As Presidents Barack Obama and Lee Myung-bak prepare for their first official summit next week, the North Korean nuclear crisis is surely at the top of their agenda. This summer marks the start of the 20th year of the Western diplomatic process pursued in the hope of "finding a solution" to the "North Korean nuclear problem." At the beginning of this effort, a North Korean nuclear arsenal was nothing more than a twinkle in the eye of Pyongyang's "Great Leader," Kim Il Sung. Today, many years of "denuclearization talks" later, North Korea is a self-declared nuclear weapons state.
To avoid eventual catastrophe, Messrs. Obama and Lee must discard the comforting illusions that have permitted generations of statesmen to sleepwalk through nearly two decades of progressively mounting North Korean nuclear menace. The continuing, overarching failure of Western diplomacy with North Korea is due to a flaw in fundamental premises. Washington, Seoul and others have long assumed (or hoped) that Pyongyang will have an interest in helping us to "solve" the "problem" it poses to us. But nothing could be further from the truth. Our North Korean "problem" is their North Korean "solution."
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