Korea: Land of the morning calm smells the coffee

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

The announcement that South Korean President Kim Dae Jung is sending spiemaeister Lim Dong-won to Pyongyang to pick up talks with Kim Jong-il is a vindication of President Bush’s “evil axis” strategy.

There can, of course, be no predicting where this new initiative will lead. North Korea is a failed regime perched on the razor’s edge. It is precariously balanced between a desperate end-of-the-world scenario in which it would use its formidable military for a suicidal attack on the South, or the beginning of the dissolution of a Stalinist structure much as occurred in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

But here are the elements which have produced movement:

Beijing’s willingness to transfer Korean refugees from China to South Korea via the Philippines is an indicator that Chinese leadership, whatever its ideological predispositions, understands that North Korean failure can no longer be disguised. The two dozen lucky Koreans who had broken into the Spanish embassy and threatened suicide if they were returned to North Korea are only token. In fact, Chinese authorities are more than ever trying to round up and return the several hundred thousand North Koreans who escaped starvation and persecution hiding among fellow native ethnics in the region. And there is, of course, growing evidence that Beijing continues to collaborate with Pyonyang in weapons development and proliferation of its missiles to the pariah states [and to Washington’s ostensible ally, Egypt!] But with the Chinese regime, itself, faced with unprecedented industrial dispute demonstrations in the Daquing oilfields and threatening to break out in other bankrupt state companies facing rationalization, in the throes of a succession struggle, its economic crisis arising out of its affiliation to the International Trade Organization, the growing self-assurance of the Taiwan regime in the face of alternative threats and seductive noises from Beijing, the Chinese Communists simply do not have the political capital to shore up the North Korean regime.

Japan’s new tough line, not only toward Korean infiltration ships [A Sense of Asia, March 11: Japan-China: the important relationship], but toward the nebulous world of yakaza and embittered radicals who have long dominated the large Japan Korean population and made it Pyonyang’s largest foreign exchange earner, indicates more policy coordination with Washington and Seoul than in the past. Given the long and bitter history of Korean-Japanese antagonism, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi’s just completed visit to South Korea appears “successful”. It will be a long and troubled road with no sure outcome. But negotiations on all issues – from revising Japanese history books to forming a new free trade zone – have been put on track. If only marginally successful, they could be, if a Japanese-Korean warming were to be successful, the most important relationship in East Asia for American strategists.

Washington appears to have settled on just the right dose of public hard talk to the North Koreans and willingness signaled quietly through diplomatic and other channels that the U.S. is willing to work out a modus operandi with Pyongyang. The details of the so-called framework laid out in the Clinton Administration are now being put to a means test – rather than the nebulous “feel good” strategy of the past. [Sec. Of State Madeleine Korbel Albright never seemed to understand that despite her frolic in Pyongyang with Kim Il Jong it takes two to tango.]

There is still the danger – despite the wrist-slapping that went on in Washington during his visit last year and the less than cordiality that permeated Bush’s brief visit to Seoul – that Kim Dae Jung will underplay what is now his strong hand. Rapidly trotting into the sunset as his lame duck regime winds down at yearend, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Kim is sorely tempted to make more compromises than he should – as his critics complain he did earlier – in his quest for his political lifetime’s goal of reunification. But the fact that the initiative for this round of talks is in the North-South Korea arena, rather than Pyongyang’s traditional insistence that its primary interlocutor is the U.S., is an enormous personal victory for Kim Dae Jung and for the Allied side and may presage a new order of tactics by North Korea.

Bush has taken some heavy hits from critics over his Korean policy, perhaps more than on any other issue in a world that suddenly seems to have come unstuck with terrorism and captious allies. That he phrased it in “moral” terms has invited the contempt of pseudo-sophisticates [unpublicized] in some U.S. bureaucratic circles as well as among some of the old foreign policy lions in Senate – not to say among our European allies [widely publicized].

But the fact that the two Koreans may now get on to a tit-for-tat program of improving their bilateral relations – despite the Bush Administration’s public refusal to buy off Kim Il Jong – indicates that the Korean logjam, one of the most dangerous places on earth, is moving, seemingly in the right direction.