WASHINGTON: To its critics, the Bush administration’s toughened policy toward North Korea is emblematic: a prime case of right-wing ideology and self-indulgent name-calling interfering with the hard, serious work of making peace. When President Bush placed North Korea’s Stalinist regime on the axis of evil, the critique goes, he blocked any chance of diplomatic progress, while undercutting America’s negotiations-minded ally, South Korea.

So it is interesting to hear that the administration’s tough line may be bearing some small fruit. And it is especially interesting to hear that news not from the administration or one of its hawkish backers but from the foreign minister of the ostensibly undercut ally.

“Sometimes carrying a big stick works in forcing North Korea to come forward,” Choi Sung Hong said last week during a visit to Washington. Choi came to town to report to the Bush administration that North Korea once again seems interested in dialogue, and he said that the administration’s “stern attitude” is one - though only one - reason for the latest shift.

At the same time, Choi was here also to urge the US to capitalize on the shift - to temper its sternness with flexibility. What emerges is an interesting case study in the benefits, and limitations, of big-stick foreign policy.

Choi reported that Kim Jong Il, the princeling dictator of the starving nation of North Korea, seems to feel some “nostalgia” for the Clinton administration and its willingness to deal. In the final autumn of his presidency, Clinton sent his secretary of state to Pyongyang (she found Chairman Kim to be “very decisive and practical”) and wanted to follow up with a presidential visit, but ran out of time. “Why should I go around visiting the big countries?” Kim boasted back then. “All I need to do is sit here in Pyongyang and they come to visit me.”

Bush entered office showing no enthusiasm for touring Pyongyang, and not much for making deals with North Korea to entice it to restrain its nuclear weapons and missile development. Kim Jong Il withdrew in a sulk. A fortnight ago, though, Kim agreed to receive a special envoy from South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who is desperate to salvage something of his “Sunshine Policy” toward the North during his last 10 months in office. The envoy got nowhere during the first two days of his visit, despite the eight-page personal letter he brought from President Kim to Chairman Kim. But on his third and final day in Pyongyang, Chairman Kim showed up at his guesthouse and spent five voluble and productive hours in talks.

At the direction of South Korean President Kim, the special envoy spelled out the significance of America’s hard line, particularly since Sept 11. “He was very afraid of being too blunt to the chairman,” Choi recounted - and who would not be, given how many North Koreans are living, and dying, in political concentration camps? But he laid it out: The United States no longer found it tolerable for outlaw regimes to develop weapons of mass destruction; it preferred diplomacy, but if diplomacy failed, “there could be use of force”; “in that case, North Korea could be on the list.”

The message seemed to get through, Choi said. “They have come to understand, slowly, that their normal brinkmanship tactics do not pay,” he said. Not only that: America’s war in Afghanistan also has had an effect: “They were terrified, impressed, at the dramatic precision of US-made modern weapons. They were clearly overwhelmed. So it is understandable that they are worried about the stern attitude of Bush.”

The question now is how best to capitalize on North Korea’s new mood. The US goal cannot be simply to avoid war; but the ultimate test of a big-stick policy is how often it can achieve its legitimate goals without resort to war.

In North Korea’s case, any administration faces two quandaries. The first is to choose the right goal. Given the isolation and misery of North Korea’s 22 million people, the moral goal would seem to be regime change. But every US and South Korean leader so far has examined the risks inherent in such a strategy and has chosen instead to press for gradual reform (so far illusory) combined with deterrence of aggression.

The second quandary is how to pursue that second strategy without creating perverse incentives: The more unacceptably North Korea behaves, the more attention and enticement it seems to earn. The Clinton and Bush administrations have never been quite as far apart in approaching that dilemma, as it might seem. The Clinton folks did not countenance outright appeasement, and Bush has continued to ship food aid and offer dialogue.

There is no question the Bush administration believed the balance had gotten out of hand - that Kim Jong Il was being rewarded for being a bully. If the South Koreans are to be believed, he has learned something of a lesson and wants another chance. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.