Next on the Diplomatic Agenda: Korea

Even if the remarkable Northern Irish peace accord comes unstuck, President Clinton, not to mention the British and Irish prime ministers, deserves an ovation for helping close a deal that just might close the book on decades of trouble. Good work, Mr. President. And now that you’re on a roll, here’s another uphill negotiation that’s a very different challenge for you indeed: North Korea.

The global stakes involving North Korea are even more serious than those in Northern Ireland, and are at least as intractable. The Korean standoff imperils not only the lives of those on the peninsula but whole populations elsewhere. North Korean missiles can fly across much of East Asia. In addition, North Koreans are exporting potent missile technologies to other countries, including Iran and Syria. New reports have surfaced about Pakistan testing a missile using North Korean technology that can hit Indian cities like Bombay or New Delhi.

This unnerving news comes at a time when the Asian economic crisis threatens to unwind the pivotal nuclear deal with North Korea. The 1994 plan was to fund two peaceful energy reactors in return for the North’s dismantling its nuclear weapons operation. Japan and South Korea were to finance most of the project, but economic troubles are sapping their will to do so. If the deal stalls, there’s no telling how North Korea will react. To be sure, there are many impediments to the worst scenario, the North invading the South. As analyst Michael O’Hanlon points out in the latest issue of International Security, North Korea is not unlike Iraq in the paper army department. Its troops are poorly trained, have inferior equipment and may suffer waning morale. The terrain separating the divided Koreas is difficult and readily exposed to air attack. But that might not stop the North from using the chemical and biological option. As O’Hanlon puts it: “Initiating any kind of large scale war would represent a desperation option for North Korea. If it chose to exercise such an option, therefore, it might see little point in showing restraint, instead gambling that the allies would not escalate to nuclear retaliation.”

North Korea is desperate and on the edge. The United Nations worries that within weeks, the North’s grain reserves will be depleted, even as international officials complain about typically secretive military authorities denying them distribution access in almost a quarter of the nation’s counties. The on-again, off-again four-party talks in Geneva involving Washington, Beijing, Seoul and Pyongyang are off again. “The North and the South are still circling each other,” admits a frustrated U.S. official. So in Washington, it’s nervous time. “The ingredients are all in place for serious instability on the Korean peninsula,” writes North Korea expert Michael J. Mazarr in the current National Interest, “something that is not to be welcomed in the most heavily militarized region on earth.”

What’s needed, as Mazarr suggests, is a new initiative from the West to break the logjam. Before this summer, when Clinton and his entourage are to land in China for the long-awaited presidential visit, a major package deal should be offered North Korea by the allies, perhaps from the hand of a new special U.S. coordinator, along the lines of former Sen. George Mitchell’s efforts in Ulster.

The offer might include some formulation of a mutual pullback from the demilitarized zone, reduction in forces, renunciation of terrorism and easing of U.S. economic sanctions. North Korea is broke and needs all the help it can get. As U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charles Kartman put it, “To achieve any level of confederation some day, South Korea needs a much higher level of political confidence, and the North needs a better economic situation.”

South Korea’s President Kim Dae Jung lacks British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s personal ties to Clinton, and, yes, North Korea can be difficult to deal with. Still, many observers in the Korean-American community believe the time is ripe. Said Hyun-ok Park, a University of Michigan sociologist who spoke Friday at UCLA’s Center for Korean Studies: “In recent months, North Korea has continually expressed a desire for change, and it wants to get South Korea and the Americans to help.” Adds a senior U.S. diplomat stationed in Asia, reflecting on the South’s own economic straits: “Not surprisingly now, there is a lot less interest in South Korea, across the entire political spectrum, in seeing North Korea collapse.” But that’s just what could happen without an overall Korean peninsula deal comparable to last week’s Irish agreement.

Over the weekend, in Beijing, Pyongyang actually started talking with Seoul. If these talks continue through the summer, Clinton would have an opportunity to meet with North and South Korean negotiators in one venue in Beijing.

It’s true that Clinton is far more alert to domestic pressures than international needs, and while there are some 39 million Irish Americans, there are fewer than a million Korean Americans; they also lack a Teddy Kennedy to speak up for them in Washington. But from the standpoint of potential cataclysm, there’s no comparison between the Korean and Irish tensions. It’s not even close. That should count for something in presidential computation.