Down the Road in Korea

...The biggest mystery was how much Putin may have offered by way of aid for Kim's destitute country...

...The Russian "side" stopped short of backing the new demand for American withdrawal, saying only that it had expressed "understanding" of the North Korean position...

...Clearly Putin sought to avoid becoming entangled in the issue, yet wanted to appease Kim: Russia's "understanding" could be interpreted as an endorsement if the North Koreans chose to see it that way...

...That is, until PresidentBushspoke out at his White House meeting with Kim Dae Jung...

...Russia, struggling with its own financial problems, is hardly in a position to become a major benefactor of North Korea, where famine and disease are now more rampant than they were over the past five or six years...

...But long before Kim Dae Jung made his devastating pilgrimage to Washington, there was speculation that Kim Jong II would think of excuses not to come to Seoul...

...Instead, the trip turned into an unmitigated disaster...

...The mere suggestion that future talks cover conventional forces was apparently seen as a precondition in itself, since the Clinton Administration had never raised the fact that the vast majority of North Korea's 1.1 million troops are stationed within 50 miles of the demilitarized zone...

...Chances are good that a conservative, possibly Lee Hoi Chang, will capitalize on the current political dissatisfaction here and win the presidential election in December 2002...

...His enemies range from North Korean refugees to South Korean agents to foes within his own regime...

...Alternatively, Kim Jong II could try to influence the outcome of the 2002 election by suddenly accepting Kim Dae Jung's invitation and visiting Seoul in the midst of the campaign...

...Cheering throngs would have to line the streets from the airport, and God forbid there should be any demonstrators denouncing the honored guest...

...Not surprisingly, the review found that unless the United States wants to risk a second Korean War, or a game of dare and double-dare across the demilitarized zone, there really is no alternative to the sunshine policy...

...With that, he suspended the dialogue with the North initiated during the Clinton Administration, announcing that the such talks would be put on hold until the White House had completed its "review" of the situation...

...Moreover, in the August Moscow declaration Kim did not seem to leave the kind of wiggle room implied in the North's earlier newspaper editorials (surely ordered by him) on the U.S...

...What would be the point of reaching a deal with him...

...military presence...

...The security precautions Kim took on his first official sojourn in a non-Communist nation showed how much he still fears an assassination attempt...

...Unable to satisfy such a request, Kim Dae Jung nevertheless missed no opportunity to express his eagerness to play host...

...All the North Koreans whom South Koreans met with in Pyongyang were tutored to tell their long-lost relatives how wonderful life was under Kim Jong II...

...Yet the fact that he dared to leave his country for more than three weeks demonstrated a certain confidence in his ability to endure the challenges of those believed to despise him at home...

...Because Kim Dae Jung, who is limited by his country's democratic Constitutions to one five-year term as president, steps down in February of that year...

...Petersburg was a magical mystery tour that included everything from reports of bullet holes in his 21-car armored train to high-stakes diplomacy with Russian President Vladimir V Putin...

...He also has another card to play...

...After that, as Kim Jong II slowly settled into the posts bequeathed by his father—chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission, and general secretary of the Workers' Party—relations between Washington and Pyongyang moved on an erratic upward trajectory...

...The North, it said, could bring up anything it wished...

...Carter noted that during a meeting with Kim II Sung in 1994, shortly before his death, the North's longtime ruler similarly spoke of the need for maintaining an American presence in Korea...

...One of the most common criticisms heard in Seoul was that the South was making all the concessions and the North was conceding nothing...

...Donald Kirk, a veteran NL writer, is the author most recently of Korean Crisis...

...national missile defense shield...

...Indeed, just prior to Kim II Sung's death the South's then President Kim Young Sam had scheduled a Pyongyang trip...

...A victory by Lee or another Right-winger would give Kim Jong II an excuse not simply to resume missile testing but perhaps to pick up the dormant atomic bomb project too...

...In this scenario, the candidate could sweep to victory on the strength of popular support for Kim Jong II's visit...

...Outside his native region of Cholla, despite almost two years to go in office, one heard people speaking of a "lame duck" presidency...

...The whole process was accelerated by the Kim-Kirn summit (fervently approved by the United States) and by the three rounds of visitations for family members divided by the Korean War...

...South Koreans became increasingly critical of Kim Dae Jung's persistent efforts to court Kim Jong II...

...The White House then also said it was open to negotiation with the North, but wanted to add two items for discussion besides missile production—one was the use of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power, and the other was the deployment of conventional forces...

...Putin thus secured Kim's promise to cooperate on the building of a railroad that would link South and North Korea and continue on through Siberia to Europe, as well as his unreserved support for the Kremlin'supposition to aU.S...

...He refused to send condolences, though, and relations between the two governments descended to a new level of ugliness...

...The turn of events put Kim Dae Jung in a difficult position...

...As far as Pyongyang was concerned, though, Washington had crossed the divide from conciliation to hostility...

...Secretary of State Colin L. Powell firmly endorsed the South's conciliatory policy...

...there was no attempt to send ordinary people who happened to be caught on the wrong side...

...The North Korean leader, however—despite allowing lower-level negotiations to resume and accepting another round of family reunions—is more interested in protecting his own power than in making any bold démarche...

...North Korea's media began to excoriate the United States in early March, when South Korean President Kim Dae Jung flew to Washington...

...But conservatives questioned whether he should leave the country while the economy was again in deep trouble, after having briefly recovered from the 199798 economic crisis...

...Certainly there would be no telephone calls, e-mails, or other forms of communication considered normal today even between people of countries that are not on good terms...

...But former President Jimmy Carter, who happened to be in Seoul on behalf of Habitat for Humanity at the time, lent credence to Kim Dae Jung's account...

...No knowledgeable observer could believe Kim Jong II somehow did not mean what he put his name to in Moscow...

...The President's career may have reached its high water mark with his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo last December...

...This came across more as an exercise in wishful thinking, however, than a sober appraisal of the dynamics behind his new rhetoric...

...It would be easy to criticize Bush, but one wonders whether the process was really going anywhere...

...It was not allayed until October '94, when the United States signed the deal under which a consortium led by Washington, and financed largely by Seoul and Tokyo, would build twin nuclear reactors to help meet the North's energy needs in exchange for Pyongyang's suspending all nuclear activity...

...But this contradicted the diplomacy that had gone before...

...There were several rounds of four-party talks, including both Koreas, China and the United States...

...South Korean President Kim Dae Jung had repeatedly said he got assurance from Kim Jong II in their June 2000 Pyongyang summit that American troops could stay put in the South, because they provide geopolitical "balance" among the mischievous great powers that surround the Korean Peninsula...

...All the North Koreans who came South were faithful party hacks who had gone to the North during the Korean War...

...there were talks between the United States and North Korea in New York...

...That would give Kim Dae Jung a much stronger argument in favor of his own handpicked candidate...

...Kim Dae Jung has merely said he would like to settle a number of longstanding differences with the North as peacefully and amicably as possible, and has pursued that goal without resorting to the type of verbal attack on the North that characterized the pronouncements of his predecessors...

...and there were talks between North and South Korea...

...The United States would then be under intense pressure to reduce its troop strength in Korea, and the North would finally be in a position to bargain more forcefully on matters of security as well as economic issues...

...There was even concern that war might break out...

...Bush shocked the South Korean entourage by expressing "some skepticism" about Kim Jong II...

...The North clearly had no intention of opening up the country to normal visits by anyone...

...The only explanation from Seoul for the apparent duplicity was that the North's leader had said what he truly thought in a private conversation with Kim Dae Jung, but had to grandstand in Moscow to mollify his would-be destroyers at home...

...The trip appeared to be a triumph for the Korean leader, but it might prove to have been utterly unprofitable...

...Why 2003...

...The beginning of reconstruction on the rail link between North and South Korea—12 kilometers of track on both sides of the demilitarized zone were blasted apart in the first days of the Korean War—seemed to presage the resumption of routine commerce between the two states...

...For South Koreans, the mystery of Kim's meeting with Putin was in the joint declaration they issued on August 4. The North Korean "side," as the statement put it, called for the departure of U.S...

...As long as Washington and Pyongyang were not talking, Kim Dae Jung knew Kim Jong II would never make the gesture that would once again establish the Nobel Prize winner as the man who brought peace to the Korean Peninsula...

...He had hoped that President George W. Bush, like former President Bill Clinton, would strongly endorse his "sunshine" policy, seeking rapprochement with the North...

...Word was that he wanted a guarantee of crowds comparable to the ones that had greeted the South Korean President in Pyongyang...

...Seven years after the death of his father, Kim II Sung, he seems counterintuitively to have solidified his own power and that of his ruling clique even as more than 2 milliorn of his countrymen have starved to death or died of illnesses related to endemic malnutrition...

...The two would have to engage in talks "in parallel," as Kim Dae Jung likes to put it, with discussions between Washington and Pyongyang...

...Nor would there be a resumption of mail privileges—except for one mailing of stilted formal letters...

...troops from South Korea...

...there would be no "preconditions...

...Rather ironically, his one hope was that Kim Jong II would pay a reciprocal visit to Seoul, as he had promised...

...In his conversations with Putin, Kim Jong II mentioned that he would not consider a new missile test until 2003, just as he had promised a delegation from the European Union...

...At a "tea party" for correspondents on the lawn of the Blue House, he hinted that the anniversary of the first summit, June 15, might be the perfect occasion for Kim Jong II to accept the invitation...

...If anything, Kim Jong II seems to have inspired a conservative reaction that, for the moment, deepens the differences between North and South, further burying the hopes engendered by the Kim-Kim summit of June 2000...

...There was a sense that Kim Dae Jung would follow all of his predecessors and finish his days in the Blue House as a failure...

...Returning home, he was reviled for failing to negotiate the release of South Korean fishermen and others held for years by the North, and fornot securing a commitment on pulling troops away from the demilitarized zone...

...As the restrictive choreography grew more obvious...

...The highly-touted family visits, for starters, turned out to be a sham...

...Bush asked, if Pyongyang was still refusing to allow "verification" of its compliance with any agreement to stop testing, producing and exporting missiles (most of which go to Middle Eastern countries at odds with Israel...

...Seoul and Pyongyang were in one of their rare moments of mutual civility...

...The outcry provoked by Kim Jong Il's renewed insistence on the departure of U.S...

...Unfortunately, there is no transcript of the meeting, nor even minutes...

...troops suggests that the latter scenario is not at all likely...

...Since the Bush administration had completed its review and was now ready for its own conversation, Washington was glad to cooperate, to the point of calling on Kim Jong II to come to the South...

...By the end of spring, as the first anniversary of the inter-Korean summit approached, Washington seemed to be in accord with Seoul...

...His conservative opposition here, led by Lee Hoi Chang, whom he narrowly defeated in the 1997 presidential election, had a field day raising the possibility that he had lied about his conversation with Kim Jong II...

...South Korea's president recognized that there was a catch to any summit with Kim Jong II...