America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

SEOUL. THE END OF THE COLD WAR IS PROVING TO BE A dangerous passage for all concerned: winners, losers and bystanders. Two years ago, Saddam Hussein concluded that the demise of the Soviet Union as a superpower had created a regional vacuum he could fill. The result was the invasion of Kuwait and Desert Storm. Last year a clique of Serbian Marxists tried to maintain its authority over other South Slavs who no longer needed Belgrade to protect them from Moscow. The result was the Balkan cataclysm.

But the most perilous place on earth may be here, on the Korean peninsula, where the cold war first turned hot in 1950 and where it could end with a bang in the years -- or even the months -- ahead.

For decades, North Korea has relied on its two giant neighbors, the U.S.S.R. and China, for political, economic and military assistance. Now Russia has recognized South Korea, stopped supplying arms to the North and demanded hard currency for its oil shipments. Two weeks ago, to the muted fury of Pyongyang, China too agreed to establish diplomatic relations with Seoul.

Not that isolation is anything new for North Korea. The country's few televisions are configured so that they cannot pick up broadcasts from the South. Radios are built to receive only one Big Brother channel. Short-wave receivers are illegal for average citizens.

The Pyongyang government has yanked home thousands of young people who were studying in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Afraid of what they might have learned abroad, authorities have sent many for political re- education into the countryside, where rationing has, according to intelligence reports, gone from three to two meals a day. But those students are surely doing some educating of their own, whispering messages of discontent and subversion to the local peasants.

The regime itself is in an advanced stage of dry rot. Imagine the Soviet Union if Stalin were still alive and in charge at age 112: that is North Korea, which outsiders have mockingly dubbed "the world's last socialist theme park." It has had no Khrushchev, not even a Brezhnev, never mind a Gorbachev. It has only its founding dictator, Kim Il Sung, who is 80 and failing. "The Great Leader" has designated his son, "the Dear Leader," heir to the throne. But a succession struggle may already have begun.

The defining issue among the factions is almost certain to be whether to accept the verdict of humanity on communism and negotiate a gradual, peaceful accommodation with the South. Members of the North Korean ruling elite have seen what happened in Germany, another country divided in 1945. The more realistic among them can easily imagine ending up like Erich Honecker and his comrades: on the dustheap of history or in the dock. Visitors to Pyongyang have noted a new defensiveness, bordering on desperation, among officials there.

Here in Seoul, I have found that South Korean officials and foreign policy experts are also sobered by the German experience. Theirs is the curse of the answered prayer. They have calculated that relative to the size of their economy, it will be 10 times as expensive for them to unite with North Korea as for the Bonn government to absorb the former East Germany. The outbreak of political turmoil in the wake of Kim's death could send hundreds of thousands of Northerners pouring across the Demilitarized Zone. Or would-be refugees might be slaughtered by North Korean troops, a horror that would tempt if not oblige the South to intervene.

What makes such scenarios especially disturbing is the uncertainty over the status of North Korea's clandestine program to develop an atom bomb. Kim is probably playing cat and mouse, like Saddam, with the international community's nuclear inspectors. But Kim did not lose a war last year, so he has much more control over foreign access to his facilities and air space.

For all these reasons, the South Koreans with whom I talked are crossing their fingers that the death of communism in the North and unification with the South will be spread out over 10 or even 20 years. They are counting on their new partners in Beijing to wean Kim's successors away from Stalinism. As Professor Ahn Byung Joon of Yonsei University in Seoul put it, "The only course is to persuade North Korea to adopt the Chinese model of economic reform and an open-door policy toward the rest of the world."

While a step-by-step, managed transition is to be encouraged, it is not necessarily to be expected. As Gorbachev himself inadvertently demonstrated, reform communism is an oxymoron. The Chinese Communists may ultimately learn the same truth, even though they bought the system some time with blood on Tiananmen Square. The late Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, a great friend of the Great Leader, provided a corollary: the more retrograde and repressive the regime, the more violent its fall. Its strength is brittle; it will not bend, but it will break. Open the door to a country like North Korea, and the whole house will fall down. The world can hope for a North Korean soft landing -- but it should be prepared for a crash.