If Clinton Talked Turkey to Elusive N. Korean Chief on Nuclear Deal . . .

Note: President Clinton ought to send the following letter, which I have helpfully written for him.

To: Kim Jong Il, Supposed Leader

Somewhere, North Korea

From: Bill Clinton, White House, Washington.

Dear Jong Il,

I guess it’s time to send you a public letter. I need to get a message across. For most of the past year, I’ve been trying to reach you. But to say the least, you haven’t made it easy.

Are you really running North Korea now? My own intelligence agencies don’t seem to know. They think you’re making the big decisions for your country. But you still haven’t been given your father’s old titles of North Korean president and party leader, the titles that all the experts were sure you would have by last October.

You don’t even like to talk to your own people, not even on television. That’s pretty hard for a loquacious guy like me to understand. In fact, the two of us don’t have too much in common, except for a certain tendency toward pudginess.

After your father died last July, I sent a condolence letter to the North Korean people that was supposed to catch your attention. Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich clobbered me for writing it, even though my note wasn’t too different from the one President Eisenhower sent to the Russians after Stalin’s death or the one President Ford sent when Mao died. What happened? I never even got a thank-you note.

Then, last October, after we signed that deal to stop your nuclear weapons program, I sent you a personal letter, addressed to “His Excellency” and to “The Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” You didn’t answer that letter, either. As Chelsea and her teen-age friends would ask: “Hello? Is anyone home?”

The nuclear deal last fall was supposed to fix things. The price was pretty high: $4 billion worth of new, safer nuclear reactors for you, plus regular supplies of fuel oil to help your economy, plus movement toward diplomatic relations. And even then, it will be another five years or so before we get the right to carry out the international inspections that would explain how far along you got in trying to make nuclear weapons.

Yet even after the deal was made, you’ve created new crises twice over the past six months. Last December, you held one of our helicopter pilots and, day after day, tried to use him as a bargaining chip. My aides had to spend their Christmas holidays working that one out.

Now you’re holding up the nuclear deal and threatening to refuel your old nuclear reactor. You say the light-water reactors we and our allies are going to provide you shouldn’t come from South Korea--or at least they shouldn’t be labeled as coming from South Korea.

Well, Supposed Leader, it’s time to tell you something. I’ve had enough of your bargaining tactics, and so have the American people.

Some experts think there’s a chance you’re about to try another clever ploy. They think you might go so far as to load some fuel back into your nuclear reactor without actually starting it up. And then magnanimously offer to go back into negotiations with us in Geneva.

That way, you’d be threatening us again, but the Chinese and Russians could still come around Washington and argue, “Why not go talk to them one more time? They still haven’t started up their reactor.”

If you do that, Jong Il, let me tell you what’s going to happen.

You know what we’ve already said in public. We’ve said that if you reload the reactor, we’re going to talk to our allies, Japan and South Korea, about asking the U.N. Security Council for economic sanctions against your country.

You’re not dumb, Supposed Leader. You’ve already figured out that we’re going to have a tough time going to the Security Council. The Chinese would stall us and ask for favors. The Russians, who desperately want to be part of the Korean diplomacy, would push their idea for a big international conference on Korea. Foreign Minister Kozyrev is out peddling that idea again.

You think the only other option for us is war. Some of my own advisers talk sometimes as though the only choice is between a bloody war and giving in to your demands.

But that’s not true, Supposed Leader. We have lots of other options besides war and U.N. sanctions. I thought I ought to tell you what is going to happen if you reload that reactor and threaten to start your nuclear program again.

First, that will be the end of the deal we signed last October. You know how your diplomats have been scouting out property to open up liaison offices in Washington? Forget it. I hear the D.C. real estate market is about to tighten up. Your country can keep on using Macao as your main window to the world and the 20th Century.

Second, you can forget about trade and investment in your country. I’ll even pull the plug on the new international phone lines AT&T; just opened. You can talk among yourselves for another 20 years.

Sure, American companies are mildly interested in North Korea, but they can certainly live without you. Even South Korean companies, like Samsung and Daewoo, which have been scouting out your country, could take their business elsewhere in Asia. They already have.

Third, you won’t get any other economic benefits either. Forget about the oil that was going to get your factories back to full shifts again. Are you going to feed the North Korean people nuclear weapons for breakfast and lunch--and, if you can afford three meals a day, dinner too?

You must have decided last October that you want this deal. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have signed it. So why are you making trouble again now? The only thing I can conclude is that you want to see if you can extract some more goodies and concessions from us.

Well, Supposed Leader, you’ve taught me a lot about bargaining. And so now I’m going to tell you about the new concession I’m going to give you.

You know those new reactors you’re quibbling about? We’ve thought about requiring that when they are installed on North Korean soil, they be fitted with signs and loudspeakers like those you put at the DMZ, all of them carrying the following message:

“This reactor was made in South Korea, a modern country, which was the site of the 1988 Olympics and has an economy more than 10 times the size of North Korea’s.”

The hawks on Capitol Hill and in South Korea want me to require this. But as a big concession to you, Supposed Leader, I’m not going to insist on those signs and loudspeakers. Just take the South Korean reactors and we’ll stick to the deal.

If the deal falls apart now, who are you going to rely on? China?

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Qiao Shi, one of China’s top leaders, recently paid a visit to Seoul. The Chinese just announced that they are going to allow South Korean airplanes to overfly their country, and South Korean Prime Minister Lee Hong Koo will visit Chinese Premier Li Peng in Beijing next week.

The Chinese are playing both sides in Korea, Supposed Leader, just the way your country used to play off the Chinese against the Russians during the Cold War.

Or maybe you think Jimmy Carter is going to bail you out again. If so, you don’t understand American politics. You think I’m going to contract out American foreign policy to Carter now, with a presidential election coming up? Dole would be all over me. And by the way, if this deal falls apart now, do you think you’re going to get better terms later on from the Republicans?

Jong Il, you are facing a big choice. Your father is dead, and you’re supposed to be in charge now. What you do about this nuclear deal will determine how you will be remembered in history.

Do you want to be considered the leader under whom North Korea reached a dead end, to be linked forever with poverty and isolation? Or do you want to be thought of as the leader who started something new?

Supposed Leader, whenever you (or whoever else is in charge of your country) have decided, let me know. You can even call me, if the international phone lines are still operating.

Sincerely yours,

Bill Clinton