One annoyance about evaluating KDJ's legacy..

The issue over many articles and posts I have read involves the hopes and failures of the Sunshine Policy that Kim Dae-Jung developed during his Presidency. It is often portrayed that this policy was a radical and new idea in ROK politics and that Kim Dae-jung deserves blame for keeping the DPRK in existence.

First, I should say that saying any specific person is the cause for keeping the DPRK alive is ignorant. There are many factors that keep the DPRK from collapsing, singling any person or entity out is just foolish. This idea seems to stem from the basic idea that was thrown around in the early 90s that the DPRK was on the verge of collapse and Kim Jong-il will not last a few years. Clearly this is has been proven to be false and we got to stop acting like that it is an undeniable fact that the DPRK is barely surviving on a shoe string. The reality is that we don't know.

Secondly, Kim Dae-jung's Sunshine Policy was not that radical; in many ways it was the natural evolution of ROK policy that stems back nearly 30 years. The first ROK President to try to make peaceful reconciliation with the DPRK was Park Chung-hee during the 1970s. Park Chung-hee met numerous leaders in the DPRK, and the two sides came up with a Join Statement in 1972 that called for peaceful reunification of the country and setup committees to prepare for it. The plan was eventually scratched because of an assassination attempt on President Park by a DPRK agent.

In the late 80s, President Roh Tae-woo begin a policy of cooling relations between the two sides with some success. During this period the two sides signed the the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression, Exchanges, and Cooperation and the Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. President Roh also publicly discussed allowing family reunification, intertrade and other peaceful exchanges on both sides. This was derailed by the first nuclear crisis that happened at the end of his Presidency. After the Agreed Framework was signed, Kim Young-sam begin loosening business restrictions on firms within the ROK with dealing business in the north. These eventually paved the way for the Sunshine Policy to exist, and many aspects of it was clearly influenced by the agreements achieved by both President Park and President Roh.

Even the conservative leaders of Korea do not want a military conflict, and prefer a peaceful resolution than war. That is the nature of international relations.