The Sunshine Policy Is Dead

I guess the whole protection racket thing was the last straw. Now they’ve even managed to rile South Korea’s UniFiction Minister, Lee Jong-Seok.

Efforts to bring North Korea back to disarmament talks were in tatters on Thursday as Pyongyang stormed out of a meeting with the South and a senior U.S. diplomat left the region after a week of shuttle diplomacy.
….
“The South side will pay a price before the nation for causing the collapse of the ministerial talks and bringing a collapse of North-South relations that is unforeseeable now,” the North Koreans said in a statement before leaving for the airport, a day before the meeting was due to end.
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“Who in the South asked you to protect our safety?” Lee told Kwon on Tuesday, according to a South Korean official. “It would help our safety for the North not to fire missiles or develop a nuclear program.”

The South said the North could also forget about any more aid until it returns to separate talks on its nuclear weapons.

Is South Korea finally through with being the bitch in this relationship? When the Marmot and I were on the BBC recently, he said, dryly, (most things he says, he says dryly) that he’ll believe that when he sees it. I’ll give Robert that point, since I’ve noted more than once that Lee’s words and the truth tend to be two different things. Overall, a cutoff of food aid would be a mixed blessing, but more good than bad for the North Korean people. Although I strongly believe in feeding them — because I oppose punishing the regime’s victims for what the regime does — I doubt they ever saw much of South Korea’s unmonitored aid. My guess is that it will be missed mainly by party members and military officers, whose hunger matters to Kim Jong Il. The loss of unmonitored aid, so the logic goes, might force North Korea to accept monitored aid.

The next question this raises is whether Minister Lee finally grown a pair. I’m not sure. Yes, Lee often talks like a man who likes a good boilermaker with his breakfast, but until now, he’s only been willing to publicly insult the President of the United States (while praising His Porcine Majesty). This is new territory for Lee, but my money says he’ll be shocking this cadaver with the heart paddles again within a week, tops. That doesn’t mean he’s fooling anyone, himself included.

The most interesting question for the three of us who blog here is why Kim Jong Il would burn the bridges Seoul used to send its tribute across his moats. One thing that makes the question so appealing is the dearth of facts to work with, but you can do a back-of-the napkin cost-benefit analysis. On the cost side, Kim has seen the results of South Korea’s elections, and he can probably guess that things aren’t getting any better for him in the Blue House from here. On the benefit side, I’ve offered my own theory. Kim Jong Il certainly acts like a man desperate enough to make mistakes. A series of them has sealed the demise of Sunshine as the policy of a discredited fringe whose tenure of office has become a painful political anachronism. As of today, you can find the death certificate on file at the courthouse.

The only problem is that you’ll have to sift your way past two million more of them.