After years meting out regular scoldings to Iran, Syria and North Korea, the United States is set to come face-to-face with its sworn foes in a sudden burst of diplomatic activity.

But the Bush administration fiercely denies it has undergone an overnight foreign policy conversion on the road to Damascus, Tehran or Pyongyang.

After weeks of accusing Iran of boosting Iraqi militias and the dispatch of two aircraft-carrier groups to the Gulf, top officials will now not rule out direct US-Iranian contacts in just scheduled regional meetings on Iraq.

And after six years of decrying one-on-one talks with Pyongyang as a reward for bad behavior, a senior US negotiator will meet a North Korean envoy next week to start thawing Cold War relations under a landmark nuclear deal...

Some foreign policy analysts dispute the administration line the contacts resulted from months of painstaking diplomacy which nudged its foes into a corner, namely through six-nation talks on North Korea, and a European-US front on Iran's nuclear challenge.

"This is very clearly an effort to bring the Iranians and the Syrians into a regional security discussion," said Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Steven Clemons, of the New America Foundation think-tank added : "something is going on in the decision making structure of the White House..."

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