Leaders on geopolitical blind date

Underlying the planned historic encounter between leaders of North and South Korea is a hope that the North's leader, Kim Jong Il, is a reformer at heart.

Once portrayed as a terrorist mastermind and the rigidly Communist leader of a collapsing nation, South Korean officials now see someone different.

Mr. Kim appears firmly in power and his once reclusive regime is establishing relations with Western nations. His recent visit to Beijing has shown that he is "not a disaster at a cocktail party," in the words of one diplomat here who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The price of admission to a new era on the Korean peninsula, it seems, is to bury the past and to trust Kim - at least for now.

The three-day summit, set to begin tomorrow with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's arrival in the North's capital of Pyongyang, is an opportunity to ease the conflict between the two Koreas, the last nation on the planet still severed by the cold war. It is also the geopolitical equivalent of a blind date. The leaders of these nations have never met and in the past half-century the paths of the two countries have dramatically diverged.

Kim Jong Il, whose official title is chairman of North Korea's National Defense Commission, leads a brutal Communist dictatorship and a decrepit centrally-planned economy. His Korea is a land of scarcity in which food and political freedom are in short supply.

South Korean President Kim heads a vibrant democracy and free-market economy. A summer evening in the Myongdong neighborhood of Seoul puts his land of plenty on display: Protesters rail against the government while sidewalk evangelists bid to save the souls of blas shoppers pondering a cornucopia of international brand names.

Kim Dae Jung is a longtime democracy activist who struggled for decades against South Korea's military dictators before being elected president in December 1997. Kim Jong Il inherited the leadership of North Korea from his father.

"We don't know how the two sides will react and what their first conversation will be like," says Moon In-Chung, a South Korean political scientist who will accompany President Kim to Pyongyang. "It will be a total surprise to Koreans as well as to foreigners."

For an encounter that is apparently so unscripted, a lot is at stake. North and South Korea technically remain at war, since a 1953 armistice was never converted into a peace treaty. Some 37,000 US troops stationed in the South help deter conflict along a 150-mile demilitarized zone.

The North has practiced global blackmail for the past decade, winning aid packages from the US and other countries in exchange for backing away from controversial nuclear- and missile-development programs. This week's summit is a glory moment for President Kim, who has pushed a "sunshine" policy of engaging North Korea that has been endorsed by the US.

The idea is to tempt Chairman Kim with aid and investment and gradually convince him to abandon his nation's threatening stance toward South Korea and stop building weapons of mass destruction.

An undesired opposite effect

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