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                                                                                AMERICA ABROAD, Page 48

The Curse of the Answered Prayer


By Strobe Talbott


    Seoul. The end of the cold war is proving to be a
dangerous passage for all concerned: winners, losers and
bystanders. Two years ago, Saddam Hussein concluded that the
demise of the Soviet Union as a superpower had created a
regional vacuum he could fill. The result was the invasion of
Kuwait and Desert Storm. Last year a clique of Serbian Marxists
tried to maintain its authority over other South Slavs who no
longer needed Belgrade to protect them from Moscow. The result
was the Balkan cataclysm.

    But the most perilous place on earth may be here, on the
Korean peninsula, where the cold war first turned hot in 1950
and where it could end with a bang in the years -- or even the
months -- ahead.

    For decades, North Korea has relied on its two giant
neighbors, the U.S.S.R. and China, for political, economic and
military assistance. Now Russia has recognized South Korea,
stopped supplying arms to the North and demanded hard currency
for its oil shipments. Two weeks ago, to the muted fury of
Pyongyang, China too agreed to establish diplomatic relations
with Seoul.

    Not that isolation is anything new for North Korea. The
country's few televisions are configured so that they cannot
pick up broadcasts from the South. Radios are built to receive
only one Big Brother channel. Short-wave receivers are illegal
for average citizens.

    The Pyongyang government has yanked home thousands of
young people who were studying in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union. Afraid of what they might have learned abroad,
authorities have sent many for political re-education into the
countryside, where rationing has, according to intelligence
reports, gone from three to two meals a day. But those students
are surely doing some educating of their own, whispering
messages of discontent and subversion to the local peasants.

    The regime itself is in an advanced stage of dry rot.
Imagine the Soviet Union if Stalin were still alive and in
charge at age 112: that is North Korea, which outsiders have
mockingly dubbed "the world's last socialist theme park." It has
had no Khrushchev, not even a Brezhnev, never mind a Gorbachev.
It has only its founding dictator, Kim Il Sung, who is 80 and
failing. "The Great Leader" has designated his son, "the Dear
Leader," heir to the throne. But a succession struggle may
already have begun.

    The defining issue among the factions is almost certain to
be whether to accept the verdict of humanity on communism and
negotiate a gradual, peaceful accommodation with the South.
Members of the North Korean ruling elite have seen what happened
in Germany, another country divided in 1945. The more realistic
among them can easily imagine ending up like Erich Honecker and
his comrades: on the dustheap of history or in the dock.
Visitors to Pyongyang have noted a new defensiveness, bordering
on desperation, among officials there.

    Here in Seoul, I have found that South Korean officials
and foreign policy experts are also sobered by the German
experience. Theirs is the curse of the answered prayer. They
have calculated that relative to the size of their economy, it
will be 10 times as expensive for them to unite with North Korea
as for the Bonn government to absorb the former East Germany.
The outbreak of political turmoil in the wake of Kim's death
could send hundreds of thousands of Northerners pouring across
the Demilitarized Zone. Or would-be refugees might be
slaughtered by North Korean troops, a horror that would tempt
if not oblige the South to intervene.

    What makes such scenarios especially disturbing is the
uncertainty over the status of North Korea's clandestine program
to develop an atom bomb. Kim is probably playing cat and mouse,
like Saddam, with the international community's nuclear
inspectors. But Kim did not lose a war last year, so he has much
more control over foreign access to his facilities and air
space.

    For all these reasons, the South Koreans with whom I
talked are crossing their fingers that the death of communism
in the North and unification with the South will be spread out
over 10 or even 20 years. They are counting on their new
partners in Beijing to wean Kim's successors away from
Stalinism. As Professor Ahn Byung Joon of Yonsei University in
Seoul put it, "The only course is to persuade North Korea to
adopt the Chinese model of economic reform and an open-door
policy toward the rest of the world."

    While a step-by-step, managed transition is to be
encouraged, it is not necessarily to be expected. As Gorbachev
himself inadvertently demonstrated, reform communism is an
oxymoron. The Chinese Communists may ultimately learn the same
truth, even though they bought the system some time with blood
on Tiananmen Square. The late Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, a
great friend of the Great Leader, provided a corollary: the more
retrograde and repressive the regime, the more violent its fall.
Its strength is brittle; it will not bend, but it will break.
Open the door to a country like North Korea, and the whole house
will fall down. The world can hope for a North Korean soft
landing -- but it should be prepared for a crash.