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The cooling tower of a main nuclear complex is demolished in Yongbyon, North Korea, June 27. The communist country destroyed the tower in a symbolic move to give up its nuclear weapons program after handing over the declaration of its nuclear activities to China, the host of the six-party talks. / Kyodo News-Yonhap |
 By Tom Plate
LOS ANGELES ― The Koreans have a special phrase for it. They call it ``ppali-ppali." It means ``double quick" like ― (1) get it done yesterday or (2) tomorrow is too late or, even, (3) act as if there is no tomorrow!
The upside of ``ppali-ppali" from the Korean experience is that it has boomed the country's economy into perhaps one of the world's top dozen. But the downside, as Koreans view it, is that haste often makes waste, hurry sometimes gets you nowhere, and slapdash can make for mishmash.
This country, after all, groans about its collapsing bridges, crumbling department stores and apartment buildings that keel over ― all because of an excess of contractor ``ppali-ppali."
The ppali-ppali concept, by the way, is one of the countless helpful insights into modern Korea that one gets in a deeply informed and informative new book, ``Changing Korea: Understanding Culture and Communication."
The authors are a gifted trio team (Shim T. Youn-ja, Kim Min-sun and Judith N. Martin) who really know their stuff and how to strut it. They have put together one of the most rewarding books on Korea I have read in some time.
And their important new study hit my desk just as I was trying to put some perspective on the latest turn in the twisty saga of the United States versus Axis of Evil charter member, North Korea.
You may recall that the Bush administration spent much of its first term bad-mouthing North Korea (not hard to do), trying to isolate it (it was already pretty isolated) and claiming that you can't trust Communists well enough to negotiate with them (but we do a lot of negotiating with China … no?).
And then came the Iraq-invasion swamp and the rise to prominent possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran (especially worrisome if one is an Israeli). With that, suddenly it made sense for us to think the unthinkable, talk to the untalkable and actually negotiate with the Korean Commies up north.
Fortunately, Beijing, which feared what the gung-ho Bush people might do next, put together the six-party talks.
Those on-again, off-again talks more or less made up part two of the North Korean saga: the Bush administration was able to use them to realize its desire to leave office with the diplomatic victory of all but denuclearizing the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (yes, that's its formal name).
So they put the project on ppali-ppali status. Thus, suddenly, it was all action.
Finally released by ppali-ppali Bush from the isolation of a diplomatic Guantanamo erected by the neo-cons (those nattering neighbors of negativity), the State Department shifted into high gear. Led by one of its most gifted negotiators and hardest-working diplomats ― Christopher Hill ― the U.S. began to derive value from the six-party talks structure.
Instead of being some kind of China Box from which there was no way out, it became a kind of Magic Box in which the Bush people could conduct quiet conversations with Pyongyang without appearing to lose face by actually negotiating with a nation with which it had serious issues and with which it said it would probably never negotiate.
North Korea is not a particularly fun or fulsome conversationalist, but with China giving its negotiators dirty looks from time to time, it began weighing the potential cost of silence. More talking between Washington and Pyongyang then erupted in Berlin, where more progress was made.
Then there was the sound of sweet music in the North Korean capital: the stunning visit of the New York Philharmonic at the tail-end of its Asian swing that seemed to put the finishing touch of an orchestral code on the isolation idea.
Step-by-step, it began to come together. And so Pyongyang presented ― in Beijing, fittingly enough ― the prize package of nuclear documents to Washington in late June. They are said to reveal chapter and verse about its feared, secret plutonium projects that it promises to terminate ― dramatically, in one case.
The delay in this dramatic hand-off had been delaying Washington's promise to ease economic sanctions and yank North Korea off its notorious terrorism list.
To South Koreans, perhaps, the sudden action might seem to coincide with the growing understanding in Washington that in little more than half a year, the Bush administration is history. If ever there was a time for ppali-ppali, this was therefore it: time was a wasting.
But to put the matter in true perspective, dally-dally would be a better characterization than ppali-ppali. The deal in many respects actually spookily parallels the one put together in Geneva in 1994 during the prior North Korean nuclear crisis.
America's man on the diplomatic spot then was Robert Gallucci, now the revered dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Like today's Chris Hill, Gallucci was a skilled negotiator with the patience of a pair of Buddhas.
Though working more than a decade apart, they have in the totality of their efforts helped bring North Korea and the United States closer together, and moved the world further away from a nuclear crisis. This is no small thing.
UCLA Prof. Tom Plate is the author of ``Confessions of an American Media Man." He can be reached at platecolumn@hotmail.com.
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