The Rising East
AFTER South Korean President Kim Dae- jung journeyed to Pyongyang to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, a year ago this month, euphoria enveloped the Korean Peninsula. Grand visions of reconciliation danced in the air after one war, numerous violent clashes and five decades of hostility. Euphoric talk of Korean
reconciliation fades in
memory todayToday, North Korea has reverted to all but a smidgen of its earlier belligerence. The Pyongyang propaganda machine regularly condemns the United States as "the rogue state of the worst type in the world" and Japan as "infusing militarism and ideas of overseas aggression into the rising generation."
South Korea has been somewhat less of a target in recent months. President Kim Dae- jung is often ignored while unnamed South Korean "authorities" are accused of "un- pardonable anti-national and anti-reunification crimes." Given the shrouds that cover almost everything in North Korea, the reasons for this subdued mood are unclear.
WHATEVER THE case, South Korea still awaits a long expected return visit by Kim Jong-il. The reconstruction of a railroad that once ran between Seoul and Pyongyang has gone nowhere. Cross-border visits by separated families are in a lull. Hopes for trade and for South Korean investment in the North have evaporated.
Perhaps most significant, the North Koreans have made no move to pull back their massed armed forces from the 4,000-meter wide, 151-mile long demilitarized zone that divides the peninsula. Nor has Pyongang relented in its drive to sell military missiles to almost anyone who will buy them.
AS A PROMINENT Korean scholar and adviser to President Kim, Moon Chung-in of Yonsei University, has noted, the summit and its aftermath "failed to produce concrete measures to resolve the security problems surrounding the Korean peninsula."
An exception to this antagonism has been the diplomatic mini-campaign that North Korea has waged for the past year, welcoming delegations from Europe and elsewhere in Asia, establishing relations with some, and accepting economic aid from everyone. The North Korean economy, which had been in a free fall for about eight years, has stopped sliding but starvation is still widespread.
PRESIDENT BUSH'S administration has been reviewing U.S. policy toward North Korea and the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, James Kelly of Honolulu, has said that the results are due to be disclosed within a few weeks. It is expected to call on Pyongyang to show good faith, which has been missing so far, in negotiating its differences with the United States.
Certainly, if the indicators coming from the Central Intelligence Agency in recent months are to be taken at face value, few in Washington will put much trust in what the North Koreans say but rather will look closely at what they do.
The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, told a congressional committee last winter that North Korea continued to develop its Taepo Dong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile that "could deliver a nuclear-sized payload to the United States." Such missiles could also carry biological or chemical warheads.
"Our main concern," Tenet told the committee, "is Pyongyang's continued exports of ballistic related equipment and missile components, materials, and technical expertise. North Korean customers are countries in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa."
SEVERAL WEEKS ago, the deputy director of the CIA, John E. McLaughlin, elaborated on the North Korean threat in an address in Texas. "The challenge that North Korea poses to us and our allies," he said, "has grown in complexity and peril."
Even though North Korea promised to stop making nuclear weapons in 1994 at a plant known to the United States, McLaughlin said that "we still cannot say for sure that nuclear-weapons work is not going on somewhere else." He said North Korea probably had one or two nuclear bombs.
The intelligence officer noted that Kim Jong-il's diplomacy reflected "a tactical flexibility" but that, strategically, "we have yet to see any comparable movement away from the legacy of Kim Il-sung and all that represents." The late Kim Il-sung was Kim Jong-il's father and the dictator whose basic objective was to conquer South Korea.
"Decisive to the success of this strategy," McLaughlin concluded, "is the projection of a credible threat...Like any policy founded on threats, it comes with the built-in possibility of accident or miscalculation -- by those who conduct it or by those to react to it."
Richard Halloran is editorial director of the Star-Bulletin.
He can be reached by e-mail at rhalloran@starbulletin.com