The Reuters news agency says the U.S. State Department appears to have scored key victories over hard-liners in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the Bush administration by persuading the White House to shift its approach on North Korea and Iraq.

After initially refusing to offer North Korea any "quid pro quos" to terminate its suspected nuclear weapons program, the Bush administration this week signaled it was willing to consider offering some incentives to Pyongyang.

The reports said that in changing its approach on North Korea, the White House appears to have resigned itself to the prospect that it is unlikely to persuade the North to end its nuclear ambitions without giving it something in return.

The report quoted Jim Steinberg, a former deputy national security adviser to President Bill Clinton as saying that the realities and especially the political realities have caused the White House to recognize that sticking with the intransigent line the Pentagon and others have been advocating carries political risk as well as foreign policy risk.

The Brookings Institution scholar added that THAT is turning foreign policy into a potential liability for President George W. Bush rather than a plus, suggesting threats from North Korea and U.S. casualties in Iraq could hurt Bush's 2004 re-election prospects.

But the White House denied Friday that it has made a significant shift on North Korea policy by contemplating a sequence of inducements for the Stalinist state to renounce nuclear weapons.