The Obama administration, however, has become pessimistic about the prospect of renewed talks and its “fatigue” from dealing with the intractable nation for years with few results is holding Washington from moving more decisively, even after it officially announced a policy shift in which it would sit down one-on-one with the North Koreans to resolve the nuclear stalemate.

North Korea has repeatedly taken the initiative in the protracted negotiations, pulling out from the non-proliferation treaty and boycotting the six-party talks that were aimed at dampening its nuclear ambitions.

During Mr Wen’s visit to Pyongyang last week, North Korea appeared to have passed the ball back to the United States. Kim Jong Il, the leader, said the North “is willing to attend multilateral talks, including the six-party talks, depending on the progress in its talks with the United States”, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported.

At a trilateral summit in Beijing last weekend that was attended by Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama and the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, Mr Wen pressed for more forthcoming and decisive action by the three countries.

“North Korea does not only hope to improve relations with the United States, it also hopes to do so with South Korea and Japan,” Mr Wen told a news conference on Saturday. “We have to grab this opportunity to move forward, otherwise we may have to make even more efforts further down the road.”

The United States, however, has yet to act on the announcement of a bilateral meeting with North Korea that the state department made in September.

Observers said Washington’s hesitance may be because of Mr Wen’s recent trip to Pyongyang. Mr Park said the US had actually planned to send Stephen Bosworth, Barack Obama’s special representative for North Korea policy, to the North and have it pledge to return to the six-party talks and reaffirm its willingness for denuclearisation.

“But during Kim’s meeting with Wen, North Korea already promised all of these things [and the] US suddenly found itself having lost its agenda,” said Park Sun-won, who was the national security adviser to the South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, and now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

The United States is in the meantime reported to be reconfiguring its North Korea strategy, Mr Park said. However, the fundamental and larger problem, according to Mr Park, is “North Korean fatigue” within the Obama administration. “The bureau of East Asian and Pacific affairs at the state department and the White House National Security Council are very sceptical about the prospect of negotiating with North Korea. So, they are procrastinating,” he said.

On Monday, North Korea launched five missiles into the East Sea, ending a three-month hiatus from missile tests, South Korean defence officials said. Although the launches were part of the North’s annual military exercises, their timing has drawn critical attention.

“It was not a good move. It can further aggravate the ‘North Korean fatigue’. People will say: ‘See? North Koreans are firing missiles even when we are preparing for dialogue’,” Mr Park said.

Since April, North Korea has boycotted the China-hosted six-party talks, but during Mr Wen’s visit to Pyongyang, the North expressed its willingness to return to the multilateral platform. Some analysts view the move as little more than diplomatic lip service as Pyongyang waits for Washington to announce plans for bilateral talks.

“Nothing changed,” said Shen Dingli, a North Korean expert and the executive dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. “North Korea will either not return to six-party talks or will return but sabotage the meeting from within the talks.”

For a variety of reasons, the North would prefer one-on-one talks to negotiations involving six countries, among them competing interests of those involved in the talks, and the fact that direct bilateral talks with the world’s superpower by default elevate the North.

In addition to its “fatigue”, Mr Shen said, another key reason the US administration was moving slowly on the North Korean issue was because Washington sees North Korea fundamentally as a “manageable threat” and does not regard it as a key foreign policy front like Afghanistan or the Middle East. “North Korea is not a US priority,” Mr Shen said.

Leonid Petrov, an expert on North Korea who visited the country this month, agreed: “Given that President [Barack] Obama is less interested in north-east Asian affairs than his predecessor, I do not think that in the foreseeable future, Washington will talk to Pyongyang about anything else but unconditional surrender of its nuclear programme,” he said.

“That is to say, North Korea, while being genuinely interested in exchanging its indigenous nuclear programme for international diplomatic recognition and lifting of economic sanctions, will be given very little incentive to disarm,” said Mr Petrov, who now teaches at the University of Sydney.

The fatigue and pessimism are shared by some analysts, including Mr Shen, who believes North Korea’s main strategy is to buy time for improving its nuclear arsenal by entering negotiation, which it will walk away from again. “Simply, nothing can make North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons,” he said.

But the United States cannot procrastinate on holding bilateral talks with North Korea forever, analysts said. Mr Obama is pushing for an ambitious plan of nuclear non-proliferation, urging all countries who are not yet signatories to join the treaty. He has announced a concrete plan of enforcing it by May when an NPT review conference is to be held. The success of his plan will depend mainly on the progress he makes with North Korea and Iran.

foreign.desk@thenational.ae