A challenge to rethink 'the Korean problem'

Also in Times Select, Nicholas Kristoff asks us to

Look around the world at the regimes we despise: North Korea, Cuba, Burma and Iran. Those are among the world’s most long-lived regimes, and that’s partly because the sanctions and isolation we have imposed on them have actually propped them up — by giving those countries’ leaders an excuse for their economic failures and a chance to cloak themselves in nationalism.

He points out that:

Lately Americans have been quarreling over who is more to blame for North Korea’s nuclear test, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

Well, Mr. Clinton inherited a situation that, if it had continued, would have resulted in North Korea having hundreds of nuclear weapons by now, and producing an additional 50 each year. Instead, Mr. Clinton negotiated a deal with North Korea that resulted in it producing not a single ounce of new plutonium in his eight years in office.

In contrast, President Bush inherited that North Korean nuclear freeze and, if he had just left it alone, North Korea wouldn’t have produced any new plutonium. But Mr. Bush overruled Colin Powell’s efforts to continue the engagement — and so North Korea has churned out enough plutonium on Mr. Bush’s watch for perhaps eight nuclear weapons.

But in a larger sense, the North Korean nuclear test — and the fact that Kim Jong-il is still in power — represent a failure not so much of either Mr. Bush or Mr. Clinton, but of decades of bipartisan American policy that aimed to isolate the North.

His conclusion?

In particular, it’s a mistake for us to reproach the South Koreans — who have more of a stake than anybody, and who understand the North Koreans better than we do — for operating factories in the Kaesong industrial zone in North Korea.

It’s true that those North Korean workers have no rights, and that North Korea will use the hard currency to bolster its military. But those South Korean factories are expected to employ 700,000 workers by 2012.

While North Korea can survive punitive sanctions, I don’t think the regime can survive the shock of having 700,000 of its citizens working for South Korean capitalists — and realizing that the southerners are so rich and spoiled that they refuse to eat rice with gravel in it.

The biggest threat to North Korea’s regime isn’t from American warships, but from the sight of other Koreans dieting, or listening on iPods to love songs, or watching decadent television comedies.

So let’s stop helping the Dear Leader isolate his own people.