Looking for Clue

Rivaling Koreas Put Their Fate in Others' Hands

Following North Korea's second nuclear test, clouds are gathering over the peninsula, threatening to shut out any rays of hope for an early breakthrough.

The Barack Obama administration has just activated a task force coordinating Washington's political, military and financial sanctions against the Stalinist regime. President Lee Myung-bak met his Japanese counterpart Sunday to reaffirm bilateral cooperation in pressuring Pyongyang to abandon nuclear programs, in what Lee's aides say was the culmination of the ``three-nation collaboration" to press for North Korea's denuclearization.

As if in response, about 110,000 North Koreans rallied and marched in the capital city last week, as their government threatened a ``fire shower of nuclear retaliations" against the United States and its ally South Korea.

Now, the three capitalist allies are persuading Beijing to join in tightening the noose on their Communist brother, with a hypothetical promise to jointly solve problems, including economic burden sharing, in case the reclusive regime collapses and refugees rush to China en masse. Yet it would not be easy ― if not totally impossible ― considering China would rather accept a small, ``nuclearized" neighbor in half of the Korean Peninsula than directly bordering a unified, capitalist and pro-U.S. Republic of Korea, at least not any more than America wants to see a communist Korean Peninsula threaten its most important Asian ally ― Japan.

Koreans with a modicum of historical sense might be lamenting: Until when should the divided halves of this peninsula be mired in ideological rivalry rooted in the tragic civil war they fought as the proxies of the Cold War?

It was also against this backdrop that we find it more than just obnoxious that President Lee is so anxious to replace the six-party talks with a five-nation meeting by excluding North Korea, an impractical idea which was indirectly rejected even by the leader of Japan, where conservative politicians love to exaggerate the threat from a country with less than one-hundredth the economic power for their military rearmament, and where the news media's sensational handling of North Korean news is nearing the levels of yellow journalism.

Seoul can also ill-afford to welcome the unexpectedly hard-line stance of the Obama administration against North Korea. President Lee should learn from the lessons of his political mentor, former President Kim Young-sam, who helped accelerate the nuclear crisis but later had to beg for Washington's restraint from starting a ``surgical strike."

Kim's request to Americans at the time with regard to Washington's North Korea policy was ``firm, but not too firm." Would the corresponding demand from Lee be ``as firm as possible?"

The bigger the role South Korea plays in defusing the nuclear crisis and making its Northern rival a member of international community, the larger its say in discussing the future of the Korean Peninsula. President Lee says his pressure tactic is also toward that end, but history says similar policies have never succeeded. The only period when the Koreas seemed to determine their own fates was during the two previous administrations.