The Tree of History Bears Fruit in Korea

Last month, a little-noted scene told a big story. In a then-secret meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Kim Jong Il showed up wearing a Mao jacket. This was befitting of the leader of a North Korean economy that was being ground to dust under rigid Maoist rules. But, if clothes make the man, then note that Jiang wore a Western business suit as befitting the reformist leader of a country that’s modernizing. Jiang’s mission, in effect, was to get North Korea to change its economic clothes. Judging from the historic agreement signed this week between North and South Korea, he may have done just that.

Yet the full story behind the South-North Joint Declaration of June 15, 2000, goes back to 1994, a pivotal year that set in motion a train of events that pulled up in Pyongyang earlier this week in the form of the unexpectedly sweeping Korean peninsula agreement. It was in 1994 that former President Carter made a bold and unauthorized trip to North Korea to urge its leaders to enter into nuclear disarmament negotiations. Washington was alarmed that the region was edging close to war again. Just months later, academic and diplomat Robert Galucci accepted the then-thankless task of constructing a diplomatically complicated and politically controversial agreement in Geneva that offered North Korea the promise of peaceful nuclear reactors in return for dismantling its nuclear capability. Galucci, now a Georgetown University dean, in effect tied North and South Korea in a seminal negotiating process.

In the South, Kim Young Sam, the first democratically elected Korean president, stumbled in negotiations with the North but achieved something essential to the process. His presidency succeeded in closing the door on whatever governing aspirations the South Korean military elite retained. As Kim Young Sam told me in April 1996: “We have made a decisive departure from authoritarianism. Never again in this country will there be a coup.” It was that success with democracy, as well as with its striking economic advances, that provided such a stark Mao-jacket contrast with the North.

Then there was President Clinton, who also in 1996 nearly committed a diplomatic blunder that would have haunted his presidency. His staff planned a trip to Asia that excluded a stopover in South Korea. Fortunately, the South Korean foreign minister persuaded then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher that the president’s itinerary would be interpreted in Pyongyang as a lessening of the U.S. commitment to South Korea. The brilliant but mercurial Clinton then visited South Korea briefly and focused, for the first time really, on the complex issues there. Before long, U.S. diplomacy was re-energized. In Washington, Charles Kartman, the canny State Department Korea coordinator, conducted meeting after meeting with the North Koreans, many of them secret. In New York, Stephen Bosworth, then head of the multi-nation Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization that was to build the North Korean reactors, successfully engaged the North in construction and engineering details, in effect inculcating a rational negotiating process. Today, the steel-willed Bosworth is the American ambassador in Seoul, perhaps the best we have ever had.

Then, in the fall of 1997, came an astonishing domestic political development in South Korea. Defying predictions, the people of South Korea chose as president, in only their second presidential election, the longtime, oft-exiled, once-imprisoned opposition leader. In an interview shortly before taking office in 1998, Kim Dae Jung told me he was prepared to personally go to the North for a summit at any time, without preconditions. Kim was to prove the man of destiny that Asia and Korea needed.

Yet North Korea, desperately poor and with many of its people without adequate food or starving, still possessed a mesmerizing 1.2-million-man war machine. So, in early 1999, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen conducted a six-day diplomatic trip to calm down the hawks in both South Korea and Japan. And to calm down domestic U.S. hawks on Capitol Hill, Clinton adroitly tapped Cohen’s predecessor, William Perry, well respected on Capitol Hill, to compose a thorough review of U.S. policy. The Perry report gave birth to the U.S. counterpart to Kim Dae Jung’s “sunshine” policy of engagement with the North.

One other piece needed to fall into place, and it was a big one. Almost everyone, including even the Japanese, was trying to bring North Korea to its senses before its own perverted policies brought it to its knees--and perhaps crashing down on the South. But not China. It was acting almost as if North Korea didn’t exist. It bolted out of its shell fast, however, when North Korea foolishly test-fired a missile with a trajectory that took it over Japan. Tokyo then declared a new interest in a regional missile defense system. The prospect of such a system, which would also cover Taiwan, infuriated and alarmed Beijing, and suddenly was born a vigorous Chinese diplomatic effort to knock some sense into Pyongyang. Evidently, that plain speaking did a world of good.

There is, of course, no certainty that a permanent Korean peace is at hand. After all, there was the North’s Kim still in his Mao jacket as he signed documents with the South’s Kim in his business suit. But because the leading powers of the Asia-Pacific region have worked together in this common diplomatic effort since 1994, permanent peace is now an actual probability. It bodes to become nothing less than a diplomatic benchmark in the annals of world diplomacy and one of Asia’s greatest turning points.

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Times contributing editor Tom Plate’s column usually runs Wednesdays. E-mail: tplate@ucla.edu.