Asia Times: Clinton cautioned over Pyongyang trip-up


	November 7, 2000	atimes.com

The Koreas

Clinton cautioned over Pyongyang trip-up
By Richard Halloran

The prospect of a journey to North Korea by US President Bill Clinton in the waning days of his term has drawn decidedly lukewarm appraisals from Americans with experience in Asia, from influential South Koreans, and from some Japanese, all of whom urge caution. Even the White House has backed away from the expectation that the president will go to Pyongyang soon.

There had been speculation that Clinton would tack on a visit to North Korea after his trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Brunei and thence to Vietnam in mid-November. The White House now has ruled that out, and officials leave open the possibility only that Clinton will travel to the isolated communist nation to meet with its leader, Kim Jong-il, before he leaves office in January - and even that might depend on who wins the US election.

After Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Kim in Pyongyang last month, she was enthusiastic about the prospect of Clinton going to Pyongyang. Such a venture, however, might be filled with more danger than opportunity.

North Korea and the US have been enemies since 1945, when Kim Jong-il's father, Kim Il-sung, was put into power by the Soviet Union. North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950, drawing the US into a war that lasted until 1953 and took 55,000 American lives. In the years since, North Korea has shot down US aircraft, captured a US warship on the high seas, killed US military people, and launched propaganda barrages at the US that continue to this day.

Against that backdrop of belligerence, caution is urged. A former US ambassador to South Korea, Donald Gregg, said in response to a query: "I do not think the president should make a trip to Pyongyang unless he can lock in real progress, not only on the missile and nuclear issues, but also the question of tensions along the DMZ."

The US has been seeking pledges from North Korea that it will not build missiles that could hit the US, would cease exporting missiles, and would continue its moratorium on nuclear arms that began in 1994. The DMZ, or demilitarized zone, is a 4,000-meter wide swath that divides the Korean peninsula and is the world's most heavily armed border.

"The millions of people in Seoul and our own 37,000 troops are vulnerable today to North Korea's massed artillery," said Gregg, who is president of the Korea Society, a civic organization in New York. He asserted that "confidence building measures" such as hot lines, "would do much to assuage rampant skepticism in Seoul and Washington as to what our current talks with Pyongyang really amount to".

Similarly, an economist who has written widely on North Korea, Marcus Noland of the Institute of International Economics in Washington, said in reply to a query: "It's hard to imagine a deal that could justify the lame-duck President Clinton visiting Pyongyang." He noted that Albright's visit did not produce "even modest steps forward".

Noland argued that a trip to Pyongyang by Clinton, coming after those by South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in June and Russian President Vladimir Putin in July, would allow Kim Jong-il to portray those visits "as world leaders coming to Pyongyang to pay 'tribute'" and thus strengthen his already unchallenged political position.

"More likely," Noland concluded, "this is little more than an exercise in 'legacy politics' in which President Clinton basks in the reflected glow of Kim Dae-jung's Nobel Peace Prize." President Kim was awarded the prize in October for his policy of seeking reconciliation between South and North Korea.

A Korean-American scholar who is an authority on North Korea, Dae-sook Suh of the University of Hawaii, said in an interview: "I don't think he [Clinton] should go." Suh praised Albright for making a start on improving relations between Washington and Pyongyang but said, "President Clinton would not accomplish very much in substance."

"I don't think the US should be hurried into this," Suh contended. "The president should go only if that signals the normalization of diplomatic relations. North Korea has put the door ajar but to normalize diplomatic relations it should be wide open." Suh noted: "I am in favor of good relations between North Korea and the US but we have to take proper steps."

In South Korea, President Kim Dae-jung has applauded the Clinton administration's approaches to North Korea. Privately, however, many Koreans have said they feared Clinton would agree to something with North Korea that would not benefit South Korea.

A scholar well versed in international relations, Chung-min Lee of Yonsei University, reflected those fears in an article in the Joong-Ang daily newspaper: "With the Middle East peace talks off the rails, President Clinton desperately wants to have a diplomatic victory that will make the history books, and the only possible target is North Korea."

Former foreign minister Han Sung-joo noted that North Korea had long alternated belligerence and rational behavior. "Even now," he told The New York Times, "North Korea is not carrying out the promises" on family reunification, economic cooperation, or railroad development. He said: "There has been no progress at all on military issues."

In Japan, the reaction to Clinton's prospective trip has been muted, largely because Japanese politics and economics remain in the doldrums. One of the few to comment has been a retired diplomat, Hisahiko Okazaki, who has urged caution no matter what the US does. "Japan should not be afraid of missing the bus," Okazaki wrote in the opinion magazine, Shokun. "It should not give a penny to the Democratic Peoples Republic of [North] Korea until it becomes a completely peaceable state."

(Copyright Richard Halloran, November 5, 2000)

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