In 1992, two years before his death, Kim Il Sung, the "Great Leader"
of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea),
began to publish a compendium of reminiscences about his life and
times. Although he inhabited a society that automatically acclaimed
his every utterance for its immortal wisdom, the old man--the only
ruler the state had ever known until then--could rightly believe that
nonetheless he had an epic story to tell.

This former Soviet Red Army officer, after all, had survived dire
perils and had gone on to savor triumphs of historic proportion. In
1950 he launched the Korean War in the mistaken hope of quickly
overrunning and absorbing the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South
Korea). Although his grave miscalculation led to an international
embroilment that devastated his country, he managed to emerge from
the disaster intact and unbowed. The world's greatest power, the
United States, had fought against him for three years and had been
unable to defeat him.

In contradistinction to other communist governments (whose doctrines
regarded dynastic succession as inherently counterrevolutionary), Kim
openly founded a socialist dynasty in North Korea, with his brother
and then later his son designated as heir to, and vanguard of, the
revolutionary tradition. And he originated a quasi-religious
philosophy, juche-thought. Juche's twenty million avowed
adherents--the entire populace of his country--had been taught that
the destiny and salvation of the Korean people, who had been
partitioned between two separate and mutually hostile states through
the settlements of World War II, would lie in an eventual
reunification beneath an independent, socialist government--that is
to say, Kim's own government, directed by Kim's own family.

Although Kim's memoirs ostensibly recounted events past, they were
suffused with the Great Leader's confidence that he knew what lay in
store for his regime--and, indeed, for all Korea. The conviction that
history was on the side of his North Korean project was conveyed by
images throughout the book, and, perhaps most significantly, by its
title: Segi Wa Toburo--"With the Century." But as the end of Kim's
century now approaches, very different sorts of images of North Korea
prevail. Some of those were conveyed in an arresting videotape
broadcast on Japanese and South Korean television in December 1998.
Shot secretly by a North Korean refugee, the video presented scenes
from everyday life in several towns in the DPRK. Western journalists
who watched the program described what they saw:

"Barefoot orphans sucking fishbones in a squalid outdoor market;
women picking lice from each other's hair; men wading into a river to
fish out the bodies of friends who starved to death or were shot by
border guards."

In one scene, an emaciated boy staggers from hunger as the cameraman
asks him where he lives. The child is an orphan and lives on what
scraps he can find in the open air market. He is clearly close to
collapse. In another harrowing scene, a small girl tries to scoop
dirty water to drink from a puddle with a plastic bag. Some of the
children said they had run away from state-run 'relief centres' where
the only food was two ladles of corn gruel a day. In some cases their
parents had died or gone away to search for food and never came back.

The images were shocking because they were so anomalous. Desperate
hunger is not supposed to strike societies that are urbanized,
industrialized and free from chaos or war. Yet urban, industrial
North Korea was--and is--manifestly in the grip of a terrible and
protracted food crisis. Pyongyang had formally issued an emergency
appeal for international humanitarian food aid in 1995, the year
after Kim Il Sung's death; international relief operations have been
under way ever since. At the end of the twentieth century, the regime
has lost the capability to feed its own populace. In fact, its
failure is so pervasive, so deep and so irremediable that we may now
begin to speak of, and to contemplate, the end of the North Korean
project.

In the most obvious of senses, of course, that project is still very
much with us at the end of 1999. The DPRK continues to function as a
state: it vigorously controls its borders (and the people within
them); it conducts a foreign policy; it demands--and enjoys--all the
recognitions of sovereignty. Yet at the same time one can also say
that the North Korean project, in some profound and meaningful sense,
has already come to an end. For it has totally failed to accomplish
the missions for which it was ostensibly constructed--missions,
indeed, on which the DPRK's authority and legitimacy have always been
predicated.

Those missions were, first and foremost, the unification of the
entire Korean Peninsula under its rule; and second, the
implementation of a program of sustained socialist growth that would
permit the state to amass steady power and allow the populace to
enjoy a modicum of prosperity. The North Korean system has not
achieved either of those objectives. But more than that: from our
current vantage point it is apparent that socialist North Korea is
systemically incapable of accomplishing those very objectives that
justify its existence. The failure of North Korea's unification quest
and of its economic formula mark the end of any positive purpose for
the North Korean state.

The Unification Project

To understand North Korea's circumstances today, we must begin with
an interpretation of its relentless, bold and yet ultimately
fruitless quest for unification of the Korean Peninsula on its own
terms. Interpretation is the operative term here, as all students of
North Korean affairs will appreciate. The North Korean government
has, for over fifty years, enshrouded itself in deliberately
fashioned mystery. By conscious and long-standing design, less
reliable information is available about the DPRK than perhaps any
other country in the modern world. (Compared with it, contemporary
China is an open book.) To complicate matters further, "strategic
deception"--that is to say, programmatic efforts to mislead potential
opponents about intentions and capabilities--always seems to have
figured prominently in North Korean statecraft. (Events leading up to
Pyongyang's surprise attack against South Korea in June 1950
constitute the most famous of those exercises, but it is merely a
single case in point.) The problematic nature of that evidentiary
record, it is worth noting, goes far in explaining why contemporary
North Korea watchers can and often do arrive at dramatically
different conclusions about the meaning and significance of given
reports about, or pronouncements by, the DPRK.

Yet I would submit that from the very inception of the North Korean
state the DPRK has maintained a consistent diagnosis of the problems
of a divided Korea, and has cleaved to a consistent prescription for
remedying them. From the very beginning, Pyongyang's leadership
regarded the Republic of Korea to the south as a flawed, corrupt and
illegitimate regime, a government with little chance of surviving on
its own and with no right to do so. And from the very beginning,
"unification" meant unification on Pyongyang's terms and Pyongyang's
terms alone.

Thus for the DPRK, the Korean War, far from constituting a
catastrophe that impelled new thinking about the unification
question, seems instead simply to have been chalked up as an
understandable miscalculation: an initial, imperfect application of a
fundamentally sound unification strategy. Over the next several
decades, North Korea systematically and meticulously prepared to
consummate that strategy by building its military might and waiting
for the crisis in South Korea or the rupture in Washington-Seoul
relations that would allow it to accomplish its mission.

The awaited opening never arrived. By the 1980s, it was apparent that
North Korea's unification policy--which at bottom had always been a
gamble--was a lost bet. Contrary to the DPRK's caricatures, the
Republic of Korea had developed into one of the postwar era's great
economic success stories. And by the late 1980s, the South Korean
political system, which had finally embraced the principles of
constitutional democracy, was steadily gaining strength, confidence
and domestic support. The U.S.-South Korean alliance, too, looked
stronger than ever. Pyongyang's allies, by contrast, had made it
clear that they would not aid the DPRK if it were to provoke another
crisis on the Korean Peninsula. In Leninist terminology, the
"correlation of forces" between the two Koreas had tilted
unmistakably against the DPRK and seemed set only to worsen in the
future. North Korea had missed its chance.

From our present vantage point, we may be tempted to conclude that
the unification strategy was doomed from the start. It was not. If
events had played out only somewhat differently, it might well have
succeeded. For several decades, after all, there was more than a
little truth in Pyongyang's view of the ROK as a fragile and
potentially unstable system. Until the late 1980s, South Korea had
not effected a single peaceful transfer of presidential power, and as
late as 1979 a South Korean president was assassinated by his own
security chief. Pyongyang's expectation that Washington would retreat
from its commitment to Seoul was not just wishful thinking: during
the 1960s and much of the 1970s--as the Vietnam debacle
unfolded--such a prognosis would have seemed prescient to many
independent observers.

In international press reports, the North Korean leadership is often
described as irrational, even mad. Such characterizations are both
inattentive and inaccurate: they fail to discern the deep logic of a
system whose precepts and starting premises happen to differ sharply
from our own. It would be similarly misguided to dismiss North
Korea's approach to unification as a crazy scheme.

Pyongyang's plan for unification-by-conquest was, rather, a careful,
calculating, high-risk venture. Like many other high-risk ventures,
it ultimately proved to be unsuccessful. But unlike most strategists
and entrepreneurs who operate successfully in high-risk environments,
Pyongyang had no "fall-back" plan. The DPRK's own chosen unification
strategy, furthermore, happened to be strongly "path dependent": in
doggedly pursuing it, the leadership ineluctably closed off other
important options and progressively narrowed its own freedom of
maneuver. With the failure of its unification strategy, North Korea
was thus caught in a bind of its own devising.

In response to the increasingly menacing fundamentals in its contest
against the South, North Korea made a tactical decision in the 1980s
to lean heavily on the Soviet Union. But far from stabilizing the
"correlation of forces" in North Korea's favor, that ill-fated move
actually precipitated the country's slide toward disaster. The
break-up of the Soviet empire and the collapse of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics exposed North Korea to a more perilous balance of
international power than it had ever dealt with before. As well, the
collapse of the USSR meant the end of military aid and subsidized
trade from the Soviet bloc. By the late 1980s North Korea was heavily
dependent on those quantities; their consequent sudden and virtually
complete termination sent the North Korean system into a steep
downward spiral. Pyongyang has, as yet, been unable to arrest that
spiral, and the grand vision of reuniting Korea under its socialist
banner has given way to a desperate focus on day-to-day survival.

The Economic Race

The failure of its unification strategy, we should remember, did not
presuppose North Korea's economic failure. North Korea would have
lost the economic race against the South--and thus eventually the
opportunity to overpower it--even if it had maintained a steady and
fairly respectable pace of growth. During its long contest against
the South, however, the DPRK was unable even to sustain positive
rates of economic growth. After apparently rapid progress in the two
decades immediately following the Korean War, its economic growth
seemed to slow markedly in the 1970s. By the 1980s the North Korean
economy was stagnant; and in the 1990s it entered into a severe and
as yet unremitting decline.

Although the precise dimensions of that decline are extremely
difficult to estimate, the South Korean government is probably
correct in asserting, as it recently did, that 1998 marked the ninth
straight year of negative economic growth for the DPRK. Indicative of
the dimensions of that decline are North Korea's trade trends:
between 1990 and 1998, according to reports by its trading partners,
the DPRK's international purchases and sales of merchandise fell by
more than half. The severity of the decline is underscored by the
hunger crisis it has provoked. While the precise dimensions of the
crisis cannot yet be quantified, they are, at the very least,
suggested by the simple fact that the North Korean call for emergency
food aid from abroad is now entering its fifth year. Thus, even
against the criterion of providing sustenance for the survival of the
local populace--the most minimal standard for economic
performance--the North Korean economy qualifies as a failure.

Initially, it might seem puzzling that the North Korean leadership
has been incapable of arresting this prolonged economic tailspin. The
country's dire condition, after all, is very largely the predictable
consequence of the relentless enforcement of economic policies that
range from the manifestly wasteful to the positively disastrous.
Moderating that self-punishing regimen could be expected to bring an
almost immediate measure of relief to the North's beleaguered economy.

The sorts of measures that might spark a revitalization of the North
Korean economy are hardly secret. The path to renewal and resumed
growth runs squarely through the international economy. For North
Korea, as for every other country, international markets in goods,
services and capital offer opportunities for reducing costs,
improving productivity and promoting dynamism. In East Asia, the
strategies of "outward orientation" and greater integration with the
world economy--expanding trade, attracting foreign investment and
encouraging technology transfers--have been common to all countries
that have achieved impressive rates of long-term economic growth.
Significantly, those ranks today include both China and
Vietnam--Asia's two other avowedly socialist states.

Why, then, has the DPRK leadership not seized those obvious options
for remedying the economic catastrophe that so plainly confronts it?
It is surely not for lack of calculation: North Korea's rulers, as
already mentioned, appear to be quite rational in evaluating the
alternatives before them--and, often, strikingly shrewd in seizing
opportunities for gain.

It is true that North Korea's ruling circles appear at times to be
amazingly naive about economic affairs. (As recently as 1998, a
visiting World Bank official was startled by a request from officials
of the DPRK's central bank to explain the difference between
macroeconomics and microeconomics.) But Pyongyang's continued
reticence about embarking on a more pragmatic course cannot be
attributed to economic innocence alone. Rather, it appears to be a
deliberate and considered decision, one reflecting the DPRK
leadership's assessment and understanding of its own political system.

North Korea's leaders appear to be convinced that programs for
economic revival that are regarded as entirely unexceptional in the
rest of the world would actually pose an extreme--possibly
mortal--peril to their own system. Ruinous as North Korea's
uninterrupted economic slide has proved for what DPRK officials call
"our own style of socialism", the ostensible cures for the country's
economic maladies are judged to be even more dangerous.
Unfortunately, their assessment of their own predicament is on the
mark, which means that they have little room for maneuver and few
viable options at their disposal.

From Pyongyang's vantage point, the most compelling argument against
moving in new economic directions is that those more "practical"
policies would ultimately undermine the integrity and the stability
of the socialist state. As it sees things, the fruits of "reform
communism" are indicated by the fates of the Soviet and East European
governments. Not surprisingly, North Korean authorities closely
analyzed the final crisis and downfall of Soviet-bloc socialism. In
their understanding--and who can dispute it--economic pragmatism and
economic reform are antithetical to socialism, and any socialist
government toying with such measures is in effect experimenting with
its own political defeat. Kim Jong Il's 1992 comments on the Soviet
dénouement would seem to offer a definitive official North Korean
view of the event:

"One-step concessions and retreat from socialist principles have
resulted in ten and a hundred step concessions and retreat, and,
finally, invited grave consequences of ruining the working class
parties themselves."

The implicit corollary to that assessment, of course, is that the
ordinary, unpoliced workings of the market--responding to incentives
and all the rest--are inherently counterrevolutionary and
fundamentally subversive of the socialist project. Kim Jong Il did
not shrink from those implications; instead, as early as 1993 he
spelled them out clearly and carefully:

"The basic driving force of development of a socialist society lies
in . . . [the people's] ideological consciousness. . . . [In the
past] there were tendencies to rouse people's enthusiasm for
production by means of such material levers as economic incentives. .
. . In those societies which gave up education in socialist ideology
and encouraged egoism, the building of the socialist economy became
stagnant . . . they went so far as denying the leadership of the
working-class party and state over the socialist economy."

Since Kim Jong Il's formal accession as head of both party and state,
North Korea's media have vociferously echoed and elaborated on that
aspect of the "Dear Leader's" teachings. In September 1998--just days
after the Supreme People's Assembly session that officially elevated
Kim Jong Il to the state's "highest position"--the party's daily
newspaper and its theoretical journal jointly ran this pronouncement
on "economic reform", "economic opening" and "economic integration":

"It is a foolish daydream to try to revive the economy by introducing
foreign capital, not relying on one's own strength. If one wants the
prosperity of the national economy, he should thoroughly reject the
idea of dependence on outside forces, the idea that he cannot live
without foreign capital. . . .

Ours is an independent economic structure equipped with all the
economic sectors in good harmony and with its own strong heavy
industry at the core. It is incomparably better than the
export-oriented economic structure dependent on other countries. . . .

We must heighten vigilance against the imperialists' moves to induce
us to 'reform' and 'opening to the outside world.' 'Reform' and
'opening' on their lips are a honey-coated poison."

Economic "reform" and "integration" would inevitably impel the North
Korean state to relinquish its claim to absolute control over "the
people's economy." But even worse, reform and opening would be
vectors for what the North Korean authorities call "ideological and
cultural infiltration."

The ROK's current policy toward Pyongyang is predicated on the
premise that enhancing economic contacts between the two Koreas will
modify the temperament of the DPRK and thus reduce tensions on the
Korean Peninsula. As Lim Dong-won, one of the policy's chief
architects, recently explained, "The objective of President Kim's
'Sunshine Policy' of engagement with North Korea is to coax the
Pyongyang leadership onto the path of reform and change."

North Korean authorities are well aware of that objective, and--as
best one can tell from their pronouncements--are thoroughly hostile
to it. At almost the same moment that Lim was outlining the rationale
of Seoul's "sunshine" policy, North Korean authorities rendered their
own verdict on "sunshine" and inter-Korean economic relations:

"Everyone knows that the puppets came forth with the sunshine policy,
the engagement policy, and reciprocity, blocking North-South economic
cooperation on every occasion. . . .

It is all too clear that nonsense being carried out by the puppets
regarding the issue of North-South economic cooperation is full of
schemes and sophistry. The well-grounded logic of patriotism is bound
to prevail over the treacherous logic."

Such a posture is not an aberration for DPRK diplomacy; on the
contrary, it conforms integrally with the basic logic of the North
Korean state.

Thus, for example, a spokesman for the General Staff of the North
Korean People's Army accused the United States of attempting "to
destroy our socialist system" through an "'appeasement strategy' to
induce us to 'reform' and 'opening'"--and that was by no means an
isolated official comment. If the North Korean leadership truly views
a more outward economic orientation as a threat to its vital
interests, the mere lifting of U.S. sanctions cannot be expected to
herald the awakening of an economic relationship between the two
countries.

To be more precise, the mere lifting of U.S. sanctions cannot be
expected to herald the awakening of a mutually beneficial economic
relationship between the two sides. For North Korea stands to gain
substantial and continuing benefits from the United States only if
Pyongyang can manage to formalize a one-sided economic relationship
with Washington.

Tribute-Seeking Diplomacy

For the DPRK, the United States is potentially a source for steady
flows of bilateral foreign aid--and much more. Washington, for
example, could assist in securing North Korean membership in the
World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and other multilateral
development institutions--organizations to which the DPRK could then
apply for grants, subsidized loans and other forms of concessional
finance. The United States could even facilitate bilateral payments
to North Korea from other countries: a settlement with Japan modeled
on the 1965 Tokyo-Seoul diplomatic normalization and indexed for
parity with it, for instance, could by now involve billions of
dollars.

For North Korea, in short, the promise of an "economic relationship"
with the United States lies not in a broadening and deepening of
commercial ties, but in establishing itself as a permanent recipient
of government-to-government transfer payments.

At first glance it might seem that such a quest for financial aid
would be doctrinally inconsistent with the "self-reliance" that North
Korean juche extols. It is not. From its very founding, the DPRK has
been embarked on a perpetual hunt for subventions from abroad. During
the Cold War, it was the constant beneficiary of aid flows from
almost the entire "socialist camp": China, the USSR, and almost every
country in Eastern Europe were donors. Today, North Korea eyes the
capitalist world for aid--and the DPRK has no ideological problem
with pocketing payments from that reviled source. Juche diplomacy is
a tribute-seeking diplomacy--an inversion of the traditional Korean
role as tributary state in the old East Asian order--and all tribute
is good tribute. Tribute not only strengthens the domestic sinews of
the North Korean state, but also affirms its international status,
validates its international policies, and legitimizes its
international authority.

Tribute is overseas aid on terms established by the recipient, not
the donor. To be in a position to dictate just how foreign
beneficiaries should bestow their largesse, of course, requires
considerable and reliable leverage. How to obtain that leverage?
North Korea apparently believes that it can achieve it through a
carefully managed stratagem of military extortion. By establishing
itself as an ever more menacing international security threat, North
Korea evidently means to compel its neighbors--and, even better, its
enemies--to propitiate the DPRK with a constant and swelling stream
of financial gifts.

That is not simply surmise. North Korea's intentions have been
spelled out by its highest authorities. At the same September 1998
Supreme People's Assembly that elevated Kim Jong Il to the DPRK's
"highest post of state", North Korea's government officially embraced
a new policy objective: that of becoming a "powerful and prosperous
state" (Kangsong Taeguk). The precise meaning of that slogan was
articulated the following month in Pyongyang's Minju Choson, which
declared that "defense capabilities are a military guarantee for
national political independence and the self-reliant economy"; the
paper further insisted that "the nation can become prosperous only
when the gun barrel is strong" [emphasis added].

Credible military menace, in other words, is now at the heart of
North Korea's economic strategy--and of its very strategy for
survival. By extracting resources from the international community
through military blackmail, the North Korean leadership hopes to
stave off the officially dreaded specters of "reform" and "opening."
That international gambit (complemented and reinforced by acute
political and intellectual repression at home) offers what Pyongyang
takes as its best chance to steer its imperiled vessel of state
between the Scylla of political liberalization and the Charybdis of
economic collapse. As an endgame stratagem, this is not entirely
misbegotten. In fact, it may be said already to have enjoyed a
measure of tactical success.

The 1994 "Agreed Framework", after all, was only signed by Washington
because Pyongyang was poised to amass an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
In exchange for an ostensible freeze on that program, the United
States has been shipping the DPRK half a million tons a year of free
oil. In addition, the United States organized an international
consortium--the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization--to
construct for North Korea two "safe" light-water nuclear reactors at
an eventual cost of over four billion dollars; work on that project
is already under way. Amazing as this may sound, the DPRK appears to
be the largest recipient of American aid in all of East Asia.

North Korea has demonstrated, furthermore, that nuclear threats can
be manufactured for new, additional payments, irrespective of
previous understandings. After signing the Agreed Framework, the DPRK
began work on an enormous underground site whose observed
specifications closely matched those to be expected of a
surreptitious effort to continue a program for the development of
nuclear weaponry. After detecting that suspect facility, the United
States naturally demanded access to it. Subsequent high-tension
negotiations in late 1998 and early 1999 resulted in an American
pledge of over five hundred thousand tons of food aid to the
DPRK--and an almost simultaneous North Korean promise to allow an
American delegation to "visit" the site at Kumchang-ri.

At one particularly heated moment in the Kumchang-ri inspection
negotiations, a North Korean military official declared:

"'Surgical operation'-style attack and 'preemptive strike' are by no
means an exclusive option of the United States. . . . It must be
clearly known that there is no limit to the strike of our People's
Army and that on this planet there is no room for escaping the
strike."

He was alluding to North Korea's long-range missile capabilities,
whose latest advance was suddenly demonstrated in August 1998 by the
firing--without advance warning--of a multistage ballistic rocket
over the main island of Japan. (At this writing, North Korea is
threatening the imminent launch of a new and improved ballistic
missile--one that may at last be capable of reaching American soil.)
That missile program happens to be another instrument through which
Pyongyang intends to derive concessional payments from abroad.

In June 1998 North Korea's state media announced that the DPRK "will
continue developing, testing, and deploying missiles" as a matter of
unshakable principle--but proposed that "if the United States really
wants to prevent our missile exports, it should . . . make a
compensation for the losses to be caused by discontinued missile
exports." In talks with American counterparts in early 1999, North
Korean officials indicated that the "compensation" they had in mind
would start out at one billion dollars a year.

Weapons of mass destruction are now the financial and political
lifeline for that starving, decaying state. By the perverse logic of
this design North Korea's vital interests lie in magnifying the
deadly risks it can pose to the outside world. Perfecting weaponry
with ever greater reach and killing force correspondingly increases
Pyongyang's scope for exacting international tribute. Just as
business magnates in postwar South Korea strove to balloon their
concerns into hypertrophied conglomerates that would be "too big to
fail", so North Korea's leaders may be gambling that they can make
the DPRK "too lethal to fail."

Thinking About the End

BUT THAT VISION - if indeed it is the vision that shapes Pyongyang's policy - is an empty fantasy. The DPRK's extortionist diplomacy is utterly inadequate to the task of revitalizing the economic foundation on which the state rests. In a world where South Korean export revenues exceed two billion dollars a week, the sums that North Korea schemes to obtain are almost negligible. Under any circumstances, those sums would be insufficient to purchase a new industrial infrastructure, or to prepare a work force for manning it, especially when extensive commercial and technical contacts with the outside world are unacceptable. North Korea's endgame stratagem promises only to slow the country's relative and absolute economic decline, not to reverse it. At the very best, that game plan will only extend the ghastly, deepening twilight in which the regime is already enveloped.

If I am correct that the DPRK is slated for still further decline, and correct as well about the logic of the North Korean system, the implications for the international community are ominous indeed. More than any other state in the current global order, the DPRK makes its living not through the export of goods and services, but through the methodical export of strategic insecurity. Furthermore, the DPRK's vital interests would be grievously and irreparably injured if its government were ever to acquiesce in what the international community desires very most: first, a real and permanent halt to its quest for nuclear weaponry; second, a demobilization of its program for perfecting long-range missiles; and third, the establishment of genuinely peaceful relations with the ROK.

That is not to say that Pyongyang might not some day commit to one or more of those courses. Leaders can miscalculate, and, often enough, do. But if North Korea's rulers - as they have so often stated - are resolved not to follow Gorbachev gently into the night, then we can only conclude that every extension of the regime's tenure will be marked by a corresponding improvement in Pyongyang's ability to inflict injury and provoke instability beyond its borders.

And yet, as North Korea fails, the international community moves to intervene with support. For Pyongyang, that is a highly satisfactory arrangement. It is less clear why it should be satisfactory to other governments. Wittingly or not, the principal powers with which North Korea interacts have fallen into a de facto policy of appeasement toward Pyongyang.

As a diplomatic approach, appeasement has recorded some successes at different junctures over the course of history, but only when the objects of that policy were capable of, and disposed toward, being appeased. In the DPRK, there is every reason to believe that the world community is dealing with an insatiable state.

Why, then, is appeasement taking place? If one were utterly cynical, one might say that this is easy enough to explain: weak governments have a predilection for appeasement policies, and the governments with which North Korea today contends are, in the main, weak ones. That conclusion cannot be dismissed out of hand, for the fact of the matter is that North Korea currently faces a most unusual international alignment. The governments crucial to its international calculations have always been China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. Since the end of the Cold War, the character of each of those governments has changed perceptibly - in some cases, radically. By comparison with their predecessors, the administrations now presiding in Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow, Seoul and Washington are either less capable of mobilizing resources to project national will abroad, less oriented toward international (as opposed to domestic) priorities, or less inclined to focus attention on long-term problems - or, in some cases, all of those things. This extraordinary conjuncture has doubtless played to North Korea's advantage.

A kinder analysis might ascribe the current appeasement of the DPRK less to a failure of nerve than to a failure of imagination. Conceptualizing the Korean Peninsula within a two-state framework almost ineluctably leads international policymakers to guard the North Korean system against its own decline - even though such support may ultimately worsen the security threats that those policymakers can expect to face in the future. For the stability and prosperity of Northeast Asia - and regions far beyond - it is therefore imperative for concerned governments to get out of the intellectual sand trap from which a Korean Peninsula without the DPRK cannot be seen. We must begin to think carefully about the implications, problems and opportunities inherent in a post-DPRK Korea.

This is not an impossible exercise. One can easily envision a less troubled Korean Peninsula than the one we know today. Korean unification under a peaceable, politically free, market-oriented system - a system much like South Korea's today - would contribute immeasurably to political stability and economic prosperity, not only in Northeast Asia but well beyond it.

To be sure, we can expect arduous challenges and serious obstacles to any effort to construct a post-DPRK architecture for the Korean Peninsula. But prepared governments may have ways to mitigate them or circumvent them altogether. Indeed, the costs and difficulties attendant in establishing a successful post-North Korean order in Northeast Asia will very likely climb the longer the current regime remains in power.

Throughout its tenure, the DPRK has demonstrated its continuing capacity to surprise, usually in unpleasant ways. In the period ahead, more such surprises undoubtedly await us. They will be distinctly less unpleasant if our citizens and statesmen do not take the end of North Korea to be an unimaginable proposition.

Nicholas Eberstadt is a researcher with the American Enterprise Institute and Harvard University. His latest book is The End of North Korea (AEI Press, 1999), from which this essay is adapted.