Bumpy Ride to a Reconciliation : The U.S. should tread carefully with both North and South Korea as they inch uneasily toward unification.

If I were in government I’d steer clear of the North Korea portfolio for a cushier assignment--maybe health-care reform or even Iraq. Nothing personal against North Korea, but it’s a bizarre society with a cultish communist ideology that seals the place off from the outside. Its economy runs with the efficiency of a broken clock; an increasing fraction of the 22 million people in the Democratic People’s Republic now glumly face the prospect of starvation because of disastrous summer rains and the equally disastrous agricultural policies of their government; a small nuclear bomb or two is stored deep in some underground bunker (or two), ever ready to scare the living daylights out of the neighbors and destabilize the entire region. The government in Pyongyang, never one to honor the normal ways of doing things, plods incompetently along without a head of state following the death of maximum leader Kim Il Sung in 1994, and without a numero uno for the country’s ruling party, despite the efforts of Kim’s eccentric son to take control. It’s quite a place.

South Koreans enjoy a much better life in part because fate left them with a more successful and less rigid economic system, state-assisted capitalism, and a more successful and less rigid ally, the United States. These days an economically booming South Korea exports many notable items--including its most valuable commodity, Koreans who become Americans. Today more Koreans live in Los Angeles than in any city outside Asia. So that’s another thing that would make a North Korea assignment tricky: Many of these good people have friends or relatives in North Korea, which is reason enough for the West not to be either petty or pugnacious about Pyongyang.

Of course no Asia assignment nowadays is a lark. Later this week, Japan, whose success story is more economic than political, will have its fifth prime minister in three years. And sprawling China, with as many human-rights low points as economic high points, before long needs to crown a successor to Deng Xiaoping. Even so, North Korea’s problem is in a league of its own.

It might seem to follow that Asia-wide cheers would ring out were Pyongyang to shed its communist snakeskin and curl up in bed with the South. But don’t push the point with the Japanese, who would chafe over a One Korea that’s economically powerful, nationalistically resurgent and militarily competent. Or with the Chinese--they traditionally don’t like muscular neighbors (consider all that unpleasantness with Cambodia and Vietnam). As Asia expert Chalmers Johnson provocatively notes in the current National Interest journal, reunification “could make Korea an independent actor in northeast Asian politics, one the size of, and potentially as rich as, the former West Germany--and possessing a good army with nuclear weapons.”

For its part, the United States has 37,000 troops in the South and is publicly committed to staying there until 2015. And with a macho Congress breathing over the West Wing’s shoulder, the U.S. economic boycott of the North stays in place, famine or not. In the current International Security journal, scholar Michael Mazarr generally applauds Washington’s pragmatic policy toward Pyongyang’s low-level nuclear capability. But the fact that “the Clinton administration, more than a year after signing [the nonproliferation agreement with Pyongyang], cannot bring itself to end any major part of the U.S. economic embargo against the north,” he avers, is an “absurd stinginess.”

So let’s look at all this from the Korean perspective. Washington has (rightly, in my view) been insisting that Pyongyang retreat on the nuclear stockpiling front. But the North has noticed that Japan has been stockpiling plutonium, useful for building bombs as well as fueling reactors. And the South has noticed that while Washington won’t support a nuclear fuel processing capability for Seoul, it did for Japan. Moreover, Koreans all over the globe tend to observe that the world community seems to have more or less accepted low-level nuclear proliferation in Israel, India and Pakistan. As for the hunger problem, Pyongyang notices that only South Korea (with some help from Japan, which has a recognizable Korean community) has substantially helped to ease the pain of the famine, not because Seoul approves of Pyongyang but because, well, why should any Korean, anywhere, be permitted to starve?

Suddenly South Korea is having problems with longtime ally Uncle Sam. These include traditional student resentment of U.S. influence, persistent trade frictions and now, allegations of American complicity in the government’s notorious 1980 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Kwangju. “With recrimination following recrimination,” scholars Jojo Liu and Richard Hughes note sadly in the current Harvard International Review, “the two nations seemed locked in a downward spiral of anti-American sentiment and American retaliation--a process that jeopardizes relations between the two nations.” Before long, North and South Koreans, still so divided, could wind up seeing eye to eye on key issues. How can any of the basic problems, from food to proliferation, ever be solved until they are tackled by all Koreans on both sides working together? And, I would suggest, at the point that both North and South agree they have more in common than they’d thought, Korean reunification will become inevitable.