IT'S A THRESHOLD ERROR:

If the past is any guide, the North will offer the South unenforceable verbiage. And if the South accepts a phony peace ploy, it will expose itself to more manipulation by the government in Pyongyang -- not only in its domestic politics, but potentially also in its alliance with the United States.

Let's begin with the obvious. A peace treaty between two countries is a legal document that requires one sovereign state to recognize the other sovereign state's right to exist. (Think Camp David accords of 1978, when Egypt agreed to recognize Israel.) Yet North Korea cannot commit to any such thing with South Korea, not least because the existential objective of its ruling family, the Kims, has been to wipe the state of South Korea off the face of the earth.

That goal was the reason for the North's surprise attack against the South in June 1950 that triggered the Korean War. And it has been the main focus of North Korea's external policy since the 1953 cease-fire in that still-unfinished conflict. It is a central duty, fused into the very identity of the state, indelibly registered in Pyongyang's institutions and ideology.

The 1980 charter of the Workers' Party of Korea, the ruling party, identified its "present task" as the "national liberation and people's democracy in the entire area of the country" -- meaning, the whole of the Korean Peninsula. North Korea's Constitution declares "reunification of the country" to be "the supreme national task" and instructs the government to "carry the revolutionary cause of juche through to completion." Juche is the doctrine extolling the vision of the entire Korean people gathering together self-determinedly under an "independent socialist state" run by Pyongyang.

For North Korea to end its war on the South, and accept the South as a legitimate, coequal government on the peninsula, would mean abandoning the quest that has legitimized the Kim family's rule for three generations. The decision would call into question why, exactly, North Korea should hold power at all. It would be system-threatening -- a mistake on the scale of the string of blunders by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that doomed the Soviet Union.

And so the North, rather than committing to a legally binding (and potentially destabilizing) peace treaty, is likely to do again what it has gotten away with in previous meetings with the South: dangle aspirational goals in jointly signed, but totally unenforceable, official statements.

Seoul and Pyongyang have a long history of this.

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