Dumb and dumber: the Bush administration thinks negotiating with North Korea is appeasement. South Korea thinks negotiating requires appeasement.

• Author: Ho, Soyoung

In 1977, the North Korean government sent 9-year-old Kang Chul-Hwan and his family to a slave labor camp. While the regime never explained why, the Kang family assumed their imprisonment was retaliation for the activities of Kang's grandfather, who often sharply criticized the management mistakes of Communist Party bureaucrats. At the Yodok concentration camp, Kang ate rats and bugs to keep from starving and witnessed the executions of fellow prisoners. In 1987, at the age of 19, Kang was released along with his family. Not long afterwards, he and a friend crossed the Yalu River on foot into China, an escape route still used today by many North Korean defectors.

In 2001, Kang, by then a reporter for a leading conservative South Korean newspaper, published a memoir, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. The book received little international attention until last April, when President Bush read the memoir on the recommendation of Henry Kissinger. Evidently moved by Kang's account, Bush asked his senior aides to read it as well. In June, Kang was invited to the White House to meet with the president, Vice President Cheney, and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. As Kang told The New York Times afterwards, "[President Bush] was more interested in the pains North Koreans are going through, more so than I had previously thought.... He kept on repeating how deeply sorry he was about the situation. To hear a president say these deep things made me fed that he cared." A calm and affable man, Kang, now 37, has been asked to speak about his experiences at Freedom House, a conservative human rights organization, and at an evangelical concert in Midland, Texas, devoted to aiding the plight of North Koreans. The conservative push has not only accelerated sales of Kang's book, but has also raised the profile of the issue of North Korean human rights among Americans.

In many regards, Bush's promotion of Kang's book shows the president at his best--using the bully pulpit to call evil by its name. Yet decrying North Korea's oppressive regime is not the same as actively working to effect change. Two decades ago, President Reagan stood among 20,000 Berliners and called on Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." Less than four months later, Reagan and Gorbachev sat together at the negotiating table and signed a deal to reduce nuclear armaments. Things worked out pretty well from there.

But instead of following Reagan's example and showing an eagerness to both engage and confront North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, Bush has stubbornly prevented any direct dealings between the American and North Korean governments. Instead, the president continues to insist on arms-length multiparty talks to curb the North's nuclear weapons program--talks that have yielded no progress--apparently under the belief that to negotiate with a tyrant is to appease him.

In June, Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun appeared together in Washington to show a united political front. But the truth is that the two leaders could hardly be more different in their approaches and philosophies. Roh allows his government to work directly with Pyongyang on a range of issues, yet refuses to...