The December 19 announcement of Kim Jong-il's death has stimulated another round of useful debate in the United States about how it and its South Korean and Japanese allies should deal with North Korea. Predictions about what is likely to happen under the new leadership of Kim Jong-un run the gamut, and suggested policies are just as diverse.
Victor Cha, a respected scholar and former White House director of Asian affairs, has written that 'North Korea as we know it is over. Whether it comes apart in the next few weeks or over several months, the regime will not be able to hold together ...' He and others who share this view may be right and, as he suggests, we must be better prepared for such a contin- gency. Yet, we have heard such dramatic warnings before. For example, just as he was leaving his post as director of central intelligence in 1996, MIT professor John Deutch pronounced, with equal certitude, that the hermit kingdom would implode within three years.
Understandably, many experts believe that, despite the huge problems confronting North Korea and the untested 'great successor' who has inherited his late father's mantle, the current political system will endure for the foreseeable future. How to cope with both contingencies is the biggest challenge facing Washington's recent policy re-emphasis on East Asia.
Some analysts claim that American knowledge of the North and ability to influence developments there are so limited that the best course for now is to wait and see what success China may have in stabilising conditions in North Korea and prodding it into a more co-operative foreign policy.
Others favour grasping what may be a new opportunity to revive earlier efforts to engage Pyongyang in a range of business and academic exchanges that began to bear fruit in the last years of the Clinton administration. Unfortunately, the Bush administration refused to build on those exchanges, and the Obama administration's first three years, with occasional exceptions, have also been disappointing in this respect.
To be sure, North Korea's participation in the six-party talks concerning its development of nuclear weapons is critical. Yet the US should not allow the frustrations of the six-party talks to bar progress in a host of other areas. The US needs to increase its contacts with and knowledge of the North. It should also eliminate its remaining economic sanctions against the North and create incentives for this military-dominated regime to give more emphasis to economic development. Such steps to broaden Korean-American engagement should not only contribute to improvements in the six-party talks, which otherwise seem destined to limp off and on forever, but also set the stage for the long overdue normalisation of bilateral diplomatic relations.