S. Korea's one-way affair

WHILE MUCH of the world is fixated on the conflict in the Middle East, there is a whole other drama playing out on the Korean peninsula that is just as crucial to global stability. Last week's U.N. Security Council resolution condemning North Korea's nuclear ambitions has not only ratcheted up tensions in the region, it is forcing South Korea to rethink its "sunshine policy" of peaceful engagement with the North. After eight years of rapprochement with the government of Kim Jong Il, a growing number of South Koreans are wondering whether the North Korean dictator hasn't been abusing their trust.

To understand South Koreans' tortured attitudes toward the rogue nation on the northern side of the most heavily armed border on the planet, it helps to watch "Spy Girl," a silly Romeo-and-Juliet-style 2004 Korean teen movie.

Hyo-jin, a fetching young North Korean spy, is sent across the demilitarized zone to capture a renegade agent who has embezzled money from the North Korean government. But while working undercover at a Burger King, she falls in love with a South Korean boy about to head off to his mandatory military service. Theirs is a love cursed by the harsh realities of geopolitics.

Only a decade earlier, making a spy into a heroine would have been considered tantamount to treason. But since the 1990s, younger generations of South Koreans have developed a more sympathetic -- yet still deeply conflicted -- view of their national doppelganger.

Products of an economically thriving and democratic nation, these generations resent their nation's military dependence on the United States, and they see the peaceful resolution of conflict with North Korea as an opportunity to assert their independence. Whereas during the Cold War South Korean politicians leveraged the North Korean threat to secure largesse from the U.S., today younger, more liberal pols stress their nation's ability to solve the peninsular standoff on its own, through economic and cultural exchange.

Not surprisingly, as attitudes toward North Korea have softened, anti-American sentiment has increased. President Bush's inclusion of North Korea in his 2002 "axis of evil" speech was understood by many as an unwelcome intrusion into South Korea's domestic politics and an attempt to undermine the sunshine policy.