(2 of 2)
Here in Seoul, I have found that South Korean officials and foreign policy experts are also sobered by the German experience. Theirs is the curse of the answered prayer. They have calculated that relative to the size of their economy, it will be 10 times as expensive for them to unite with North Korea as for the Bonn government to absorb the former East Germany. The outbreak of political turmoil in the wake of Kim's death could send hundreds of thousands of Northerners pouring across the Demilitarized Zone. Or would-be refugees might be slaughtered by North Korean troops, a horror that would tempt if not oblige the South to intervene.
What makes such scenarios especially disturbing is the uncertainty over the status of North Korea's clandestine program to develop an atom bomb. Kim is probably playing cat and mouse, like Saddam, with the international community's nuclear inspectors. But Kim did not lose a war last year, so he has much more control over foreign access to his facilities and air space.
For all these reasons, the South Koreans with whom I talked are crossing their fingers that the death of communism in the North and unification with the South will be spread out over 10 or even 20 years. They are counting on their new partners in Beijing to wean Kim's successors away from Stalinism. As Professor Ahn Byung Joon of Yonsei University in Seoul put it, "The only course is to persuade North Korea to adopt the Chinese model of economic reform and an open-door policy toward the rest of the world."
While a step-by-step, managed transition is to be encouraged, it is not necessarily to be expected. As Gorbachev himself inadvertently demonstrated, reform communism is an oxymoron. The Chinese Communists may ultimately learn the same truth, even though they bought the system some time with blood on Tiananmen Square. The late Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, a great friend of the Great Leader, provided a corollary: the more retrograde and repressive the regime, the more violent its fall. Its strength is brittle; it will not bend, but it will break. Open the door to a country like North Korea, and the whole house will fall down. The world can hope for a North Korean soft landing -- but it should be prepared for a crash.