Turn Off the Goodwill: The North Is a Threat

Dark clouds have set on outgoing South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s “sunshine policy.”

As North Korea unabashedly draws the world’s attention with its relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons, South Korea is awash in a monumental scandal over secret payments of $500 million to its northern brethren before the unprecedented inter-Korean summit in June 2000. Kim admitted to his nation Feb. 14 that he had authorized some secret cash transfers, through an elaborate web involving companies, banks and the intelligence service, for the sake of “peace and the national interest.”

Kim’s appeal to South Koreans to “make a special political decision in the national interest” and put the issue to rest comes in the wake of the public’s rejection of his dubious invocation of executive privilege of nondisclosure in the name of peace and security on the Korean peninsula.

This latest scandal is a glaring example of an ill-conceived and reckless policy of coddling dictatorship gone terribly wrong. The five years of sunshine are a reaffirmation to the world of South Korea’s muddy business practices and of North Korea’s knavish behavior.

The Korean peninsula today is an anomalous world of darkness and light, poverty and prosperity, tenuously woven together by a common thread of outdated ethnic nationalism that the leadership in South Korea has only been too eager to exploit at the expense of its half-century-old and indispensable alliance with the U.S.

The passionate apostles of “sunshine” say that one cannot put a price on peace, but peace in the region has been kept for the last 50 years by the commitment on the part of the United States to the defense of South Korea, not by some sudden change in Pyongyang brought about by Seoul beaming sunshine up north.

The power configuration surrounding the Korean peninsula that has held the peace over the last half-century has been severely strained. Proponents of sunshine presume the continued presence of U.S. troops in South Korea, as do the leaders in Pyongyang, who know that they are unassailable as long as U.S. troops lie at risk of a counterattack.

It is all too plain that pandering to Pyongyang is self-defeating. Seoul needs to sweep the shattered scraps of sunshine under a giant sobering shroud and see North Korea as what it is: a threat to its national security.