Visiting former U.S. President Bill Clinton shared his views Feb. 26 on issues ranging from the Middle East peace process; the North Korean nuclear crisis; tension over the Taiwan Strait; and trilateral relations between Japan, China and the United States.

Clinton talked with Asahi Shimbun foreign affairs columnist Yoichi Funabashi, and fielded questions from university students. The forum was sponsored by The Asahi Shimbun, which published the Japanese edition of Clinton's autobiography ``My Life.'' About 1,000 people attended the event at the Hotel Okura in Tokyo's Minato Ward.

Following are excerpts from the forum:

ON NORTH KOREA Showing a better lifestyle could spur regime change

Funabashi: In your book, you mention that you had to decide whether to go to North Korea, and you didn't.

If you had visited, do you think things would have worked out differently?

Do you think it is possible to have diplomatic dealings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il?

Clinton: I think the short answer is, I'm not sure, I don't know. I believe if I had gone to North Korea we could have gotten an agreement to end the production of long-range missiles.

But let me remind you all of exactly what happened and what precipitated the current crisis.

In 1994, North Korea had those spent fuel rods, highly valuable for producing fissile material for nuclear weapons. So we agreed in 1994 with the North Koreans that they would secure the spent fuel rods, they would not build the second nuclear reactor at 200 megawatts. They could have been building 10 or 12 nuclear weapons a year, if we hadn't done that in 1994.

What we did not know is that in 1998, North Korea began a separate and secret small program using highly enriched uranium in a laboratory to try to to make a nuclear weapon. It was much, much smaller than the program we ended in 1994, but it still violated at least the spirit of our agreement. It could have given them enough fuel at most to make two weapons a year probably more like one, but it shattered the confidence of the Bush administration and a lot of other people.

I think that the six-party talks are good. I think the North Koreans should come back. I think the Americans should talk frankly with them in the context of the six-party talks, and make it clear that we will be a part of helping them, as Japan has been very generous in doing, in providing food and energy. So we have to make a deal here, and I expect it to work out this year.

But the real problem is North Korea feels that its only leverage to gain attention and force people to do anything is to threaten to do what it does well, build bombs and missiles. That goes back to your final question, can we trust them? We don't have to trust them if we have inspection provisions that are strong enough. We just need to draw up an inspection provision that's strong enough so that, if they cheat, we'll find out, then we don't have to worry about trust.

Funabashi: According to North Korea, the United States did not honor the Agreed Framework.

Clinton: You know it's just not true that we weren't making a good faith effort to implement the framework agreement.

The North Koreans knew perfectly well that I had worked with the Japanese primarily and the South Koreans to try to get the food and energy they needed.

So all they did by pulling this stunt with this laboratory testing was to give aid and comfort to their adversaries in America. I think they did it, because they thought they needed a little extra leverage to get a better deal in the end. But they made a bad mistake because they made us all mad in America.

Funabashi: Around 1994 to 1995, some senior officials in your administration started suggesting that the North Korean regime would not last very long.

What were your thoughts about the North Korean regime's sustainability?

Clinton: I was much more skeptical about regime change in North Korea than some people were in my government and some people are on President Bush's government. For one reason, you can't replace somebody with nobody. And ironically, you know the absence of civil society, the absence of political opposition, the absence of any known sources of strength and capacity to govern make it harder to change.

And I felt that the best way to get change and to build up centers of opposition over the long run was to open up North Korea. I think that the best way to hasten regime change is to expose the people of North Korea to a different, better lifestyle. So I think we should engage if we can. But they've got to put the nuclear program down. They have to stop producing and selling long-range missiles.

ON MIDDLE EAST Mideast shifts show need for multilateral diplomacy

Funabashi: What is needed for the stability and democratization of Iraq? To what extent can Iraq achieve these targets?

Clinton: There was an attempt in the Sunni area to intimidate voters, and yet 58 percent of the people in the country went to the polls and voted. So in that sense, it was clearly a success.

I think that the most important thing now is to set up a functioning representative government without cutting the Sunnis out.

Then we need help from all willing countries to train security forces so that this new government can provide an atmosphere of order and safety.

It's quite possible that the experiment will work, if they can be genuinely representative, and if they can provide for the security of their people.

Funabashi: What is your assessment of al-Qaida?

Clinton: As to the capacity of al-Qaida throughout the world, we were successful, when I was president, in taking down more than 20 of their cells and stopping several attacks they had planned in various parts of the world. Since Sept. 11, more than 20 more cells have been taken down. A lot of the money networks have been disrupted. And to some extent, al-Qaida is acting more like a management consultant for terror. That is, while their operational capacity has been rather dramatically eroded in many places, they still have lots of contacts. They still have lots of money. They still have expertise. They still have some operatives. So I would say they're still the most dangerous independent terrorist network in the world. But their operational capacity is much less than it once was.

Funabashi: Why couldn't former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat come to an agreement on Middle East peace? Can President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon make any progress in achieving peace?

Clinton: I think that insofar as Mr. Arafat got any message at all from the Arab nations, he was encouraged to sign the agreement.

I think in the end he decided he was terrified that anybody would accuse him of compromise. Well, you can't have an agreement without a compromise. He would have gotten about 97, 98 percent of what he wanted. The Palestinians would have had a state, and thousands and thousands of people would be alive in the Middle East today.

Arafat was not a coward. He survived a lot of assassination attempts. But he lacked the emotional courage to look people who called him a traitor in the eye and tell them they were wrong. It requires a different kind of courage. And sometimes it requires more courage to stand up to words than to stand up to bullets and bombs.

Abbas has basically said the conflict is over, terrorism is illegitimate, and he wants to work with the Israelis on peace. Sharon has dissolved his own government and took in Labor Party leader Shimon Peres so there would be a coalition sufficient to withdraw from Gaza. But let me remind you all that withdrawing from Gaza is just the beginning. They need some investment. They need something positive to do while the diplomacy is working its will.

Also, they should tell everybody right now what the final agreement is and then phase in the implementation of it. That way you can hold people to the deal because they know what it's going to look like at the end.

Funabashi: How should the United States deal with the rising tide of anti-Americanism?

Clinton: I think that by sending Condoleezza Rice to the State Department, President Bush was saying that diplomacy would be more important than force in his second term. Or at least, he hopes it will be.

And the world should not see America solely through the Iraq policy, even if you disagree with it. Because on balance, we're not an imperialist country and we mean the world well.

My policy was that we should cooperate with other people whenever we can, and act alone only when we're forced to. In Bush's first term, there was a little of the reverse. We should act alone when we can, and cooperate if we have to. But I think you will see in this second term more diplomacy.

Funabashi: Abdul Qadeer Khan was involved in black-market sales that aided the nuclear programs of Libya, North Korea and Iran. Some say this black market has the risk of undermining the nonproliferation treaty regime.

Clinton: Well, first of all, I think that the identification and the exposure of the Khan network has been the most important achievement of the intelligence community by far since President Bush has been in office.

The existence of the Khan network, it seems to me, emphasizes two points that may be in conflict of one another. One is the importance of a nonproliferation regime to restrain the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. And the second is the difficulty of doing it.

We're not going to plug every hole, we're not going to succeed at every effort. But we can drastically minimize the problem by first identifying, securing and, wherever possible, destroying all supplies of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and nuclear materials that we can.

ON CHINA AND JAPAN Competing on military terms is counterproductive to ties

Funabashi: In your second term as president, you said there should be a strategic partnership between China and the United States. Do you think even to this day that China should have been seen as a counterpart for a strategic partnership?

Clinton: Well, first of all it is true that we used the term strategic partnership, although it wasn't solely a military term. We developed that phrase partly to answer the fears of the Chinese that America was trying to contain them rather than cooperate with them in the 21st century. And we developed that phrase to show that we could build a future together. I still believe it is in our interest.

China is also a little nervous about America and Japan, because of our recent security declaration in which Japan mentioned Taiwan for the first time and joined with America in mentioning it. Although, all we really did was reaffirm our joint policy which is that we think there ought to be a peaceful resolution to this.

But the Chinese saw it in the context of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's criticism of their military build-up, and the president's (Bush's) attempt to dissuade the Europeans from selling weapons to China. So we've got kind of a messy situation here.

Japan and the United States would be better off if our competition with the Chinese were in the economic, athletic, cultural and scientific fields, and not military. So we should work for a strategic partnership which embeds China more deeply in international institutions of cooperation, both regional and global, and give them every incentive to act responsibly.

So, we should work and hope for the best, but we have no choice but to remain prepared for whatever might happen.

Funabashi: You once said China's introduction to the Internet may help its democratization. Is it happening?

Clinton: Well I think some Chinese leaders thought that it would facilitate the speed of democracy, too, which is why they tried to control part of the Internet and access to some Web sites. I think the political system per se is still not democratic, not close. There is a lot more personal liberty in China than ever before.

Funabashi: Now, Japan-China relations are in a very difficult state. How do you see Japan in these relations and how will they affect U.S. interests in the long term and the future of Asia. Some of those so-called Neo-Cons in the United States say that a deteriorating situation between Japan and China would be even better for the United States.

Clinton: I don't agree with that. The Neo-Cons are part of what I would call the clan mentality in America. They desperately need an enemy and they are only happy when they have an enemy. Saddam Hussein is gone and they need a new enemy.

You should fight your enemies when they present themselves as such; you shouldn't define them as enemies in advance because then you create the very crisis that you claim you're only responding to. Now having said that, I think it is for the foreseeable future likely that the United States will always be closer to Japan because we are both democracies.

But unlike the Neo-Cons, I don't want to pick a fight with China. I want to find a way to change China to make them come to us.

Funabashi: Looking back, how do you see your policy toward Taiwan? When we consider the future of Taiwan, what are the things we have to bear in mind?

Clinton: The short answer to your question is that I think my policy succeeded and I will explain why: We have a ``One China'' policy but we want neither side to do anything to try to change the situation by force. I was afraid that would happen and that is why (in 1996) I sent those two aircraft carriers into the Taiwan Strait.

But if you go back and look, you will also see that I didn't say anything. That is, I didn't have any big macho rhetoric, I didn't try to do anything to embarrass the Chinese.

I was just trying to say, ``Let everyone calm down here and not have any killing, not have any violence, not have any problems.''

There are 10 million people on mainland China working for Taiwanese companies. There is massive bilateral trade, investment and communications.

If no political action is taken by either side to change the current status quo, the people involved will resolve it, that is, we'll have one China. They'll be so tied together economically and socially and personally that no one would think of having any serious military conflict over it.

Funabashi: With regard to this East Asia Summit and the movement for East Asian regionalism what are your views?

Clinton: I feel the same way about East Asian regionalism as I did about the EU. So long as it's not going to be used to sort of shut us out economically or forget about our security interests and your need for our security partnership in this region, I think more regional cooperation is good.

That's got to be in America's interest over the long-time run. I think sometimes this (resistance toward regional cooperation) is all psychological. We need to live in a world where we do not define our success by someone else's failure.

Funabashi: Is it possible at all, from the U.S. perspective, to improve Japan-U.S. relations?

Clinton: First of all I think that I was thrilled that President Bush and Mr. Koizumi got along so well. Whether you think we are right or wrong in Iraq, I just think, when the United States and Japan feel that they are close together, it increases both our security, our sense of security, and it makes us more willing to try to build a better world.

But again I think that it is important that you say, ``OK, they're getting along and we feel good about each other, what are we going to do with our partnership?'' We should expect our president and the prime minister to maintain a strong security and economic partnership and then we should say: `Now what do we do to build a 21st century world?'(IHT/Asahi: March 5,2005)