Is it worth the investment?

Investment of time, resources, and perhaps more importantly, faith.

In my recent effort to write a letter of intent for my postgraduate applications, I strongly insisted that the world is in need of people who are not only multilingual, but multicultural, to stand as representative members of a growing international community. I argued that they must be, first and foremost, endowed with a sense of global responsibility. I cannot help but feel that Roh Moo-hyun, the current South Korean president, was one such person.

His 'sunshine policy' programme was began in an effort to reengage a population that had been separated quite cleanly in two by a physical border and a war. According to my mother's extended family members, such a political separation has not led them to believe that they are specifically 'Northern' or 'Southern'; they are, they insist, Korean. The successful completion of Roh's 'sunshine policy', therefore, would have helped bring together two populations that were originally one.

But what do you do, as a man of politics, when your neighbor blows up a nuke, against international objection? Here is a government you've decided to invest in, hoping--and that is truly the appropriate word: hoping--that they would begin to cooperate and see things in a different light. Despite the result (i.e. nuke), Roh should be commended for his effort and his ultimate faith in the good heart of human kind. Yes, they may be (are?) developing 'weapons of mass destruction', but their people are starving, and today, they would be half my people if it were not for the War and the physical border. The government that rules over their former people must be pressured to meet recent international standards of peace and security, but being so close and sharing so much history, they must not be completely alienated. As the direct neighbor and thus the most threatened, South Korea's approach to the recent North Korean crisis has been summarized in the recent issue of the Economist as the following:

South Korea's predominant political consensus, says Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul, is to seek gradual change north of the border in ways that might eventually narrow the vast income gap between the two sides. Tightening the screws too far risks goading Mr Kim to strike back. A collapse of the regime, followed by reunification, would impose unbearable costs on the South. Even the opposition GNP, says Park Jin, a member of the party, believes in maintaining dialogue with the North, while adding some pressure.

How does one with a sense of so-called 'global responsibility' tackle such a situation?