The Kim Dae-jung administration, which invented the Sunshine Policy, was no exception. In the summer of the year it was inaugurated, the North fired Taepodong missiles. It fired some more missiles when the Roh Moo-hyun administration was launched, and resumed its nuclear program and broke off all inter-Korean exchanges to boot. All this suggests that Pyongyang is really trying to bring our new administration to heel.

We have only ourselves to blame. Successive administrations could not bear the cross-border silence: inter-Korean dialogue is a means of North Korea policy, but it became an end in itself. There is no reason why the North would not know this. The high priority our past administrations have put on inter-Korean talks has got us exactly where the North wants us. That is the reason it makes a show of severing talks whenever a new government comes in here.

So how to break the vicious cycle? Though inter-Korean dialogue matters to us, it is evidently beneficial to the North, too. If they think of something they want, the North Koreans will come to the negotiation table. Instead of being glad and sad by turns all the time, we need a resolute stance.

Our governments in the last 10 years felt it was the Cold War reality of the Korean Peninsula that prompted the North to develop nuclear weapons and hesitate to open itself to the outside world. So they pursued a policy based on the idea that the Cold War alliance of the U.S., Japan and South Korea is the big problem, and that once their “hostility” ends, North Korea would resolve the nuclear issue and open of its own accord. But the Cold War structure is gone in and around the Korean Peninsula, and no one is hostile to North Korea. The international community's efforts to end the North Korean nuclear program can hardly be confused with hostility. The crux, then, is not how to overcome the Cold War structure, but that North Korea is a failed nation. So long as we do not tackle that essential issue and instead put the blame on outside factors, the vicious cycle will repeat itself. We must tell the North, not what it wants to hear but what it needs to hear.

The Lee administration's North Korea policy differs substantially from those of its predecessors. Lee’s idea of denuclearization-opening-US$3,000 puts economic reconstruction at the center. If the North abandons its nuclear ambitions, Seoul is to help it achieve a per capita income of $3,000 within a decade in collaboration with the international community. Regrettably, the North won’t hear of it. But there is no way to reconstruct the North Korean economy without denuclearization and opening. After 17 long years of negotiations, does the North still not realize that no country in the world will offer the large-scale support desperately needed for its economic reconstruction without denuclearization? Even if the progressive camp had won the presidential election, the huge inter-Korean cooperation promised in the October inter-Korean summit would not have been delivered without denuclearization.

South Korea has achieved the miracle of boosting per-capita income from $80 to $20,000. North Korea is in a much better position today than we were six decades ago. It already has a per-capita income of $500 and a whole nation of 48 million people south of its border desperate to help a brother country. Our experience of the economic miracle will be of decisive help to the North Koreans, who share our DNA. Please don't miss this opportunity. It is simply pathetic that epithets like "traitor”, “American stooge” and “ imposter" are still being bandied about in a bilateral relationship that has produced the July 4, 1972 North-South Joint Statement, the 1992 Basic Agreement and two summits.

The column was contributed by Yoon Duk-min, a senior analyst at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul.