Tomorrow night in Washington, President Bush will have one of the most important dinners of his presidency: a two-hour summit with the president of South Korea, Roh Moohyun. The meeting unfolds amid a drama worthy of a James Bond movie — a Stalinist North Korean leader is pursuing nuclear weapons while holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in concentration camps. Meanwhile, the South Koreans, once steady American allies, are quaking in their boots.

Chosun Ilbo, the South Korean daily, reported that while here in New York on Sunday night, Mr. Roh told a crowd of Korean Americans at the Waldorf-Astoria that the Second United States Infantry Division should remain deployed along the 38 th Parallel. “The U.S. forces in Korea represent the core symbol of our alliance and hold importance both in political and security terms,” Mr. Roh said, according to Chosun Ilbo. “If any changes take place without our consent, it would put South Korea in a very difficult situation,” he said.

What Mr. Roh is trying to avert is what some of the more creative defense policy minds in Washington are suggesting — that, in the face of South Korean squeamishness, the American troops march to the Southern tip of the Korean peninsula. That would dramatically illustrate for the South Koreans the consequences of their own soft line toward the North. In other words, if the South Koreans don’t want to stand up to the Communists, let the South Korean people, rather than American G.I.s, absorb the brunt of a Communist attack.

A better solution would be to solve the North Korea problem before it came to that. The need is to free the North Korean people from the Communist tyranny and the South Korean people — and others — from the threat of nuclear attack.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was in part because of refugee flows to the West. The North Korean people are desperate to escape, to the extent that a kind of underground railroad has reportedly been established. If Mr. Bush really wants to have a lively dinner, perhaps he might explore with Mr. Roh the possibilities of letting the North Korean people vote with their feet. If Mr. Bush can instill in Mr. Roh some of the determination the American president himself has shown in the war on terror, perhaps it’s not too much to hope that one day they’ll be smashing statues of Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang the same way statues of Saddam Hussein were felled in Baghdad.