The Payoff in Caring About Korea : Who wouldn’t pay attention to a big developing economy in a tough relationship with its divided self?

The Clinton administration, which in foreign policy has not often cared about much, cares about Korea. As any of us would, if we had a potential diplomatic triumph on our hands.

Last Saturday, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in South Korea, announced that after months of game-playing, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has agreed to show its face at a preliminary session of talks next week. There in a room in New York, if all goes well, will be not only officials from the U.S. and China but from South Korea as well. If these sessions do lead toward the denuclearization of North Korea and normalization of the peninsula, the Clinton administration, which has been working hard on this tricky problem since 1994, will have done something in world affairs of which it can be very proud. Of course, it’s a long long road to a peaceful Pyongyang yet.

From Korea, though, it is a short road to Los Angeles. On Saturday I saw 200 or so intense Korean Americans pack a downtown hotel ballroom for panels and lectures on Korea’s future. There they were, the cream of our multicultural future: young students and professionals, with ties still to prospering but troubled South Korea or relatives living in the nonprospering and even more troubled North. The news of Albright’s announcement sent an excited murmur across the audience. Explained accountant Michael Won, president of the Global Korean Network of Los Angeles, organizers of the conference: “Many of the million Koreans who live in this country have relatives and very close friends back in Korea. They are greatly concerned.”

And who else cares? Well, there’s South Korean President Kim Young Sam, who this week begins the last year of his five-year term. Americans who spend a lot of time in Asia, such as L.A.-based international lawyer Arnold Malter, have no difficulty feeling for this embattled Korean reformer: “He made Korea’s first peaceful transition to civilian rule. There has been an aura around Kim, like around Kennedy--an idealism. But Korea is very hard to reform.” Too true. The economy is running down, the reform effort is running on empty, the nation’s powerful conservative factions are starting to run wild and Washington is wooing North Korea; one slip-up here and the anti-communist conservatives in the South will have a field day.

No wonder that Kim, who courageously began the reform of the country’s military, its tradition-bound economy and its oft-corrupt political system, is feeling under siege. A well-informed source told me of Kim’s agitation during a staff meeting in the Blue House: “He was upset and frustrated and in a kind of deep lamentation. At one point Kim said, ‘I try to make a good country but no one follows.’ He talked with deep emotion of his worries and his sadness. He knows there is not much time for him left.” He also knows that loss of the South’s democratic gains could also turn the clock back on U.S. efforts to negotiate with the North.

Certainly the Chinese, who are growing rather tired of Pyongyang’s shenanigans, and who regard South Korea as an increasingly important trading partner whose active cooperation is key to peninsular peace, care about Korea. And let’s not forget the officials and technicians who have been working on the project called KEDO--for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization. This multinational agency is in charge of the Clinton administration’s imaginative but risky nuclear power-plant deal with the North Koreans, a bid by Washington, Seoul and Tokyo, with others, to defang the nuclear threat of the world’s last Stalinist regime by offering to finance and build a pair of nuclear power plants, plus interim food and fuel aid. This Saturday, in fact, a team of about 30 people from South Korea, Japan and the United States is to go to North Korea to advance the project. They have received solemn assurances of their safety from the Democratic People’s Republic. Two weeks ago, after a top official defected in Beijing, Pyongyang threatened reprisals; a few days later a previous defector from the North was shot in South Korea. Watch this trip carefully; Pyongyang is always hard to figure.

Anyone else care about Korea? I’d make the case that if the American people knew more about this story, they would care, too. If only our schools taught Asian history and more Americans knew the saga of this brilliant civilization, brutally occupied for years by the Japanese, now suddenly in the world limelight. There is North Korea, the communist basket case, reluctantly reaching out to the world just to feed its people and trying to pump life into a political system that all others have abandoned. Then there is South Korea, suffering trade reversals and labor troubles now, but still the world’s 11th- or 12th-largest economy and California’s third-largest export market. Its freely elected president is truly a civilian--the first ever to have no ties to the military--its public schools are turning out a well-educated generation and its national aspirations and goals reach for the moon.

Korea, were it ever to be successfully united (or even competently confederated), could prove one of America’s most powerful allies and one of the great democratic success stories of all time. And imagine the consequences of a South Korea reverted to its old, dark authoritarian ways and a North disgorging its starving refugees at every border. A recipe for Asian disaster.

Isn’t this worth caring about?