North Korea’s Biggest Threat Is to Itself

There’s new tension on the Korean peninsula. In a dangerous turn, North Korea, where the Cold War still lives on, has once again hurled its rattle out of the crib in a shout for help that’s more pathetic than anything else.

Faced with growing famine and a shrinking economy, Pyongyang is now throwing in the world’s face its few credible bargaining chips: the capacity to cook up a few nukes, the hinted-at launching of another “satellite” missile and the continuation of secretive work on a mysterious underground facility that no one from the West has seen. For South Korea, a nation already mired in its own economic crisis, it’s beginning to look less like Christmas than, possibly, Armageddon revisited.

If bad things do tend to happen to good people, then South Korean President Kim Dae Jung is on the verge of becoming one of the best leaders in memory to be dealt one of the worst hands by history. Stanley Roth, the State Department official in charge of East Asia and Pacific affairs, has little but praise for Kim, whose diplomacy, he feels, warrants support because of its emphasis on peninsula comity rather than enmity.

Says Roth: “You have to give President Kim enormous credit. On the foreign policy side alone, he has been brilliant, especially with the tense North/South issue. There he has demonstrated incredible political skills in building public support for a fairly open and engaged policy.”

Kim’s diplomacy may yet save the world from having to endure a second Korean war. Kim is gambling, rationally, that the North Koreans are playing their bombastic war-card games only because their economy is in far worse trouble than anyone knows. And even what is known--that many are dying from lack of food and many others are so malnourished that they may never enjoy normal lives--is bad enough. North Korea today is nothing like Iraq in 1990. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, it had a strong economy, a coherent government and a voracious appetite for conquest. Iraq was ambitious and under Saddam Hussein wanted to rule the Arab world.

North Korea, on the other hand, is in deep trouble and has a government that can’t even run its own country competently, much less aspire to acquire others. But desperate nations on the verge of collapse are capable of desperate--and sometimes unintentionally comical--acts. When U.S. State Department official Charles Kartman visited North Korea last month to inspect an underground cavern built for who-knows-what purpose, he was asked at first for a $300-million sighting fee. Calmly, the veteran diplomat explained that he was not carrying that kind of money and doubted that today’s Congress was in a check-writing mood. The request has since been withdrawn.

Although it may sound insane, sticking with the economic-incentive policy might well pay off with North Korea, even as it backfired with Iraq. And that is exactly the provocative thesis of a new book, “Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea,” on which the American Academy of Diplomacy has just conferred its annual distinguished writing award. Author Leon V. Sigal, a Columbia University professor and former New York Times editorial writer, argues that it is the West’s string of broken promises in its relations with Pyongyang as much as North Korea’s many mistakes that have brought the peninsula to the brink of calamity.

Weak nations, he argues, will create crises to hide their vulnerability from powerful nations that possess the actual capacity to deliver on threats. Sigal argues for a nuanced and patient American diplomacy: “Appeasement of the weak by the strong promotes peaceful change,” he writes. Sigal offers an example of President Kennedy’s careful weighing of carrots and sticks when confronted with a Cuba that had given a home to Soviet missiles. Writes Sigal unapologetically: “What the Cuban missile crisis was to the Cold War, the nuclear crisis with North Korea may well be to the current era.” Sigal believes cooperation with North Korea, however endlessly tortuous, “is far less costly than coercion.”

Sigal has the key to containing the horrifying North Korean nightmare. For whether North Korea invades the South or implodes on top of it, it would be a disaster. Unless America plans to invade the North, the only sensible policy is Kim’s, which treats Pyongyang with extreme care by offering a lot more economic aid, as was promised under the 1994 Geneva agreement that Washington has not in all respects observed.

“With regard to the suspected nuclear-missile site,” said Hyuck Choi, minister for economic affairs at the South Korean Embassy in Washington, “we eventually will have to have access to see it. But until we have clear evidence that it contains our worst fears, we have to continue our policy of engagement.” Only that kind of clear-eyed focus can avoid worse trouble. And, too, that approach is far, far cheaper than the cost of war.

But if congressional hawks get the upper hand over U.S. diplomacy and exploit this issue, especially as America moves closer to the next presidential election, they could usher in a calamity. North Korea is more of a danger to itself than to anyone else unless U.S. policy gives it no choice but to embark on the course of ultimate self-destruction.