Posted on: Monday, December 23, 2002

EDITORIAL
New Korea leader gives a chance for fresh start

Election of a new South Korean president who says he won't "kowtow" to Washington is no disaster. Instead it presents an opportunity to redraw some policies in Northeast Asia that weren't particularly effective, but endured in part because our allies too often tell us what we want to hear.

Roh Moo-hyun was cast as the more liberal, less tough on North Korea of the two candidates. In continuing the "Sunshine" policy of outgoing President Kim Dae-jung, Roh gives the Bush administration a chance to tweak a North Korea policy that offers more opportunity for calamity than peaceful progress.

"Don't bother me, I'm busy with Iraq" is not a strategy likely to build confidence in Seoul or Tokyo or change hearts and minds in

Pyongyang. It is a better strategy, surely, than the one called for in the administration's recently released doctrine calling for pre-emptive response to weapons of mass destruction before an enemy can use them.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell made clear last week, the new policy does not apply to North Korea, at least for the time being.

There's a lot to be said for Bush's decision not to reward Pyongyang's misbehavior by giving it what it appears to want: direct negotiations. But the result of this policy is that Pyongyang seems ready to escalate the misbehavior sharply. Before Washington stopped talking to them, the North Koreans were creeping along with a uranium-enrichment program that is years away from producing weapons. Now they threaten to resume a program that can give them five bombs in four months.

Bush has made shutdown of nuclear programs a precondition for resumption of talks. That path seems likely to produce a crisis in Korea just when Iraq demands full attention. Bush should use the occasion of Roh's election as cover to restart negotiations — with the unabashed object of achieving a standdown of Pyongyang's weapons programs. It's the best choice from an unappealing palette.