Clouds on The Horizon; The 'Sunshine Policy' is slowly driving a wedge between the United States and South Korea.

Byline: Christian Caryl and B. J. Lee (With Stephen Glain in Washington)

Talk about open secrets. For weeks now, North Korean technicians have been preparing a site for the launch of a ballistic missile. In Washington, national-security adviser Stephen Hadley warned Pyongyang that launching a missile would expose North Korea to the unspecified wrath of the United States; in Tokyo, a senior Japanese politician echoed the vague threat.

And what about South Korea? Most people there have completely ignored the launch, opting instead to cheer their team through the World Cup. Oh, yes, and then there was the celebration in Kwangju, where delegates from the two Koreas gathered to celebrate the sixth anniversary of a historic summit between their leaders that marked the beginning of the "Sunshine Policy" --the South's program of proactive support for its economically prostrate communist sibling. Meanwhile, the South's radical university-student association, in a directive to student councils, called for "escalation of the wave of anti-American struggles."

Seoul and Washington used to share a common viewpoint on how to approach Pyongyang: warily. But now that's more the way the two military allies perceive each other, with Washington hewing to a fairly tough line on North Korea and Seoul preferring a policy of accommodation. Indeed, it's increasingly clear that Seoul's Sunshine Policy is not just a fleeting improvisation, as it seemed when launched by President Kim Dae Jung in 1998. Rather, it's the expression of a whole set of deeper imperatives that are steadily driving a wedge between the United States and South Korea. "The Sunshine Policy changed the South, not the North," says Kim Jung Won at Seoul's Sejong University. "The southerners are confused. They're no longer sure who's their enemy and who's their friend."

Maybe that will become clearer later this month, when the architect of the Sunshine Policy, former president Kim Dae Jung, heads to Pyongyang for a much-heralded tete-A -tete with dictator Kim Jong Il. Optimists hope that the meeting will jump-start the moribund Six-Party Talks, the multilateral negotiating process aimed at persuading the North to discard its presumed nuclear arsenal. But the major players in the talks are being pulled apart by their increasingly divergent interests--and without a breakthrough the increasingly threadbare international consensus on the need to disarm North Korea could unravel altogether.

Along the way, Seoul's military alliance with Washington may be fraying. In March, the two countries started talks designed to prepare the way for Seoul to take over control of joint U.S.-South Korean military forces in the country. The commander of U.S. forces in Korea, Gen. Burwell Bell, has been hinting that Washington won't stand in the way, and South Korean President Roh Myoo Hun has indirectly confirmed the shift by saying that Seoul will assume wartime command within the next five years. Publicly, both American and South Korean officials are saying that the change merely represents a long-overdue "modernization" of the alliance. But experts say that, in reality, transferring command to Seoul will mean the virtual dissolution of the U.S.-South Korean Combined Forces.

On one level, the Sunshine Policy has worked. Hardly a week goes by without some sort of Korean-Korean meeting involving bureaucrats, generals or long-separated relatives touchingly reunited. Yet the policy also has its shadow side. For while the Bush administration is frustrated with the usual stonewalling and feinting from Pyongyang, South Korea seems ever ready to give Kim Jong Il the benefit of the doubt.