Pyongyang needs a diplomatic push
By Thomas Plate
How long until North Korea comes to its senses and comes in out of the cold?
Associated Press library photo • August 13, 2001
It is now past time for Kim Jong Il to face reality and implore the world to help resurrect North Korea's moribund economy. In return, he must ease long-standing Korean peninsula tensions —for starters by reciprocating last summer's summit visit by Kim Dae Jung.
South Korean protester Park Chang Sung shouts in protest against a recent visit to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese Prime Minister Junichuro Koizumi.
But who can pry North Korea from its scary, claustrophobic shell? One answer may be Junichiro Koizumi. Japan's dashing prime minister could hold the key to a way out. Indeed, instead of visiting war shrines, the prime minister should be visiting Pyongyang to crack open the last iceberg of the Cold War in Asia.
After all, who else better to do this?
Evidently not South Korea's Kim, the Nobel peace prize winner. His biggest card was the journey to Pyongyang for what was supposed to be the first half of a reciprocal North-South summit. Still, no Kim Jong Il.
The United States? The Clinton administration's negotiations came close to nailing a peninsular detente but its time in office ran out. The new administration sometimes seems almost to fear the development of peninsular peace lest that inadvertently weaken Bush's justification for a new ballistic missile defense system.
For its part, China has tried to lead the North Korean horse to water but has failed, in the main, to get it to drink. Its pitch to Kim Jong Il is reform or die: Start opening up the markets of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as China did two decades ago. Beijing does have one last big card to play — cutting off all its aid — but that's simply too dangerous.
Russia? Moscow recently delighted in receiving the North's Kim, but, though it has a huge interest in peninsula developments, in its current enfeebled state Russia wouldn't wield a lot of influence.
The impasse needs East Asia's big new player. After all, Koizumi leads a Japan that, despite all its troubles, is still by far the biggest economy in Asia, one that could hugely benefit from the investment opportunities of a North Korean open market. And Japan can be a top-table player when it wants to be. Obviously, the PM has not yet managed to find a balance between domestic and foreign pressure: His visit last week to a Shinto war shrine threw cold water in the face of the Korean-Japanese relationship and inflamed the Chinese. He has to do better.
His next major diplomatic challenge — and it's a big one — will be how to handle the Bush crowd's pressure to join the missile defense bandwagon aimed at so-called rogue states such as you-know-who. Japan has been tilting the American way only because (1) it's a loyal ally and (2) it's edgy about North Korea, which in 1998 launched a satellite missile over its territory.
"A politically strong and skillful prime minister can lead the decision-making process" on the missile defense issue, write East Asian experts Michael D. Swaine, Rachel M. Swanger and Takashi Kawakami in "Japan and Ballistic Missile Defense," a report just issued by the California-based think tank RAND.
Perhaps, but in Japan missile defense remains bitterly controversial. Even the most persuasive PM will find it a hard sell. Better that this gifted Japanese leader use his skills and political capital to persuade North Korea to de-rogue its image and begin negotiations with the South.
A Koizumi initiative like this would more than make up for the Yasukuni shrine stumble, demonstrate to the Koreans and Chinese the power of positive Japanese diplomacy and remove from Tokyo's roiling politics the divisive missile defense issue. This has the potential not only to stall Koizumi's premiership but, argues the timely RAND report, harm the Tokyo-Washington alliance as well: The mishandling of the missile defense issue by the United States "could damage the alliance and U.S. security interests far more than any military benefits" obtained from it.
Who else could hope to pull off such a dramatic gesture? While it is certainly true that it's a mistake to ask Japanese diplomacy to do too much, it can also be a mistake to ask too little, especially when so much is at stake. It's Koizumi's move, or there'll probably be no movement.
Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Find him on the Web.
