Once again, there is disagreement among the partners, with South Korea fearing that the American desire for a cutoff will only provoke North Korea further.
It calls for a cutoff in the production of new materials for nuclear weapons; President Bush issued a similar proposal after the revelations that Pakistan's nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had spread such technology around the world.
PAGE A6 Egypt Cool to Rice on Hamas Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began a Middle East tour with a stop in Egypt, which she found unreceptive to American calls for a cutoff in aid to Hamas.
A few voices in Washington have called for a cutoff in aid, including Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.
"We understand the need for a cutoff date, but it should be 2013, not 2011," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration group.
If Mr. Clinton can coax India and Pakistan to consider reciprocal steps to ease tensions -- a reduction in Indian forces in Kashmir in return for a cutoff of Pakistani aid to the rebels -- the visit this week will have been valuable indeed.
Although South Korea has reduced its own food aid to the North, officials in Seoul criticized the Bush administration for forcing other nations to go along with its demand for a cutoff of fuel shipments to North Korea last year, even though the shipments had been arranged as part of the 1994 agreement, now broken.
After the Middle East peace talks broke down on Tuesday at Camp David, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement urging both sides to continue negotiations and called for a cutoff in assistance to the Palestinian Authority should Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, move to declare a state on his own.
Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Democratic Senator Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, joined the calls for a cutoff in aid, saying that the Egyptian government had used the unpopularity of Mohamed Morsi's administration as a license to restore the old military régime.
"When guys have a bad game or someone's at the wrong place for a cutoff or something else goes wrong that you've worked on a hundred times, that is where I think, 'I can't let that happen again,' and that's why sometimes I take it personally".
"The Egyptian military likely saw its suspicions as confirmed; in a tense standoff over democratization, the U.S. would buckle under pressure," Shadi Hamid, research director of the Brookings Doha Center recently wrote in an essay arguing for a cutoff in aid.
