Korea: a time to be bold?

• Author: Mazarr, Michael J.
• Position: North Korea's relations with US and South Korea

Pity poor Korea - and not, anymore, just the brooding North. On both sides of the feared demilitarized zone (DMZ), trends have taken a sharp turn for the worse. Start with Seoul: When the Asian financial crisis washed over it, South Korea's economy simply collapsed. The won lost more than half its value against the dollar, the Seoul stock market plunged 70 percent, and the crisis laid bare the cruel fact that South Korea resides on the edge of bankruptcy, and will remain there for some time to come. The country reportedly has more than $150 billion in foreign debt coming due in the next year or two, and just a few billion in currency reserves to pay it back.(1)

On the political front, the December election of opposition candidate Kim Dae Jung was a triumph for South Korean democracy. (In a move delicious for its symbolism, North Korea angrily refused to allow South Korean contract workers in the North to cast absentee ballots, calling the act an infringement of its sovereignty.) But Kim's party is a minority in the National Assembly, the urgent need for painful reform confronts his left-leaning political base, and South Korean politics may well be stuck in an erratic period of realignment for some time. Gridlock, and resulting political unrest, are hardly out of the question.

Now shift your gaze north. Between floods, droughts, typhoons, and tidal waves, North Korea has endured one of the worst series of natural disasters visited on a country in recent memory. Each successive calamity, layered on top of the foundational catastrophe that is the North Korean economy, has inched the regime in Pyongyang closer to its inevitable ruin. The latest word from the World Food Program is that, in order to forestall the starvation of as much as a third of the North's population in 1998, the international community needs to spend almost $400 million to pump three-quarters of a million tons of food into the North. Things have gotten so bad that in December power shortages forced Pyongyang to suspend operation of the speakers near the DMZ that blare absurd propaganda into the South.

The ingredients are therefore all in place for serious instability on the Korean Peninsula, something that is not to be welcomed in the most militarized region on earth. Yet on the central strategic issue at hand - dealing with the North Korean threat - the past few months have done nothing to relieve the distinct impression that Washington and Seoul have abdicated responsibility for North Korea policy and left it to be determined by fate. Apart from routine exchanges resulting from the 1994 Agreed Framework and listless four-party talks about talks on the subject of a peace treaty, the sum total of U.S. and South Korean action on the North amounts to offering a few bags of rice and hoping that Pyongyang will make the first move toward better relations. U.S. officials have repeated the phrase "The ball is in North Korea's court" so many times that it might as well be tattooed on their foreheads.

Early hopes that Kim Dae Jung would dash into office with a bag full of ideas for enhanced North-South contact, beginning with a quick summit, seem to have been misplaced. Kim recently told IMF head Michel Camdessus that "I will not rush" to improve relations with the North, and that he would focus instead on economic issues. Aides quoted Kim as saying that, "If North Korea proposes to hold talks, we will respond. But if they don't, we won't."(2)

Meanwhile, the North simmers. Famine persists and the risk of war through accident or miscalculation lingers. As always, the North's million-man army is poised across the demilitarized zone, just a cannon shell's throw from Seoul.

For several years, the American and South Korean approach to North Korea has been of two minds - or, perhaps more accurately, many minds. One can think of policy toward the North as a set of Russian matroshka figures, wooden dolls successively nestled inside each other. The outermost layer - the face the policy shows to the world and its top public priority - is the unassailable touchstone of "deterrence." Washington and Seoul seek to prevent the North from attacking the South, from building nuclear weapons, and from deploying or selling mid- and long-range ballistic missiles.

In some policy contexts, deterrence can imply boldness and energy. This is not the case with respect to North Korea, where a strategic foundation of negation and defensiveness engenders limp and insubstantial policy, in part because deterrence constitutes a de facto veto of other possible approaches. Thus, obsessed with deterrence, we cannot give the North much food aid because it might go to the army; and we cannot allow foreign investment because it might provide hard currency for new bullets and bombs.

Residing uneasily inside deterrence is the second layer of the matroshka, the broad notion that Washington and Seoul are concerned not to provoke North Korea so much that it opts for a...