Letters.

• Position: Review - Letter to the Editor

North Korea:

Nicholas Eberstadt's article ("The Most Dangerous Country", Fall 1999) should have been required reading for former Secretary of Defense William Perry and his team before they issued their Report on United States Policy Toward North Korea, a set of recommendations that had been prepared at the request of the President. As one would expect from Dr. Perry, his report is a thoughtful and carefully constructed analysis. And now it has apparently become the guide for the administration's new approach to the Korean dictatorship. The Perry report recommends a path that "would lead to a stable security situation on the Korean Peninsula, creating the conditions for a more durable and lasting peace in the long run and ending the Cold War in East Asia." But it rejects trying "to undermine" the North Korean regime.

A reader of Eberstadt's penetrating analysis must come to the conclusion that this goal of the Perry policy seeks to square the circle. "Stable security" and "conditions for a lasting peace" on the peninsula cannot coexist with the North Korean dictatorship. Kim Jong Il's abominable dictatorship is the Cold War in East Asia. We cannot end one without ending the other, much as we could not end the larger Cold War so long as Stalin ruled the Soviet Union.

As Eberstadt makes clear, North Korea is interested in an economic relationship with the United States not to deepen commercial ties, but to collect tribute--that is, "aid on terms established by the recipient, not the donor." This feat requires leverage, and Washington over the last several years has inadvertently taught North Korea how best to employ that leverage against the United States; namely, by refusing nuclear inspections and threatening to build nuclear weapons, then promising not to do so in exchange for a U.S. commitment to provide massive long-term aid. Next, build tunnels that might hide a new nuclear weapons program; then grudgingly allow U.S. inspectors into these empty tunnels in exchange for more tribute. Next, test long-range missiles and threaten further tests; then promise to halt testing in exchange for still more tribute. And so on.

With North Korea, Eberstadt explains, "there is every reason to believe that the world community is dealing with an insatiable state." Why, then, do we keep appeasing this state? Eberstadt believes it is because of the weaknesses of all the governments involved--Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo and, of course, Washington. For Washington, appeasement is obviously not the result of military weakness but of a lack of self-confidence and a fear of war. Indeed, North Korea has proved so successful in extracting tribute precisely because Washington believes it might otherwise launch a war. That was, of course, Hitler's strong card at Munich, too.

FRED C. IKLE

Bethesda, MD

Nationalism:

Michael Mandelbaum sets out a plausible matrix of solutions to twentieth-century problems: popular rule trumps dynasty, and democracy trumps totalitarianism ("The...