Now It’s Up to North Korea

The United States is making its strongest bid in half a century to establish more normal relations with North Korea, offering the impoverished and famine-stricken country major economic and political incentives if the Pyongyang regime agrees to alter its threatening military policies. However desperate conditions in the Stalinist state may be, Washington faces an uphill struggle. The suspicions of North Korea’s reclusive leaders toward almost everything beyond their tightly controlled borders appear unabated. To lower that wall of hostility would require an almost unimaginable change in Pyongyang’s worldview.

Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry is now in Pyongyang, heading the highest-level U.S. mission to North Korea since the Korean War erupted in 1950. Perry’s trip, which has been coordinated with South Korea and Japan, was prompted by rising concerns over Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear programs.

Nine months ago North Korea recklessly test-fired a three-stage missile over Japan, a challenge that has led to the strengthening and expansion of U.S.-Japan military ties. North Korea continues to export missiles and missile technology to such countries as Iraq, Iran and Syria, all regarded by Washington as dangerous regimes.

And it might still be pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program, despite its promise in 1994 to freeze such efforts in exchange for U.S.-Japanese-South Korean construction of two nuclear power reactors and huge shipments of free American fuel oil.

In return for better North Korean behavior, Washington appears ready to offer an end to the 50-year-old U.S. trade embargo, security guarantees and diplomatic recognition by the United States and Japan. Though the Clinton administration--implausibly--denies any link, the United States has accelerated shipments to North Korea of hundreds of thousands of tons of food to ease a four-year famine that some outside experts think might have taken 2 million lives.

North Korea’s economic implosion continues as its food crisis deepens. Have things reached a stage where Pyongyang might finally conclude that it must moderate its behavior and reach an accommodation with the countries it most despises? The Perry mission offers the best chance ever for North Korea to end its isolation and assume a normal place in the world community. Do its leaders have the vision to seize that chance, or will they instead remain captives of their own failed and self-destructive ideology?