Koreas, keep chatting

Cheer on North-South talks, but stay realistic

North and South Korea are advancing from the opening that the Winter Olympics provided them, improving communications and beginning to address an agenda that may even include the North’s nuclear weapons program.

The Koreans are doing this in spite of America’s resistance to the progress they are making toward healing the rift. The division followed World War II, into the Cold War and America’s first open confrontation with Communist China in the Korean War of the 1950s.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, sent his sister to represent him at the Olympics, carrying a message of his willingness to meet with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in. That has led to the establishment of a danger-reducing military hotline between the two Koreas. A meeting has been set between Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon at Panmunjom at the 38th parallel next month.

A senior South Korean delegation that went to Pyongyang, allegedly in pursuit of an effort to arrange a meeting between the North Koreans and the Americans, brought back a positive response, including an affirmative nod to America’s public demand that North Korea’s nuclear arms program be one subject on the table (as if it wouldn’t have been in any case).

Mr. Kim also said he would, in effect, suspend nuclear and missile testing while talks were continuing. His people blew off a lot of rockets last year, which never helps. He will almost certainly agree with Mr. Moon eventually that U.S.-South Korean joint military exercises, which the North Koreans take as a provocation, also be suspended or postponed while talks continue.

Publicly left out of the evolving equation so far are neighboring China, Japan and Russia, the other three parties to what used to be six-party talks addressingthe Korean issue.

On the Korean side, the direction of the talks is almost certainly toward reunification of the two countries. A precedent, but not exactly a parallel, is German reunification, although a bitter war was not part of the history between East and West Germany.

Resolution of the Korean situation, especially with the North possessing nuclear weapons, presents a puzzle for U.S. policymakers. On the one hand, it is impossible to deny the right to self-determination of the Koreans in working through the problems of their countries, even if the solution results in reunification, which China doesn’t like much either. U.S. military needs in the region will continue to be met by America’s large presence in Japan, particularly Okinawa, and Guam and even Hawaii. America’s military presence in South Korea should not get in the way of whatever the Koreans are able to work out between themselves.

The United States needs to get over the 1953 stalemate in Korea, our first post-WWII military setback. In commercial terms, it needs to be able to help a developed South Korea integrate economically with the communist slum that North Korea constitutes. This process could be profitable to U.S. interests overall. Most of all, now, America should stay out of the way while the North and South Koreans pursue this opening. Healthy skepticism about Mr. Kim and the North, expressed quietly but frankly to Seoul, should still be part of the U.S. posture. We have seen some of this sometimes deceptive apparent reasonableness on Pyongyang’s part before, as have the South Koreans. It’s interesting but no one’s first rodeo.