Asia who is now senior director of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm that specializes in Korea, China and Japan. "The possibility of a serious miscalculation is not as great as a few days ago."
He attributed North Korea's reduced bombast partly to what he called their position "at the top of the rhetorical escalatory ladder -- where do you go after you threaten to nuke Los Angeles, Austin, Texas and Washington? The place to go after that is to carry out your threats, and they are not in the position to do that."