AS RECENTLY as a half year ago, enough promising signals were emanating from North Korea that South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" of embracing - rather than isolating - its longtime enemy seemed the most promising path to peace on the peninsula.
But with the North admitting this fall it's developing nuclear weapons and last weekend removing international monitoring equipment on its plutonium stockpile and one of its reactors, a murky standoff has suddenly been ratcheted up again into a dangerous crisis.
And unlike the last such high point in tensions with the North in 1993-94, the United States this time has not one, but two Korean problems - one with the North, the other with the South. Last time, the United States struck a deal with the North unilaterally, but that can't happen this time.
"Sunshine," it turns out, has allowed the North to drive a wedge between the more conciliatory South and the more skeptical United States, an opening that now must be healed before it gets wider and riskier.
The fraying of their 50-year alliance was evident in last week's presidential vote in the South, in which human-rights lawyer Roh Moo Hyun was elected with friendly rhetoric toward the North and some antagonism for the U.S. military presence in the South.
Mr. Roh was backed by the South's "386 generation," so named because they are now in their 30s, attended college in the 1980s and were born in the 1960s. They're most concerned with further expanding the world's 13th-largest economy, don't fear the North and want peace at virtually any cost. Other than war, they may most fear a sudden collapse of the North, after which - like West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall - they would be burdened with reunification's high costs.
The North last weekend wasted no time in testing Mr. Roh by announcing that it's taking the shackles off some of its nuclear equipment and material, possibly enabling creation of an arsenal in a year. Once again, it's trying to ransom off a threat that the United States was supposed to have bought off with the nuclear agreement that ended the similar crisis of the 1990s.
If that now casts "Sunshine" as questionable policy, other options may not be better. U.S. military moves are hard to imagine given the war on terrorism and the possible invasion of Iraq. Even a surgical strike on the North might provoke artillery fire on Seoul with many fatalities or another missile test firing over Japan - and, in both cases, broader instabilities for East Asia.
The only good news is that the North is such a failed regime that it likely could not exist for long without the world aid lifeline. In applying that leverage, Washington must work in close concert with Japan, China, Russia and the European Union. And that now can't happen without high-level steps to firm up the U.S.-South Korean alliance - a process that may have to be jump-started directly by President Bush and President-elect Roh.