First Step for the Koreas

South Korea’s President Kim Dae Jung announced Monday he will visit Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, June 12-14 to establish direct contact with Kim Jong Il, his North Korean counterpart. The summit meeting, if the North’s unpredictable leadership doesn’t change its mind and cancel the visit, would be the crowning of Kim Dae Jung’s dogged and politically risky pursuit of reconciliation with North Korea. It would help vindicate his “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with the North no matter what the cost, and it could boost his Millennium Democratic Party’s sagging popularity in Thursday’s highly contested parliamentary elections.

The summit, which would be the first meeting between leaders of the two Koreas since the split in 1945, tops a busy diplomatic season for Pyongyang. Earlier this year, North Korea established diplomatic relations with Italy, and it is pursuing full relations with half a dozen other countries. This active but befuddling foreign policy is hardly a sign of political enlightenment. Rather, it is a shrewdly calculated extortionist diplomacy designed to extract food, fuel and financial aid from its neighbors and the West in exchange for a pledge to stop developing nuclear weapons and suspend missile tests.

Kim Jong Il is presiding over a desperately poor country. The population is starving and the economy keeps shrinking. He may be reaching out simply because he has run out of options.

Still, President Clinton was right in welcoming the announcement of the June summit and in encouraging direct contact between the leaders of the two Koreas. Many things can go wrong before then, and even if the meeting does take place it is likely to be largely symbolic. It is a significant first step nonetheless.

South Korea’s president sees the promotion of cultural, humanitarian and, most important, trade and economic ties as the best way to ease tensions and lay the groundwork for eventual reunification of the peninsula. But for this policy to work, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il must renounce his policy of hostility and show the same determination as his counterpart.