KOREA NEWS SERVICE/REUTERS

With Seoul and Washington at odds, will Kim come out the winner?

Kim's Great Game
	The U.S. can't seem to stop him. Asia doesn't know if it loves or hates him. So the position of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il looks stronger than ever
	By Anthony Spaeth

Posted Monday, June 14, 2004; 20:00 HKT
Lee Myong Sok grew up in the town of Dongducheon, just 20 km south of Korea's Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the grotesquely fortified no-man's-land rimmed with razor wire, heavy military hardware and tens of thousands of soldiers. When he was a boy, Lee lived on "army-base stew": leftover meals from U.S. military canteens, which he would throw into a pot with cabbage and water after discarding the stray cigarette butts. Today, as an operator of a bar in which Russian girls serve the drinks, Lee is still living off the American troops who serve as a "trip wire": if North Korea attacks, these soldiers will come under attack, guaranteeing U.S. involvement in the conflict. But now Lee is deeply upset at the news that Washington wants to pull out 12,500 soldiers, or one-third of the American armed presence in Korea, after 50 years of peacekeeping. The plan is to remove all the troops now stationed on the front line. "This is devastating," says Lee. Fifteen of Dongducheon's leaders shaved their heads last week and went to Seoul to hoist a protest banner outside the National Assembly building. The banner was written in their own blood.

For the elders of Dongducheon, the departure of American soldiers is a pocketbook issue: the town survives by providing Yankee grunts with Pringles, Budweiser and raunchy nighttime entertainment. For the rest of the region, it's something far more significant: another indication that the status quo on the Korean peninsula for more than half a century, written in the blood of the Korean War's more than 2.5 million victims, is rapidly evolving. North Korea is no longer the region's pariah, a hermetically sealed place with whose leaders no others wanted to deal. On the contrary, South Korea is now dominated by a leftist-nationalist President and a political party whose members often see the North as a potential friend or partner, and only sometimes as an enemy that vows to invade and conquer them in a "sea of fire." (The two countries are still technically at war.) Last week, Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi gave an astonishingly positive account of his recent meeting with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, saying that "I personally felt that North Korea was interested in moving forward in a positive way." (See following story.) Beijing said last week that it did not share Washington's assessment of the north's nuclear programs. These changes in attitude toward Pyongyang are being played out against the backdrop of a revised American military posture on the peninsula and strains in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Echoing the famous complaint about Washington's China policy in the late 1940s, South Korean conservatives are already starting to ask: "Who lost the U.S.?"

Hovering above all this, doing one of the great geopolitical levitation acts of our time, is Kim Jong Il. The world has consistently underestimated North Korea's "Dear Leader." Of his potential to cause a bloody war on the peninsula there is little doubt, even if such a war concluded, as it almost certainly would, with the collapse of his own regime. Kim has vast arsenals of biological and chemical weapons, along with the rocket launchers and missiles needed to lob them over the DMZ, onto South Korean cities and even as far as Japan. The North is trumpeting its ability to make nuclear bombs; according to U.S. intelligence, Kim may have at least eight nuclear devices by now, up from only a couple before the latest nuclear crisis. But the policy of South Korea's President Roh Moo Hyun is not to confront Kim but to engage with him. Roh is keen on sending tourists across the border to help the North's economy and on building rail and road links that may someday zip through the DMZ. Japan's change in approach to Kim is even more marked. In 2002, the Japanese public was outraged when North Korea admitted it had abducted 13 Japanese. But Koizumi flew to Pyongyang last month, met with Kim, and got some of their families back to Tokyo—while his government promised the North 250,000 tons of food and $10 million worth of medical supplies, staunchly denying it was a quid pro quo.

It might be a stretch to label Kim the Teflon Dictator, but so far, he's looking mighty unscratched. His government is still engaged in talks with the U.S., Japan, China, South Korea and Russia on ways to dismantle his nuclear program, and all sides insist they're united on that goal, although little headway has been made. And the U.S. is hardly pulling its boys in fear. "You can be a trip-wire force with 5,000 troops," says one U.S. Air Force officer in Washington, "as well as with 37,000." That's especially the case given the parlous state of Kim's own infantry and air force, which work with equipment designed and built in the 1960s.

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	Left Behind [May 25, 2004] Koizumi returns from North Korea triumphant—lin all ways but one Blood on the Tracks [May 04, 2004] A mysterious train explosion kills scores in North Korea Playing for Time [Mar. 02, 2004] In negotiations on North Korea's nuclear program, achieving little is better than achieving nothing at all Atomic Shakedown [Jan. 12, 2004] Pyongyang's promise to disarm is just a cunning financial ploy Your Move, Mr. Kim [Aug. 29, 2003] History repeats itself as a multinational group led by the U.S. tries to get North Korea to lay down its nuclear arms More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine