GOOD NEWS FROM KOREA

When Japan’s prime minister schedules a visit to North Korea, one-third of President Bush’s “axis of evil,” it’s big news and reason for hope. Japan evidently sees an opportunity to negotiate outstanding differences between the two countries. The Bush administration seems to have given up on diplomacy with the reclusive and prickly North Korean regime.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi proposed the Sept. 17 summit in Pyongyang, but events in the past six months suggest that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has been doing the wooing. He has been permitting Japanese charter flights for the first time to land in Pyongyang with tourists and economic missions. And he has hinted that negotiations might heal old wounds like Japan’s colonization of Korea and Korea’s refusal to let Japanese wives of Korean men return to Japan. North Korea has also eased relations with South Korea, agreeing to construction of road and rail links between Seoul and Pyongyang starting Sept. 18, the day after Mr. Koizumi’s visit. The ice is breaking.

Why these dramatic changes? North Korea is desperately poor. It depended on China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Now adrift on its own resources, it desperately needs food and energy and cash, which it earns largely by making and selling missiles to Pakistan and other countries. The United States is building nuclear power plants, promised for 2003 but now delayed for many years. With little prospect for aid or talks with the United States, North Korea has turned to Japan for help.

Don’t look for quick solutions for long-standing grievances. But the mere existence of negotiations, which could go on for a year or more, offers a breathing spell and an opportunity for the United States. With talks in progress, North Korea won’t want to rock the boat. This is the view of Selig S. Harrison, a North Korea expert at the Center for International Policy in Washington. He spends the summer on Islesford, in the Cranberry Isles, and over the past weekend has been taking calls from The New York Times in Tokyo, the BBC in London, and National Public Radio.

Mr. Harrison makes a persuasive case that North Korea, while it has offensive capabilities, is too busy managing its economic survival to look for excuses to attack the United States. He sees strong possibility that it could in time be persuaded to halt its construction and export of missiles in return for compensation (which could amount to several billion dollars but could take the form of food and energy assistance).

A first step could be sending Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly on his long-planned but repeatedly delayed mission to Pyongyang to size up the prospects for dealing with the missile problem, for eventual normal relations with North Korea and, at long last, for an end of the 1950s Korean War.