Word: korean
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...theme of pragmatism was picked up again in the context of inter-Korean relations. "The core task," Lee said, "is to help all Koreans live happily and to prepare the foundation for unification" of the peninsula. But that, as everyone knows, is easier said than done. It is perfectly true that nothing lasts forever and that one day the totalitarian rule of Kim Jong Il in North Korea will end. Some analysts suspect he is in poor health, and he does not seem to have an obvious heir within his family. But it is also true that many...
...potentially destabilizing impact of nuclear weapons on the peninsula, Beijing, Pyongyang's old ally, has been deeply engaged in the six-party talks between the North and the South along with Japan, the U.S. and Russia. Lee would like others to be involved in thinking about the Korean question, too; he thinks that the European Union, for example, might have a role to play as an interlocutor between the North and the international community...
...implication, to deploy or sell his nukes, he has wheedled cash, fuel and food aid from the outside and used them to prop up his rule. Nothing, as I say, lasts forever. But the unification that Lee maintains is the "long-cherished desire of the 70 million Korean people" is not yet in sight...
...Even from afar, North Korea is rarely dull. In the course of writing about the place, I have interviewed government spooks who track the country's illicit arms trade, as well as its counterfeiting and drug-running businesses. I have also written about legitimate South Korean businessmen who have invested there, hoping it's a low-wage alternative to China. And I have followed the seemingly endless permutations of Washington's fitful efforts to convince Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program. When, defiantly, North Korea set off a nuclear device in October 2006, I wrote a cover story...
...thanks to the historic concert by the New York Phil, coming amid a slow-motion diplomatic thaw already underway between Pyongyang and Washington, I would finally get to see a little of the place for myself. The North Koreans, to say the least, are control freaks, and hordes of minders immediately surrounded us on the tarmac as we waited for the orchestra leader, Lorin Maazel, and his musicians to follow us down and take a "class photo" in front of a beaming mosaic of the Great Leader. The deputy minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, stepped forward to greet Maazel...