Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's summit with Kim Jong Il, leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), may well be a watershed in U.S.-Japan relations, North Korea's reform program and the future of South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's engagement policy. It is too soon to tell if the promising beginning made by the two leaders in Pyongyang will bear fruit in the difficult normalization talks that will begin next month.
But if normalization does ensue without more bitterness, acrimony and substantial delay, this courageous September visit will go down in history as a milestone in the quest for peace in Northeast Asia.
Understandably, the terrible facts uncovered during Koizumi's visit, finally verifying that North Korea cruelly abducted many citizens of Japan, have grabbed the headlines and led to concerns that domestic politics may have played a role in Koizumi's calculations.
But for Kim Jong Il to admit to such acts is utterly unprecedented in North Korean behavior. For more than 50 years, North Korean propaganda has maintained they are absolutely right and the entire rest of the world is wrong-not to mention being imperialists, war-mongers and criminals.
Whatever one thinks of this regime, it has always placed complete primacy on its own conceptions of national dignity as it pursues an extreme doctrine of national sovereignty. For the top leader to admit to these crimes is for his entire nation to lose face.
Kim, chairman of the North Korea National Defense Commission, was the only person in the country who could have made these admissions, but the fact that he accompanied them with a direct apology was truly amazing.
This completely reversed the expectation that Koizumi's visit would be about a Japanese apology for its colonial and wartime rule. All this suggests that a long overdue realism may be creeping into North Korean behavior, and that the many other changes in the North's posture (opening relations with the European Union and Commonwealth countries, signing railroad deals with Seoul, dramatically devaluing its currency) are likely to last.
Koizumi's success also gave tremendous support to Kim Dae Jung's ``sunshine policy'' in the waning, lame-duck days of his presidency. A few months ago, this policy seemed dead, with the next Korean president likely to repudiate it. The reputation of this Nobel Peace Prize winner suffered almost as much as his popularity, as corruption engulfed his close aides and sons, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush denounced North Korea and Pyongyang refused to deal with Seoul.
A breakthrough came last April, however, when Kim Dae Jung's key adviser on the North, Lim Dong Won, traveled to Pyongyang. Lim conveyed the judgment that ``the global strategy of the United States has fundamentally changed,'' and that since the Sept. 11 attacks, ``the United States is prepared to resort to military means of counter-proliferation and that North Korean leader Kim Il Jong must fully and clearly understand that North Korea is also included in the possible targets for such military efforts by the United States.'' (This was an early warning of the pre-emptive counter-proliferation doctrine officially announced last week in Washington.)
In the aftermath of Lim's visit, North Korea returned to substantive talks with the South. Over summer, Russian President Vladimir Putin also weighed in to urge Kim Jong Il to complete agreements relinking railways in the North and the South. Koizumi's visit thus culminated a remarkable six months of diplomacy that has put the engagement policy back on track-everywhere but in Washington.
Only in the Bush administration does this recent success create problems, because senior officials do not really believe that diplomacy can accomplish anything with regimes that form part of Bush's ``axis of evil.''
It was astonishing that just a few days after Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a protege of Senator Jesse Helms, was in Seoul denouncing the North as armed to the teeth and thoroughly evil, Tokyo sprung the surprise of this summit meeting.
To avoid the appearance of a breech with Tokyo, U.S. diplomats pretended that Washington agreed with the summit. But clearly Koizumi has departed dramatically both from Bush's dangerous doctrines of pre-emptive war, and from a half-century of close coordination in foreign policy between Washington and Tokyo.
Amid the virtual abdication of diplomacy that has passed for U.S. policy toward North Korea in the past 20 months, Koizumi has taken it upon himself to issue a strong challenge to Washington and to give a welcome breath of life to the hard work of creating a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula.
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Pyongyang visit a challenge to the U.S.