Hard line on Korea

No one should have expected much from last week’s White House meeting of President George W. Bush and President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea. Mr. Bush had just won a narrow victory in a campaign that stressed military toughness and pointed to North Korea, with its nuclear missiles, as a threat that must be taken seriously. New to dealing with foreign affairs, Mr. Bush had visited Asia only once, on a trip to China 25 years ago. Hawks in Congress and within his administration preferred continued pressure and confrontation to any further negotiations.

President Kim came as the winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his progress in coaxing the North Korean communist dictatorship part way out of its paranoid reclusiveness. He wanted support for his plan to persuade the North to close down its nu-clear and missile programs and to gradually integrate the North and South economies and move toward eventual unification of the Korean peninsula. He hoped that Mr. Bush would take advantage of what he called a narrow window of opportunity and resume the Clinton administration’s missile talks. Those talks had already achieved a suspension of North Korea’s nuclear production and a tentative offer to halt missile sales to other countries bent on becoming major nuclear powers.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, pressed by widespread famine and a near collapse of his country’s economy, seemed to see economic relations with the rest of the world as a means to survival. He had gone so far as inviting President Clinton to visit Pyong-yang. The Clinton talks and tentative plans for a Clinton visit ran out of time and fell though, entangled in the hang-fire presidential election.

Serious problems remained. North Korea had not yet agreed to destroy its existing nuclear stockpiles. Nor had it agreed to on-site inspection to verify future agreements on missile sales. (It had submitted, however, to international inspection to monitor a 1994 agreement to freeze plutonium processing at a suspected nuclear weapons plant, and regular inspections are still going on.)

One bright sign appeared on the eve of Mr. Bush’s meeting with the South Korean president. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the Bush team intended to “pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off.” It was the second time that Gen. Powell had seemed to break ranks with the Bush team’s hardliners. He had suggested “smarter” but smaller sanctions on Iraq, in contrast to a harder line by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In any event, however, the Bush people closed ranks. The president brusquely told the South Korean president that he would not resume the missile talks any time soon. He and his national security team tagged North Korea as a continuing threat. Mr. Bush expressed doubt that the North would respect any future agreements. Gen. Powell stepped out of the Oval Office to tell re-porters that North Korea was “a threat” and that “we have to not be naive about the nature of this threat, but at the same time realize that changes are taking place.”

Unspoken but clearly in mind was the fact that the North Korean missile programs have been the foremost justification for the ambitious, expensive and yet unproven program for a National Missile Defense, successor to President Reagan’s “Star Wars.”

For the time being, the Bush administration has thrown cold water on the plans and hopes of both Kims, South Korea’s Kim Dai Jung and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. The former, clearly disappointed, told reporters as the White House meeting ended that there had been “a frank and honest exchange of views,” diplomatspeak for disagreement.

But the Korean issue is not ended. The North faces economic collapse. The South fears a flood of starving emigres and pursues its search for a peaceful accommodation. And the American force of 37,000 still guards a border that both sides fear but neither is willing to breach. A half century after the Korean War, the armed stalemate looks ripe for a solution. The United States must remain wary, but it also should listen and learn and look for the possibility of helping rather than hindering.