The Korea Challenge
By David Ignatius
Washington Post
January 7, 2001; Page B07SEOUL -- Looming above the stairway to the office of President Kim Dae Jung in the Blue House, South Korea's presidential mansion, is a large tapestry depicting the Korean peninsula. Like the Korea in the imagination of many of the president's compatriots, it has no border dividing north and south. Kim realizes that his homeland, carved in half by the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II, probably won't be reunited in his lifetime. That process will take another 20 to 30 years, he said in an interview Friday. But the South Korean leader doesn't want to slide back into the past, either. And he worries that his rapprochement with North Korea -- symbolized by the dramatic visit last June to Pyongyang that won him the Nobel Peace Prize -- may be undone because of misjudgments by the new administration of George W. Bush.
Kim said he plans to visit Washington soon to urge Bush to maintain support for his "Sunshine Policy" of engagement with North Korea. And he hinted at the message he'll deliver to the new U.S. president: Don't change course; support continued dialogue with the North; don't push North Korean leader Kim Jong Il back into a corner.
Korea presents what may be the Bush administration's trickiest foreign policy problem outside the Middle East. It's a region where the new administration has especially hawkish views and where its rhetoric conflicts directly with the peace policies of a close ally. And because 37,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, it's one of the few places on earth where U.S. missteps could lead to a real war.
It's also a region where the Clinton administration accomplished some important gains: helping Kim Dae Jung draw the isolated neo-Stalinists of North Korea into a process of dialogue and change. Indeed, Clinton had hoped to cap his presidency by visiting Pyongyang himself to sign an accord limiting North Korean missile development, but he ran out of time. When the incoming Bush administration looks at North Korea, it sees red -- a rogue nation that's a living demonstration of the need for a missile defense system to protect the United States (and, in theory, South Korea) from attack. One senior South Korean diplomat worries that in the mind of Defense Secretary-designate Donald Rumsfeld, North Korea has become a "poster child" for missile defense. He fears that the new administration will create "a missile arms race in our region and a return to an 'us-them' mentality." President Kim chose his words carefully in the interview Friday with the International Herald Tribune, and he specifically refused to answer a question about the Bush administration's enthusiasm for missile defense. He said he would wait to hear what administration officials had to say on the subject when he visited Washington, perhaps as soon as March.
While he noted that there are different voices in the new administration, Kim Dae Jung said he expects that Bush will support his policy of engagement with the North. He said he wants the United States, too, to continue engaging Pyongyang -- through the tripartite U.S.-Japan-South Korea approach that the Clinton administration backed. The South Korean leader said he wants Washington to understand that the North really has changed -- not because its Communist leaders wanted change but because change was forced on them by the need to survive economically. He said the most important sign of that change is Kim Jong Il's acceptance of the proposition that U.S. military forces should remain in South Korea to foster security and balance in the region.
North Korea must go further and agree to give up its nuclear and missile threats, President Kim said. South Korean officials are worried that if the Bush administration simply denounces North Korea -- and pushes ahead with an aggressive missile defense program -- Kim Jong Il will retreat into isolation. In that case, the only leverage available to the desperately poor North Korean regime will be military force. With thousands of North Korean artillery tubes pointed at Seoul -- and at U.S. troops near the DMZ -- defending against a long-range missile attack may be the least of America's worries.
The Korean peninsula poses a classic test of the basic conundrum of foreign policy: Is security best achieved by a "soft" policy of negotiation with a potential adversary or a "hard" policy of building weapons to blunt that adversary's power? The right security policy is usually some combination of the two. But in its enthusiasm for building weapons, the Bush administration could subvert the process of negotiation that's already underway.
(c) 2001 The Washington Post Company