icholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is author of, most recently, The End of North Korea.

Lopez: How real is this talk of reunification of North and South Korea coming out of last week's summit?

Eberstadt: It's a big breakthrough for the heads of North and South Korea to actually meet, given the context of hostility the summit takes places against. North and South Korea are still formally in a state of war with one another. Moreover it is significant that Kim Jong Il and the North Korean government now formally refer to Kim Dae-Jung as president. That is an implicit recognition of the Republic of Korea, which North Korean doctrine has always held to be a monstrosity, not worthy of the right to exist. Those two developments are highly significant.

But what they portend for future North-South developments is very unclear. The Kim Dae-Jung government sees the summit as predictable consequence of its Sunshine policy toward the North. And according to the worldview, such a visit is just a first step toward resolution of the North Korean problem. The Sunshine policy envisions the grand bargain at the end of the road where the North Korean government fades away its weapons of mass destruction and embraces a peaceful coexistence with the South in return for diplomatic recognition from the United States, Japan, and, of course, a lot of foreign aid. It is by no means certain, however, that North Korea's leadership believes itself to be on that path.

Against the seeming concessions North Korea made to hold a summit, North Korea receives some immediate gains, the most obvious of these, foreign aid. Foreign aid is absolutely essential at this point to the survival of the North Korean system. If North Korea were a more normal state, it could deal with its economic crisis through outward-oriented economic reforms to generate export earnings and thus revenues. North Korea hasn't made any appreciable moves in that direction, possibly because the government has stated time and again that it views open-ended reform as honey-coated poison put out by the imperialists for the North Korean system to swallow and be killed by. So, the quest for foreign aid is absolutely vital at this point. And in return for the summit, the foreign aid flows have already been redoubled. The South Korean government has just announced that it will budget $450 million for North Korean foreign aid in the coming year. That's just the beginning.

The United States is removing some of its sanctions against North Korea. And while the commercial impact of that removal will probably be negligible, removing some of the sanctions will permit United States officials to vote in favor of foreign aid for the DPRK in such places as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank and other large repositories of international development assistance. So, North Korea is being paid for this summit in no uncertain terms.

The question arises as to the future of the North Korean nuclear and missile program. The answer to that is still rather obscure. We certainly know that the North Korean government hasn't betrayed any general indication "to settle the weapons of mass destruction question." Just last month the U.N.'s International atomic Energy Agency sent a mission to Pyongyang to inquire about the nuclear program, and they were afforded rather less hospitality than Kim Dae Jung just received. They were completely strong-armed and held up. And at the end of the mission, the head of the IAEA pronounced the trip a failure. So, I don't think we've seen yet the kind of movement that Sunshine theorists predict will come. The question they have to answer is why the North Korean government would wish to trade away what has been its survival lifeline in the post-Cold War era. Generally, governments do not trade away their vital national interests.

Lopez: What role should the West play at this point?

Eberstadt: Encouraging contact with North Korea is highly desirable. But we should make a distinction between encouraging contact and subsidizing the state. At the moment, Western countries and concerns are playing a very problematic role in directly financing the operations of the North Korean government, since its priorities are extreme militarization and maintenance of WMD programs. Western governments and concerns are indirectly supporting this. The food-aid program, for example is very highly centralized. In effect, the food-relief program, the world food program, and others, are cutting checks to the North Korean government's public distribution system, which is hardly the most efficacious way to attend to distress, in a country where the distress is caused by politics.

By the same token, the Hyundai Business Group in South Korea has a tourism venture in Kumgang Mountain with the DPRK, which provides an example of exactly what Western businesses should not be doing. The Kumgang project provides virtually direct transfers of money to Kim Jung Il's central financial system. The deal has absolutely no hope of turning a profit for the Western partner, and in fact has brought severe financial distress on the Hyundai Business Group as a whole. And the tourism project brings outsiders to these beautiful barren rocks in North Korea, but doesn't really promote any contact between the outside world and North Korean citizens, which is what we should want to see. So, far from subsidizing the North Korean state, outsiders should be encouraging the North Korean state to reach out and deal with the internal contradictions of their own economic system.

Lopez: Parochially, how should the U.S. presidential candidates be talking about North Korea?

Eberstadt: The North Korean government hopes the candidates will not be talking about the DPRK and North Korean calculations are pretty self-evident. If North Korea becomes an issue in the American presidential campaign, the dynamic is that both Democrat and Republican will be impelled to move toward tougher or harder-line policies toward North Korea. That's simply the predictable dynamic. North Korea wishes to enjoy benign neglect during this electoral season, because greater attention will make it vastly more difficult for the DPRK to enjoy the sorts of favorable treatment it has been receiving during the last four years of the Clinton administration. But the interests of the American public and the interest of the North Korean state are obviously quite different in this respect. And it would be very healthy for the two major candidates to express their views about the North Korean problem and how American national security should be protected.