Mirror, Mirror On The Wall...: There are plenty of collapse-of- communism scripts for North Korea--too many, in fact.(Brief Article)

It's more than fitting that Bill Clinton announced recently that he won't make a trip to North Korea before leaving office, explaining that time was too short to hammer out an agreement to curtail that country's missile program. Yes, last year produced extraordinary breakthroughs: the June summit in Pyongyang between North Korea's Kim Jong Il and South Korea's Kim Dae Jung, and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit in October. But Washington sees--and, undoubtedly, under a Bush administration will continue to see--North Korea as a dangerous, isolated, unpredictable state, at least until it has backed off its missile-development program and exports to nations like Libya. More significantly, North Korea's political future remains as shrouded in mystery and guesswork as ever. The two Kims pledged their countries to "independently resolve the issue of national unification." Whatever that means.

You'd think that, after watching so many communist regimes collapse, all of us would be better equipped to anticipate what will happen in a small Orwellian state. Especially in a country that chooses to build missiles and maintain one of the world's largest armed forces, with 1.1 million men, while famine has taken hundreds of thousands of lives since 1995 and energy shortages abound. The strongest temptation is to see what is happening in North Korea as a replay of earlier events elsewhere. But which is the right elsewhere?

Consider the possibilities:

Romania. Watching TV images of North Koreans paying homage to the "Great Leader," I find myself thinking back to Nicolae Ceausescu's last Communist Party Congress in 1987. I was standing with other foreign correspondents observing the proceedings, accompanied by our Foreign Ministry "minder." When Ceausescu spoke, the delegates jumped up every couple of minutes to applaud and chant his praises--all in zombielike, rhythmic fashion. Our minder, who was trying to exude sophistication, would bolt up on cue with everyone else, perform the same ritual and sit down with a slightly sheepish smile. Two years later this Great Leader and his wife were dead, riddled with bullets by their own people. Could this be Kim's fate? Maybe. But the North Koreans appear to take the cult of the leader much more seriously than the Romanians ever did.

Germany. In theory, a perfect analogy: two countries divided by history, but one people destined for reunification. The problem is that everything else is different. Compared with North Korea, East Germany was an open, prosperous society. East Germans watched West German TV and maintained contacts with their relatives in the West, even if travel there was largely restricted to pensioners and party hacks. None of those conditions applies in North Korea. As difficult and costly as the West Germans have found unification to be, they are coping. The South Koreans are in no position to do so. "Having to carry the burden of the whole North ...