Kim's Great Game — page 2

But Kim, whose country George W. Bush placed on his "axis of evil" list in 2002 (along with Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq), isn't exactly in need of a spider hole. The methods he uses to maintain control of his army, Politburo and people might be opaque, but his manipulation of the outside world is looking surprisingly and consistently adroit. Kim quickly recognized that South Korea's shift from cold war to détente (under former President Kim Dae Jung's "Sunshine Policy") was based on the fear that if the North collapsed it would touch off a ruinously expensive unification of the peninsula. Seoul suddenly desired what Kim wants most desperately: his own survival. That drove a wedge between South Korea and the U.S. Now, Washington is tinkering with its trip wire after 50 years. "The winner is North Korea," says Lee Dong Bok, a former top South Korean official who led negotiations with North Korea over a 30-year period. "There's no doubt about that." In other words: the world does deal with terrorist rogue states when the situation is complex, when there are distractions around such as Iraq—and when dictators play their cards right.

Washington insists the pullout of troops isn't a lessening of support for South Korea but merely part of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's re-engineering of the U.S. military. Rumsfeld wants to have speedy and flexible units around the world that can move into various kinds of conflicts. The G.I.s in South Korea, in contrast, are configured for one war alone, against the old-fashioned (if potentially cataclysmic) weaponry of North Korea. "'Imperfectly' is how I would characterize the way the United States is arranged," Rumsfeld said this month about the U.S. troops. Victor Cha, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., agrees: "This is an alliance that has not changed in 50 years. It was a static force, heavily ground-based." Last week's announcement of the pullout followed two earlier U.S. plans to move 14,000-15,000 American soldiers from the DMZ to bases farther south and transfer 3,600 troops to Iraq.

But for all its military logic, Seoul was rattled by the Pentagon's latest decision. In an interview with TIME, Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon bristled when asked about the "withdrawal" of U.S. troops—he insists on the term "reduction"—and said the details were still being thrashed out between the two governments. "We'd like to see whether this can be delayed," he said. "And, if it can be delayed, by how much." (Ban is pushing for the U.S. to hold off any pullout until 2007, although Washington has said it wants the troops gone by December 2005.) President Roh had come to office by exploiting anti-American sentiment among the young generation of voters, but even Roh has started to recognize South Korea's vulnerability behind a smaller U.S. shield.

That's wise. If Kim Jong Il chose war, he would start with a barrage from the thousands of North Korean artillery systems arrayed on the 248-km front. Some of the shells could be loaded with chemical or biological weapons. Then hordes of North Korean infantry and Kim's giant fleet of tanks and armored personnel carriers would be sent, headed for Seoul and other strategic targets. The U.S. 2nd Infantry Division near the DMZ flies Apache attack helicopters capable of stopping the tanks—but that's the unit the Pentagon plans to downsize and move south. The U.S. insists that even if the artillery division is moved, the defense of South Korea will not be compromised, and Washington has promised an $11 billion upgrade of the country's defenses, including new Patriot antimissile systems. But South Korean experts are worried that North Korean artillery will have freer rein until the South can plug the hole with its own antiartillery batteries. "If they move out the artillery and the helicopters," warns Kim Tae Woo, a military analyst at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, "we will have serious problems." He points out that equipment and boots on the ground are concrete shields against the North. "Yes, capability is more important than the sheer number of soldiers," Kim Tae Woo says. "But the health of the alliance is more important than both those things combined."

The alliance, however, looks far from healthy. Foreign Minister Ban's assessment of the North Korean nuclear threat is less dramatic than the official U.S. position: that Pyongyang is probably already a nuclear power. "We are not quite sure whether they are in possession of nuclear weapons," Ban told TIME, adding that South Korea nonetheless took the issue seriously. (China's Deputy Foreign Minister last week also said he doubted the American assertion that Kim was running a covert uranium-enrichment program on top of making weapons from plutonium.) Washington and Seoul are also bogged down in a dispute over a new base for American soldiers currently stationed at the Yongsan garrison in central Seoul. The U.S. says it needs 11.9 million sq m of land for its soldiers; the South Koreans haven't been prepared to set aside quite that much. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Lawless complained earlier this month in an interview with the Chosun Ilbo newspaper that if that dispute isn't settled, the $11 billion weapons-upgrade program could be threatened. Park Jin, a lawmaker in South Korea's conservative opposition Grand National Party, visited Washington last month and got the feeling from U.S. officials and scholars that the South was being viewed as wobbly or maybe even plain old untrustworthy: "I was told there was a question mark over whether South Korea was a true ally." Marcus Noland, a scholar at Washington's Institute for International Economics, says the two governments are clearly "further apart" since Roh took office. "There is blame to be shared by both sides," he says. "But the Roh people appear to be particularly inept and/or hostile."

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