Quotes of the Day

It ain't bragging if it's true, as they say in Texas, which is why a moment of unmistakable pride in the speech that Lee Myung Bak, the new President of South Korea, gave at his inauguration on Feb. 25 was forgivable. "In the shortest period of time," Lee said, "this nation achieved both industrialization and democratization." Visiting bustling Seoul a few weeks ago to meet Lee — who was a reformist mayor of the city before he won the presidency — I was struck, as I always am in Korea, by the extraordinary story of a nation that, impoverished and ravaged by a cruel war, managed to turn itself within a generation into one of the world's most dynamic economies. Even better, in the past two decades it has shown itself to be a thriving democracy, too.

A former businessman who himself rose from poverty, Lee made the centerpiece of his speech a commitment to move "from the age of ideology to one of pragmatism," and promised a set of measures to revive and liberalize the economy, not that the casual visitor to Korea would notice much sclerotic about the pace of development there. After a decade in which the old automatic warmth for the U.S. had seemed to cool — as a younger generation of Koreans, with no personal memory of the shared fight against communism, came to maturity — Lee promised to take his country's foreign relations back to its traditional bedrock, speaking of the "deep mutual trust" between the two nations and promising to "strengthen our strategic alliance with the U.S."

The theme of pragmatism was picked up again in the context of inter-Korean relations. "The core task," Lee said, "is to help all Koreans live happily and to prepare the foundation for unification" of the peninsula. But that, as everyone knows, is easier said than done. It is perfectly true that nothing lasts forever and that one day the totalitarian rule of Kim Jong Il in North Korea will end. Some analysts suspect he is in poor health, and he does not seem to have an obvious heir within his family. But it is also true that many in the South, with a very shrewd appreciation of the likely costs of unification, dread a collapse of the North — and that Kim has shown himself able to use his possession of nuclear weapons as a way to coerce enough foreign tribute to preserve his regime. As Yoichi Funabashi, the editor in chief of Japan's Asahi Shimbun says in his fine new book The Peninsula Question: "The people of North and South Korea have confronted each other for more than half a century, figuratively dying to be unified but scared to death of being unified."

Beyond the peninsula itself, there are two reasons for treating relations between the two Koreas as a pressing issue. The first is that the north is one of the world's cruelest regimes, one that keeps its people in miserable penury. At a time when states such as Burma are rightly condemned in the West for their abuses of human rights, it has always baffled me why there is so little protest on campuses and among Hollywood activists of Pyongyang's ruthless suppression of dissent.

Second, the potential for nuclear proliferation is one of the great dangers of the age, which is why it is so vital that there should be continued pressure on Pyongyang to verifiably dismantle its nuclear facilities. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew from Lee's inaugural to Beijing to reiterate that point to the Chinese authorities. No harm in that, but the real lesson of the past few years is that the Chinese get it. Alarmed by the potentially destabilizing impact of nuclear weapons on the peninsula, Beijing, Pyongyang's old ally, has been deeply engaged in the six-party talks between the North and the South along with Japan, the U.S. and Russia. Lee would like others to be involved in thinking about the Korean question, too; he thinks that the European Union, for example, might have a role to play as an interlocutor between the North and the international community.

But however many states become involved in trying to defang Pyongyang and ease the North's eventual integration into the international system, it remains the case that for someone who has long been assumed to hold a weak hand, Kim has played his cards well. Using delay and deceit, always threatening, expressly or by implication, to deploy or sell his nukes, he has wheedled cash, fuel and food aid from the outside and used them to prop up his rule. Nothing, as I say, lasts forever. But the unification that Lee maintains is the "long-cherished desire of the 70 million Korean people" is not yet in sight.

• Michael Elliott