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The National Interest
Our Other Korea Problem
by Nicholas Eberstadt
. . . Thus the possibility of a visit to South Korea by Kim Jong-il, and the prospect of a North-South peace document, takes on extraordinary portent for the Kim Dae-jung administration and his ruling party. Given the importance that the current ROK government invests in such a visit and that envisioned document, the prospect of a peace proposal scripted to Pyongyang's tastes may be one of the enticements Seoul will use to lure Kim Jong-il to South Korea. (That prospect assumes more than a hypothetical possibility: former ROK General Lim Dong-won, a confidant of President Kim Dae-jung and co-architect of the "sunshine policy", went to Pyongyang in April of this year on a mission to jumpstart the "Korean peace process", and more impromptu missions may follow.) If so, President Kim would not be the first worried politician in a democracy to gamble on national security for the sake of maintaining his party in office - and the June 2002 gunboat incident, serious as it was, does not necessarily leave the possibility of an election-influencing "peace breakthrough" dead in the water. South Korean polls show that while 70 percent of the public believes Pyongyang deliberately engineered the shoot-out, nearly 60 percent nevertheless want the "sunshine policy" to continue. It is worth recalling, too, that President Kim has choreographed such "breakthroughs" to coincide with the South Korean electoral calendar before: his historic visit to Pyongyang, for example, was announced just three days before the country's April 2000 National Assembly elections. . . .