PERSPECTIVE ON NORTH KOREA : Demanding to Be Left Alone : Sanctions would further isolate a country already striving mightily against infection by the West.

Should efforts to bring Pyongyang to heel over the nuclear-inspection issue fall through and the United States manages to persuade the United Nations to invoke sanctions against North Korea, the action will have, on the country’s 22 million inhabitants, precisely no effect. The North Koreans will scowl and bear it, just as they have scowled and borne the vicissitudes of the half-century of ill fortune that have dogged their remarkable little country. For we are dealing here with a people who are, if nothing else, as tough as steel; they know only too well how to tolerate the disapprobation of the outside world. They will soldier on.

I hold no particular brief for the country or its leadership, other than an abiding affection for Korean people as a whole. The tragedy of their division, now 40 years old, is almost as overwhelming as it is dangerous; and one can only cling to the belief that one day--as with all partitioned countries--the Koreas will be reunited. But in the meantime it is perhaps reasonable, especially at this critical moment when the whole world seems to be glaring down on Pyongyang, to consider the realities of the division, and wonder whether what Kim Il Sung (the longest-serving national leader on the planet) has created is really as bad as the White House and the State Department would have us believe.

I am certain that it is not. Few of those who speak of North Korea have been there; the knowledge that they claim to have is based on the persuasive propaganda of the South Koreans, the gap-riddled intelligence of Langley and Fort Meade or the tales of escaped dissidents.

I am only too aware that on my several visits in recent years to Pyongyang, Wonsan, Nampo, Kaesong and some smaller North Korean towns, what I have been permitted to see has been sanitized, the people to whom I have been permitted to talk have been selected, all my observations have been screened through Northern doublespeak. But even so, there are some inescapable realities: This is a nation that does not wish to be affected or infected by the Western--and more specifically the American--way of life. It is a country that just wants to be left alone. It is a country that doesn’t want any outsiders to presume to tell it what to do. And in that context, even Pyongyang’s pained complaints over the nuclear issue have a vague reasonableness: Why, they say, should anyone presume to tell them what they might do within the privacy of their own frontiers?

Remember that Korea, as a peninsular entity, has had those frontiers crossed and recrossed with grim regularity--and that as a nation it was invaded and colonized by the Mongols, the Manchus, the Chinese, the Japanese. In South Korea today, there is an enormous influence--almost a colonial influence--by an America that retains troops there, provides CNN there, offers McDonald’s there. The attempts to retain traditions are fast waning in a South Korea that is, in many ways, becoming much like everywhere else--a part of the borderless world, host to all foreign influences and victim of their dubious gifts.

But in North Korea, all is purely and solely Korean, and there is a grim determination to remain so. There are no Chinese characters in their language--only Korea’s own hangul script. There are no advertisements for Japanese cars--only exhortation to ride on the country’s own dubiously engineered buses. You will not hear Madonna on the radio, only the pleasantly enduring music of the kayagum and the rather less pleasant paeans to the party leadership. The philosophy of juche-- socialist self-reliance--may be an incomprehensible melange, but it has kept North Korea utterly and completely Korean.

The people I have seen over the years are reasonably well sheltered and clothed and fed; they have work; they have some knowledge of the outside world (I lunched recently with a North Korean diplomat in New York, and he spoke fondly of reading Charles Dickens’ “Dombey and Son” at his school in Sinuiju town. They have no freedoms, true. But then again, there will be no tragedies such as befell Polly Klaas or British toddler James Bulger, no Hustler magazines on the newsstands, no need for a drug czar or a Brady Act. And the freedom whose loss in Pyongyang we deride will seem perhaps less significant to a homeless women shivering in the cold of a Second Avenue doorway or to someone just felled by a stray bullet in the Bronx.

Frankly, in many ways I applaud North Korea’s insistent defiance, its steadfast decision to march to the beat of a different drummer. Providing that it leaves the rest of the world alone--and with the possibility of atomic weapons in its arsenal, that is a crucially important caveat--then the rest of the world should perhaps leave it alone. North Korea is perhaps not so much a menace as talking makes it so.