Roh Moo Hyun, South Korea's President-elect, is taking on a tough job
When Roh Moo Hyun, the new President of South Korea, was an impoverished 13-year-old farm boy in Bonsan, a tiny village of clay-and-thatch huts, an older, much bigger bully constantly pushed him around and called him names during his long trek through muddy rice paddies to school. One day, Roh decided he had enough. He enlisted the support of two friends and proclaimed, "We won't let him do it again!" When the bully next came around, the three small boys knocked him to the ground and kicked him. The humbled tyrant never bothered Roh again.
That early experience in coalition building may serve him well in the days ahead. But the bully Roh confronts today has a million-strong army and might possess nuclear weapons. What's more, Roh's friends these days have agendas of their own and may not be so easily enlisted.
Roh, 56, steps into South Korea's most important job at a critical juncture in his nation's history. An absolute novice in foreign relations who has barely set foot outside his homeland, he finds himself at the center of a global crisis as North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il threatens to arm himself with nuclear weapons and turn the peninsula into "smoking ashes." Just last week the North warned that it might abandon the 1953 Korean War armistice, then sent one of its MiG-19 jet fighters for a provocative two-minute swoop through South Korean airspace. Meanwhile, a deep-seated dispute with the U.S. over how to defang Kim is eroding the traditional alliance that has been at the heart of South Korea's policy for the past 50 years. That alliance gets its first big test this week, with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visiting Seoul for Roh's Feb. 25 inauguration and to discuss Kim Jong Il.
The diplomatic nightmare facing Roh (pronounced No) would unnerve even a seasoned statesman. North Korea wants the U.S. to promise not to attack it and is demanding direct talks with the Bush Administration. The U.S. says it wants multilateral talks and won't begin serious negotiations until the North dismantles its nuclear weapons program. Roh, the neophyte in this game of global brinkmanship, has cast himself in the role of peacemaker—even while his country is held hostage by the direct military threat from the North. So far, at least, he is sticking to the idea that aid, investment and negotiations will beguile the teetering North Korean regime into behaving like a responsible world citizen. "The Korean people believe ... that only dialogue will bring a solution" to the nuclear issue, Roh says in an exclusive interview with TIME.
As Roh sees it, any action that could provoke Kim Jong Il to fight—economic sanctions, a surgical strike to take out nuclear reactors that provide fissile materials for bombs—is unacceptable. "If the Korean people believed sanctions and pressure could eliminate nuclear weapons without causing war," he says, "then Korean people will have a different thought." Since that's not the case, Roh asserts "we are going to have a hard time changing our position" that dialogue is the only "credible" option.
To Washington, that conciliatory stance smacks of appeasement, threatens to strip the U.S. of bargaining power and plays into Kim Jong Il's radiated hands. Likewise, opposition politicians in South Korea argue that cajoling and aiding the North merely perpetuates the misguided "Sunshine Policy" propounded by outgoing President Kim Dae Jung—an approach that has brought the country no closer to its dream of reunification with the North.
