The North-South Korean summit has opened a new phase in the great debate over the future of the Korean Peninsula by calling for a treaty to replace the armistice that ended the Korean war. But, although no one in South Korean President Roh Moohyun’s entourage dares to say so, talk of a peace treaty, more than 54 years after the guns fell silent, presents complications and pitfalls that are sure to become clear all too soon.

Might it be China, whose troops were “volunteers” – theoretically not under the command of the communist rulers who had completed their takeover of the mainland on October 1, 1949?

Incredibly, another candidate for exclusion may be South Korea. That’s because its president at the time, Rhee Syng-man, refused to authorise a truce that would legitimise the more or less permanent division of the Korean Peninsula.

His refusal to sign the truce gives Pyongyang an excuse to reject Seoul as an equal participant in peace talks. North Korea has often given the impression that the South hardly counts when it comes to negotiating issues like the North’s nuclear weapons programme.

The North would like nothing better than to sign a peace treaty with the US and China, relegating the South to subsidiary status. That would befit Pyongyang’s view that only one government should rule all Korea: a government led by Mr Kim and his inner circle. The North Korean concept of a peace treaty, moreover, is not just a document saying that the war is long over, and now let’s declare permanent peace. No, the reason Pyongyang wants this treaty is to dismantle the entire structure behind which South Korea has risen as a great economic power from the ashes of a war that left the South among the world’s poorest countries – poorer even than the North.

With the treaty would come provisions disbanding the UN Command while reducing US military strength to a marginal, advisory role at best. We may assume the treaty would not include provisions for a vast reduction in North Korea’s 1.1-millionman military establishment, much less pull most of them away from positions close to the demilitarised zone.

Actually, no one, certainly no foreign observer, could object to a simple peace treaty between South and North Korea. A foreigner would have to say that the two Koreas had every right to sign a treaty free from foreign interference.

That kind of treaty, however, would be too easy. The North is not interested in a peace treaty with the South. The whole point is to strengthen the North’s hand by drawing the US and China into the process of establishing a “peace regime” – under which North Korea stands to receive enormous quantities of aid while giving very little in return.

The US may be falling for North Korea’s stratagem. President George W. Bush has held out the possibility of a treaty after the North “verifies” that it has dismantled its nuclear programme.

Those interested in a peace treaty, though, should see it as a gimmick that runs the risk of undoing the prolonged peace under which South Korea thrives while North Korea – for all its weapons of mass destruction – remains mired by its own policies of massive self-destruction.