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.