Dim Hope for Sunshine in South Korea

South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Hong Soon Yong, keenly appreciated in the Asia diplomatic corps for his patented jocular charm, has a hard job that’s growing harder. He is the lead actor in President Kim Dae Jung’s so- called “sunshine policy,” South Korea’s version of an engagement policy for North Korea, an approach analogous to that practiced by the U.S. toward China. But jocularity is tough to sustain when sunshine is the last word anyone would apply to South Korea’s disaster of a neighbor up north.

Hong, a career diplomat with a track record that has included the key posting to Russia, sees North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as even more reclusive than his infamous father, the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “The son is certainly no North Korean version of Deng Xiaoping,” sighs Hong, referring to the late Chinese leader who saved his country of 1 billion-plus from the kind of disaster now facing North Korea by distancing it from rigid communist economics.

Hong’s further fear is that the patience of the South Korean people with the North is running out fast; so is that of the U.S. Congress. “I tell my friends there: We have to be very careful in talking about war and North Korea,” he says, speaking in the elegant foreign ministry conference room. “If you make snap judgments and overreact to any one provocation from the North, you are playing with fire.” At the same time, notes Hong, “North Korea’s brinksmanship diplomacy is playing dangerously with the pride and prestige of the world’s superpower. They had better not do that for too long or too much.”

Hong both admires and is irritated by the ambivalent role of China, North Korea’s last significant remaining ally. Years ago, Beijing began reducing its endlessly needy ally’s food allotment. Then the country got hit with enormous, harvest-destroying floods. That one-two punch conspired to produce one of the worst famines in memory. Now the minister hopes for more Beijing involvement in North Korea’s plight, not less. For its “rather open-minded and pragmatic” leaders, pushing forward on the long road of modernization, North Korea is little more than one big, persistent annoyance. “Still, China is starting to do its share to stop North Korea from firing any more missiles,” he confided. This statement is the first official confirmation that Beijing is now trying to prevent North Korea from launching another missile test like the one that zoomed over Japan last summer. Hong wishes Kim Jong Il would get out in the world and at least travel to China, but no such luck.

Japan is another dilemma for South Korea. Tokyo was deeply shaken by last summer’s North Korean missile test and has had its pride wounded by exclusion from the four-party talks involving the two Koreas, the U.S. and China. Hong thus accepts the suggestion, not so warmly welcomed by Beijing and Washington, that Tokyo be invited to sit at the table. And Moscow, too: “Moscow’s influence with North Korea is great. That’s why, the sooner Kosovo is over, the better.”

Hong offers the world what might be called the Kosovo paradox: Russia, he says, won’t help control North Korea as long as NATO is bombing its ally Serbia. A prolongation of the Kosovo caper would preoccupy America until the world’s greatest democracy gets bogged down in the internal warfare of the presidential campaign: “I am so worried about the coming debate in Washington, over China as well as North Korea,” says Hong. “It can get so very emotionalized. And sometimes these debates paralyze the foreign policy of the United States. Then it’s hard to get any coordinated execution of policy. It’s a vacuum period.”

Adds Hong: “It would be difficult for everyone if the U.S. pulled back from sunshine.” But that’s exactly what could happen if, in the heat of the presidential race, the oft-flexible Clinton-Gore administration throws sunshine out the political window. What then? Hong’s eyes narrow quickly, as if fixating on the weird Stalinist-throwback to North Korea that’s no more than a rocket exchange away: “What North Korea must understand is this: Until and unless we are attacked by a full-scale war, there will be no war on the Korean peninsula.”

But that, of course, is the most conspicuous cloud looming over the sunshine policy: It asks for North Korea to be a rational player. In the final analysis, how rational is that? No one, especially in South Korea, has to put on sunglasses when looking north.

Times contributing editor Tom Plate’s column now runs Wednesdays. The full text of this interview is at www.asiamedia.ucla.edu, the web page of the Asia Pacific Media Network.