If the summit between North Korea and South Korea leads to peace on the peninsula, it will also deliver big headaches for China, Japan and the US, analysts said yesterday.
Both the US and China have an interest in preventing war and creating a soft landing for North Korea, said Prof Harry Harding of George Washington University. But "from a broader strategic context, we face some very real dilemmas from a real improvement in North-South relations," said Dr Harding, professor of international affairs and political science.
Japan and the US would have to find a new threat to justify their development of a national missile defence program, aimed at shooting down ballistic missiles from "rogue nations".
And China would have to decide whether it really wants to get rid of US forces in South Korea, and run the risk of Japan eventually building up its own offensive capability.
If North and South Korea ease tensions, it will turn the spotlight on whether Japan and the US actually want their defence programme to deal with a missile threat from China, Dr Harding told the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
For now, the US could argue that it was simply countering the North Korean threat and had no intention of undermining the Chinese nuclear deterrent. But "to invoke a declining North Korean threat will be more and more difficult for Japan and the United States to do", he said. From Beijing's side, he added, peace would force it to grapple with the question of what would happen if it led to withdrawal of the 37,000 US troops stationed in South Korea, and another 47,000 in Japan.
Mr Scott Snyder, a US expert on North Korea from the Asia Foundation, said the big question for the summit was whether it could translate symbolism into concrete achievements.
"Quite clearly it is a kind of historic event to reach the summit," Mr Snyder told the same seminar. "But the problem is that once you get to the summit, once you get to the top, you still have to make your way back down the mountain," he added.
"I think that that is really what people are waiting to see now . . . whether the symbolic promise which was embodied in the handshake [between the two sides' leaders] can be realised in substantive terms or whether this will be another false start that has characteristically bedevilled the inter-Korean process."
The dialogue needed to be institutionalised with further summits, working level channels and a gradual change in atmosphere from confrontation to peace, Mr Snyder said.
But economic co-operation between the bustling South and starving North could be the deciding factor, he added. "It is economic opportunity, not necessarily emotional sentiment that I see as the driving factor underlying the inter-Korean interaction," the analyst said. "And indeed, I think that the question of economic benefit and potential convergence is likely to be the essential one that will determine exactly how far one can go in terms of broader political convergence."
Suspicions that North Korea is secretly developing a nuclear weapons program remain high as it accelerates development of long-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in its annual report, published yesterday.
"North Korea has not met its obligations under bilateral safeguards agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency, strengthening the suspicion that it has a clandestine nuclear weapon programme," the report said. Pyongyang stunned the world in August 1998 when it test-fired a suspected Taepodong I ballistic missile that flew over Japan. Pyongyang said it was a satellite launch.