NEW YORK — In Korea, sometimes even the good news can be scary. The latest example came two weeks ago, when a reluctant North Korea defused a simmering crisis and put international negotiations back on track by apologizing for an incident last fall, when a heavily armed North Korean submarine ran aground in the South.
That apology was, make no mistake about it, good news--and one of the most important foreign-policy victories of the Clinton administration to date. Hard-liners in North Korea, worried about growing ties between North Korea and the United States, apparently sent the submarine south in an effort to derail progress toward peace. Firm but patient U.S. diplomacy ultimately got the North Koreans to issue their apology and, better still, to agree to attend a meeting to learn more about what Washington hopes can be a framework for peace talks between North and South Korea.
All this is good news--but look a little deeper and the outlook is not quite so sunny. North Korea didn't apologize because it was sorry; it apologized because it is starving--and starvation in North Korea could destabilize the Korean peninsula and East Asia as a whole.
Without subsidized Soviet oil and other foreign aid from communist states, North Korea's economy has been slowly unraveling since 1990. Food shortages, already a problem, escalated into famine after devastating floods in the summer of 1995 spread close to three feet of water on crops almost ready for harvest. By the summer of 1996, food shortages were so acute that rations in much of the country dropped below 500 calories per day.
This year, things look worse. More floods last summer, combined with the collapse of most of North Korea's industry, leave the country facing a massive food shortage that can't be averted without foreign aid. Now North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il (son of recently deceased Great Leader Kim Il Sung) has little choice but to continue to look for help in his economic troubles to Japan, South Korea and the United States.
Pyongyang's apology assures that the U.S. will continue to help North Korea replace its current nuclear reactor with a safer model, whose spent fuel cannot be used to build nuclear weapons. Military officials will dig up North Korean hillsides in search of the bodies of MIAs from the 1950-53 Korean War.
