WASHINGTON - Japan and the United States will delay plans to move a military base in Okinawa during top-level talks on Tuesday, officials said, as pressure builds for a new solution to the long-running rift.

US President Barack Obama's administration had hoped that Japan's massive March earthquake would help turn the page on a years-old dispute over US troop levels. But US senators have pressed for a rethink, calling plans unfeasible.

Japanese Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa, one of two Japanese officials in the talks with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said it would be difficult to complete the base plan by the 2014 goal.

"There is no point in dragging out something that cannot be done just because we agreed to do it before. What we are saying is let's deal with this realistically," Kitazawa told The New York Times before departing from Tokyo.

An US official, speaking to reporters in Washington on condition of anonymity, said that the meeting would result in "a readjustment of the timeline" to one that is "more realistic".

"It does not take a math prodigy to look at the calendar, look at the original timelines that were laid out, look at the progress that has been made and make a determination about what can and can't be completed between now and 2014," the official said.

Sealed in 2006 after exhaustive negotiations, the realignment plan calls for the closing of the Futenma air base, which lies in a crowded urban area of subtropical Okinawa island and has long been a source of grievance.

The plan, signed under the administrations of George W. Bush and Junichiro Koizumi, would have a new base built on an isolated part of Okinawa with some 8,000 Marines leaving by 2014 for the US territory of Guam.

Some Okinawan activists demanded that the base be removed entirely from Okinawa, which bears half of the 47,000-strong US military presence in Japan.

Yukio Hatoyama, resigned last year as prime minister after failing to fulfill campaign promises to renegotiate Futenma, with the Obama administration insisting that the crux of the deal was not open to debate.

Agence France-Presse