EDITORIAL: “North Korea: Dealing with an impossible regime; North Korea is changing from the bottom: it needs more delicate handling than ever,” The Economist, 27 September 2008. SPECIAL REPORT: “The odd couple: A special report on the Koreas,” by Dominic Ziegler, The Economist, 27 September 2008.

Mounting signs of new famine, and Kim’s alleged stroke. Both, say the Economist, make it harder to press the regime on nukes, but “outsiders can hardly just stand by and watch millions starve.” Because of previous famines, informal markets have sprung up across the country, says the mag, “while cross-border exchanges with China have transformed what North Koreans know about the outside world.” Tell me this doesn’t sound like a détente-dynamic screwing up Kim’s totalitarianism. Best part in the editorial:

This makes Mr Kim vulnerable—in ways the outside world should exploit. That will be easier if America, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia, the five countries that pushed for the deal with Mr Kim, stand tough together against the North’s attempts to renege on it.

My years-old diagnosis for the second Bush term remains valid: deal with Iran, push North Korea’s collapse. Basic message of the special report echoes this goal:

Koreans want their international standing to match the south’s economic success. They may have to wait until the peninsula’s unified.

My exact message in every interview I’ve ever given the South Korean press. North Koreans earn, as a per capita GDP, about 1/19th of South Koreans. SK has its own Gap to integrate and exploit in terms of cheap labor, so long as it doesn’t make the same mistake the West Germans did when they made their Eastern brothers their economic equals overnight.