By Matthew Klauber

The recent rumors of a ``grand bargain'' between Pyongyang and its adversaries over the North's nuclear program can only be an encouraging sign. Any step away from nuclear holocaust is a step in the right direction.

However, even if such a deal wins approval from all three capitals, there is still no way to be sure that it will really stick. Most past agreements with the North have encountered a rocky, ``two steps forward and one step back'' implementation process.

North Korea's nuclear program, to take only the most salient example, has been an issue since the early 1990s. Some blame the United States for reneging on such agreements as the light water reactor deal of the early 1990s.

Others place all the blame on the North for its legacy of provocative behavior, and for investing in a nuclear program to begin with ― even as its population goes hungry.
The real reason that this and so many other agreements with the North have foundered, however, is because there has been a state of war on the Korean Peninsula since 1950.

Seoul and Washington cannot provide food aid to a country with which they are at war. They cannot build nuclear reactors for a nation with which they are at war.

In short, they cannot accomplish any substantive, enforceable agreement with North Korea, because the only agreement possible among warring powers is a peace treaty. Normalization is the condition of the possibility for peace.

Talk of normalization is, of course, enormously controversial among South Koreans, particularly among the older generation, and for good reason. The price to be paid for a peace treaty is the ratification of Korea's division, the official recognition of the fact that a single people has been made two through the interference of outside powers.

The closest analogy for an American, perhaps, would be to imagine California sundered from the body of his republic. It would be a tragedy.

Yet, surely the greater tragedy would be to continue a war that no longer serves any purpose, a war that once claimed the lives of tens of thousands, Korean and American, and could easily do so again.

Much of the blame for the situation naturally lies with the North, the ruthless totalitarian dictatorship that insists on maintaining a clearly moribund system at the cost of thousands of its citizens' lives.

If communism is obsolete, though, it necessarily follows that anticommunism is also obsolete. If Pyongyang must realize that surrender is an option, and that this surrender need not be unconditional so long as the 1953 armistice holds, Washington must make defeat worth its enemy's while.

We have used the stick for 60 years. It hasn't worked. Let's try the carrot. It is true that the division of the Korean people is a bitter and awful fact, but it is most assuredly a fact. To deny it would be to imbibe a dose of the same narcotic that has made the self-delusional North Korean leaders such fearful adversaries.

Today, there are two Koreas, not one. They have vastly different economic and political systems, different cultures, different levels of development and standards of living, and radically different relationships with the outside world.

They don't even have the same word for ``computer.'' They are, simply put, as different as two countries could possibly be.

Even if North Korea dismantles its bizarre ``juche'' system of collectivism tomorrow (we may hope), it will still take over 20 years to reunify Korea.

While the North does have enormous potential ― it remains technically industrialized, even if the equipment is dated and in dire need of energy and spare parts, and has a relatively healthy and well-educated workforce ― it will take many years to dismantle its sclerotic planning apparatus, modernize its technology and handle the massive social dislocations that will inevitably accompany a collapse or denouement.

In the meantime, the possibility of renewed hostilities on the peninsula, even nuclear war, is a sword of Damocles hanging over the democracy and prosperity that South Koreans have struggled so avidly to build.

To say that the tragedy of another war would dwarf that of a divided Korea would be to indulge in understatement of truly galactic proportions. Hundreds of thousands would die -- Korean, American, and Japanese.

Seoul would be destroyed. Pyongyang would be destroyed. Weapons of mass destruction would set the entire peninsula ablaze. Five millennia of Korean civilization would be annihilated. For what?

Now is the perfect time, whereas before about 1980, the primary obstacle to normalization was opposition from the rightwing regime in Seoul. After Ronald Regan's election, Washington became the roadblock.

While newly democratic South Korea reached out to the North under Kim Dae-jung's sophisticated Sunshine Policy, batting down its provocations while offering face-saving compromises, America's rightward lurch made any dramatic moves toward peace unimaginable, even during the pragmatic Clinton years.

Now that the American public has returned to sanity after eight years of cowboy diplomacy, President Barack Obama must seize what may well be one of the last historical opportunities to avert a civilizational crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

The democratic allies have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Would Seoul and Washington be giving the North exactly what it wants by extending recognition? Certainly.

What we would insist on in return would be the immediate dismantling of North Korea's nuclear program, as well as its chemical and biological stockpiles, and a bilateral drawdown of conventional forces. Trade and assistance to the North can thereafter be progressively broadened as Pyongyang curtails its human rights abuses.

For the United States, peace in Korea should be conceived of in terms of a broader retrenchment of its military commitments. America has stretched itself thin, expending manpower and resources desperately needed for domestic enterprises on an imperial presence in the same Mesopotamian deserts that bankrupted the Roman Empire under Trajan.

It should be clear, at this point, that the reduction of imperial overstretch would offer substantial benefits for both the American taxpayer as well as for an exasperated world public.

Our chief strategic concerns are managing China's rise and calming the Middle East. Both have political solutions, and both will require judicious redeployments of our nation's strength and skill.

For South Koreans, the termination of the conflict would mean more than just a collective sigh of relief, an end to tiptoeing around a sleeping crocodile. It would mean a substantial peace dividend, as men and resources are freed for more productive ends. (Potable tap water is but one possibility.)

It will mean an expansion of freedom, as the national security law forbidding full freedom of expression in South Korea will have exhausted its rationale. Most of all, it will give South Korea a freer hand in its own foreign policy.

The U.S. and the ROK would remain allies on paper, of course, but American troops can withdraw to Okinawa, while South Korea assumes a role in East Asia commensurate with its status as a rising world power.

No thought is more delightful, to both Koreans and Americans, than that of one Korean nation from the Yalu River to Jeju Island, peacefully reunified under a democratic government. I hope to witness that day in my lifetime.

For the time being, however, we must play the hand that history has dealt us. This is perhaps the crowning irony for a country whose modern history is replete with the bitterest of ironies ― Korea cannot hope to one day make itself whole without first recognizing its division.

Matthew Klauber is a native of Long Island, N.Y., and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2003. Since then, he has worked in publishing, education and freelance journalism. He is currently working as an English instructor at YBM in southern Seoul. He can be reached at matthew.klauber@gmail.com.