N. Korea Cracks the Door

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell shook hands with North Korea’s foreign minister. They sipped coffee. Not much in most circumstances, but for the secretive Stalinists of North Korea it amounted to a blatant overture.

Powell met with North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun on the sidelines of a regional Asian summit on security in Brunei, and both said later they hoped for meaningful talks. The most pressing issue for the United States and countries in the region like Japan, China and of course South Korea is to ensure that Pyongyang does not develop nuclear weapons.

North Korea has sent mixed signals before, and this time--whether by accident or design is hard to know--the country’s Communist Party newspaper demanded on the day of the Powell-Paek meeting that the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea leave. The newspaper also labeled the United States “the aggressor and the kingpin of evil” and said the Bush administration was “keen to make preemptive strikes” after branding North Korea a part of the “axis of evil.”

Still, the Brunei meeting was the highest-level contact between the United States and North Korea since the Clinton administration left office. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang in October 2000 when Washington was trying to negotiate an end to the production and sale of North Korea’s ballistic missiles. But Pyongyang balked at attempts to verify and monitor compliance and declined to make a deal.

The Bush administration has taken a far more wary stance.

It has been eight years since the United States, Japan and South Korea agreed to supply North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors for energy and North Korea agreed to end its nuclear program. Since then, Pyongyang has test-fired a missile over Japan, continued to export rockets to Iran and Pakistan and rebuffed many South Korean attempts to improve relations. Those developments and the suspicion that North Korea is continuing nuclear weapons development have delayed construction of the new reactors, which is due to start next week.

Last week, the North surprisingly issued a statement of regret for its sinking of a South Korean naval patrol boat in June. That small gesture by Pyongyang bolsters the international effort to persuade North Korea--perennially on the verge of economic disaster and even widespread starvation--that aid would flow generously if it stopped nuclear weapons development and missile exports.

The Communist regime hinted recently that it might undertake economic reforms that include paying wages and letting prices of food and other commodities rise to a level determined by supply and demand. That would be a welcome start to ending its mummified economic system.

North Korea is unlikely to become stable or predictable anytime soon. But the U.S. and its allies should keep dangling incentives to lure it toward joining a more prosperous larger world.