Pyongyang’s Sucker List

North Korea continues to perplex American officials as they reassess policies toward the long-hostile and reclusive Communist state. A month ago, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il told Russian President Vladimir V. Putin that he might halt development of long-range rockets if other countries agreed to launch North Korea’s satellites, free. Russian officials say Kim’s offer was later repeated in a letter to Putin. But the other day Kim told a group of visiting South Korean media executives that he had raised the missile idea “laughingly,” and he seemed pleased that his hoax might have given the United States “a bad headache.” So much for what passes for humor in Pyongyang these days.

The missile offer seemed to be the boldest step yet in North Korea’s apparent readiness to reduce tensions with its adversaries, a change symbolized dramatically by the limited and carefully controlled meetings it allowed this week between families separated half a century ago by the Korean War. Kim’s dismissal of his missile remarks as a joke only deepens uncertainties over how committed he is to pursuing detente.

Washington takes North Korea’s missile program seriously, regarding it as a potential strategic threat to U.S. territory some years down the road. That perceived danger has become the chief and, in our view, exaggerated rationale for a costly proposed national missile defense system. Pyongyang has suspended its missile tests for now, in exchange for various political and economic concessions from the United States. It is pressing for further benefits, including removal of North Korea from the U.S. list of countries that sponsor terrorism.

The easing in relations between the two Koreas, inaugurated by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s visit to Pyongyang in June, is welcome. But it remains unclear whether North Korea, in desperate need of aid and investment, has decided on a more accommodating course or merely seeks to squeeze as much as possible out of its adversaries while giving as little as it can in return. In his meeting with the South Korean executives, Kim Jong Il boasted that he doesn’t need to woo major countries; “powerful nations come to me.” So they have, led by the United States. But a one-sided courtship doesn’t make for an effective policy. Unless something more than opaque talk and lame jokes come from Pyongyang, Washington is apt to finally conclude that it’s being played for a sucker.