South Korea Says No to President’s Engagement With North
Proposal generates outrage at home
By: Shim Jae Hoon
South Korea is up in arms over President Lee Jae Myung’s September 23 call for the Trump administration to start talks on normalizing relations with North Korea before Pyongyang agrees to denuclearize.
Critics have vociferously rejected Lee’s new policy, with North Korea itself strongly vowing it will never give up its nuclear weapons. With opposition parties setting up a firestorm over Lee’s overtures, South Korea appears headed for a prolonged period of domestic unrest over the North Korean nuclear issue.
“With his nonsensical policy turn, is President Lee trying to help Trump win the Nobel Prize?” asked one journalist critic, asking he not be identified, fearing reprisal. That, he said, could be the only help Lee could deliver.
Lee’s gambit appears to be a non-starter in Pyongyang as well. In a response that appears to undermine Lee’s policy statement, North Korea’s leader himself declared he isn’t interested at all in denuclearization.
Anonymous US officials say they too remain committed to unambiguous denuclearization as a condition for resuming talks although rumors continue to circulate that President Donald Trump and Kim could meet again next month on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit scheduled for the South Korean city of Kyongju.
In a three-phase initiative in his UN speech, Lee asked Washington to undertake what he described as “exchanges” with North Korea, a phase that implies multifaceted exchanges of personnel, even a beginning of trade with the North, now under global sanctions.
Lee said “normalization” – presumably of diplomatic relations – should take place in the second phase, which he said would be followed by what he called “denuclearization.” He summarized these steps as an “E.N.D” initiative, E for exchanges, N for normalization, and D for denuclearization, implying a termination of the crisis besetting the Korean peninsula.
With Kim Jong Un himself punching a large hole in Lee’s proposal, deriding it as a “hollow expectation,” in Seoul, few outside the Lee government accepted it as a viable solution to resolving the nuclear crisis besetting the Korean peninsula.
“Comrade Kim Jong Un said we must constantly sharpen and renew the nuclear shield and sword that can reliably guarantee national sovereignty, security, and interests,” said a Korean Central News Agency dispatch quoted by Reuters four days after Lee’s UN proposal.
For all that, Kim has recently also shown some indication he might be interested in another summit talk with Trump by saying he retained “good memory” of their last meetings in Singapore, Hanoi, and at the Korean Demilitarized Zone between 2018 and 2019. These talks drew much publicity but resulted in almost nothing of substance. Indeed, three meetings between Trump and Kim broke down in Hanoi as soon as Trump proposed inspecting Kim’s nuclear facilities.
Since the inauguration of the second Trump presidency, Kim has shown renewed interest by claiming he had a “good memory” of with the US leader, while Trump himself has claimed during his last campaign that he could resolve North Korea’s nuclear crisis in “one day” if he were reelected.
But in Seoul, few outside the Lee government think the North Korean issue could be resolved soon. Rather, by indicating a possibility of another summit with Trump, most analysts believe Kim continues in his strategy of driving a wedge between Seoul and Washington by proposing a summit format that leaves Seoul out of it.
“It’s an unsubtle game of keeping the line of dialogue open between the US and North Korea while shutting out Seoul,” said one prominent North Korea watcher.
In Seoul, President Lee’s new initiative advocating the reopening talks, even at the cost of excluding Seoul, has met with an avalanche of doubts. “President Lee’s initiative amounts to an infantile notion,” commented Rhee Young Il, a retired three-time legislator who has made several trips to the North. “Why on earth would Kim give up the only leverage (his nuclear arsenal) he has for the price of talking with Washington?”
Other commentators were even more scathing. Nam Sang Wook, an authoritative commentator on the Kim family regime, worried that removing the North’s nuclear arsenal from first priority could be extremely dangerous.
“President Lee has got his order of priority wrong,” he told the Chosun Ilbo, Seoul’s most authoritative newspaper. “D for denuclearization should come first, not at the end of his initiatives,” said Nam.
At the end of decades of dealings with the North, South Korea remains utterly distrustful of any initiative with regards to Kim and his regime. The big question raised by critics stemmed from the barren record of talks held on and off with the three generations of Kim family leaders over more than two decades. Under the so-called Beijing accord brokered by China two decades ago, Seoul gave the North a nuclear power generator to provide electricity, while the US and other countries formed a consortium to provide oil in exchange for the North’s agreement to denuclearize.
The Pyongyang regime took this aid but has refused to undertake the promised opening of nuclear facilities for outside inspection. Indeed, the Kim regime has taken advantage of the lull in nuclear talks by expanding its nuclear capability. Since the death of his father Kim Jong Il in 2011, Kim Jong Un has undertaken four of six underground nuclear tests conducted since 2006.
Today, international specialists believe Kim has stockpiled 50 atomic and hydrogen bombs, on top of the country’s capability to produce 15 to 20 bombs a year.
“North Korea has become one of the three countries capable of attacking the US mainland,” Chung Dong Young, Seoul’s new unification minister declared at a news conference in Berlin on September 29, referring to Kim’s destructive capability. Lest his statement risked being interpreted as bombast, Chung added: “What needs to be acknowledged should be acknowledged rationally.”
Chung was referring to Russia’s recent help to North Korea for developing new intercontinental missiles as the price for its contribution of armed troops to fight alongside Russian troops in Ukraine. Russia is known to have promised help in developing intercontinental missiles capable of targeting the US mainland.
With Lee and Chung taking turns underscoring the grim power of the North’s destructive capability, the conservative opposition People Power Party legislators in parliament claim that Lee’s center-left regime is resorting to fear-mongering to justify its left-leaning détente policy with North Korea.
“The Lee government’s statement officially recognizing North Korea’s nuclear weapons amounts to an incredibly irresponsible attitude,” said Song Un Suk, the opposition People Power Party spokesman, said. “It is an irresponsible attitude of striking fear into 50 million people in the South who have to live under the North’s nuclear threats.”
The party is preparing for a nationwide campaign against what it calls President Lee’s “dubious” and “dangerous” policy of overlooking the risk of leaving out denuclearization as a price for its engagement policy.