There Isn’t Much Hope on North Korea Policy | Opinion

The Korean Peninsula, arguably the most heavily militarized region of the world, hasn’t seen full-scale conflict since July 27, 1953, when an armistice agreement stopped a three-year war that claimed the lives of millions (including more than 36,000 Americans). But the absence of war doesn’t necessarily translate into peace. With a third-generation dictator in Kim Jong Un on one side and a brash conservative South Korean president in Yoon Suk Yeol on the other, decent inter-Korean relations don’t stand a chance for the foreseeable future.
It certainly never had a chance this year, which started off with Kim announcing that South Korea will now be referred to as North Korean’s “principal enemy.” Sure, such a designation isn’t exactly surprising given the seven decades of animosity between Pyongyang and Seoul. But it was significant because it demonstrated that North Korea had no intention of offering even minor concessions for the sake of a better relationship. Kim’s declaration on New Year’s Day that reunification was no longer on Pyongyang’s docket was even more important, for it overturned a decades-long North Korea policy that Kim’s father and grandfather long advocated for.
Yoon Suk Yeol, hawkish on North Korea issues, wasn’t about to extend olive branches either. Rather than beg for a summit meeting like his predecessor, Moon Jae-in, Yoon essentially wrote of dialogue with Pyongyang as a waste of time. In its place, the Yoon government focused on deterrence and defense—deepening its trilateral military relationship with the United States and Japan, creating its own strategic command to respond to a hypothetical North Korean attack, and confronting North Korean military drills with military drills of its own. Talk about South Korea acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent, once a fringe topic, is now well within the mainstream. Instead of finding diplomatic ways to communicate, the two Koreas are menacing each other with Cold War-style psychological warfare; Pyongyang had sent more than 3,600 balloons filled with rubbish into the South, and Seoul is re-broadcasting K-Pop songs from loudspeakers along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
The situation is quite bad on the Korean Peninsula, and it isn’t getting any better. Perhaps this is why Yoon devoted a good chunk of his recent speech marking the 79th anniversary of Korea’s liberation to righting the ship of inter-Korean relations. Is Yoon slowly coming around to a new position? And if so, would Kim be open to re-examining his own?
Don’t count on it. First, the speech itself wasn’t extraordinary. The potential resolutions Yoon floated were geared less toward solving the systemic political and ideological problems that exist between the two Koreas and more toward winning the propaganda war. Yoon claimed he had a plan for achieving freedom for the entire Korean Peninsula, yet his proposals were a mishmash of vague generalities about fighting the evil forces of disinformation, changing the minds of the North Korean people, and expanding information flows into the North so the public there can see for themselves all the wonderful capitalism and political pluralism it’s missing out on. There are no tangible steps offered, likely because Yoon recognizes in the back of his mind that his lofty objective of freedom-based unification is unachievable.
This isn’t the first time the security environment on the Korean Peninsula has looked dicey. There was a time not so long ago when a U.S. president by the name of Donald Trump was threatening “fire and fury” against North Korea, Kim was talking about his nuclear button, and the South Koreans were infuriated about Pyongyang’s nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests. Then, after the rhetoric scared everybody straight and Trump embraced the unconventional, the talk tough was replaced by summitry, nice words, and long strolls together. In 2018, a comprehensive military de-escalation accord was signed by Pyongyang and Seoul, which minimized the miscalculations that periodically flared between the two nations.
Yet the circumstances couldn’t be more different today. Even if Trump did win the 2024 presidential election, it’s not a given that Kim, humiliated after walking away from diplomacy in February 2019 with nothing to show for it, would be eager to get back to negotiations. If Kamala Harris wins the election, her position toward North Korea is likely to be a carbon copy of her former boss, Joe Biden, who recited talking points about unconditional diplomacy but still insisted on Pyongyang’s complete denuclearization.
Plus, it’s unclear whether Kim even feels the need to negotiate with the U.S. or South Korea at this point. Compared to 2017, when North Korea was isolated at the U.N. Security Council and dealing with an ever-tightening sanctions regime, its geopolitical position looks brighter today. Courtesy of Russian and Chinese vetoes, the Security Council hasn’t passed any sanctions against Pyongyang since December 2017. The war in Ukraine has given Kim the opportunity to exploit Russia’s desperation for artillery shells to his advantage, so much so that he signed a comprehensive strategic partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June. China and Russia used to cooperate with each other to save North Korea from trouble; now, the two are competing for influence in North Korea, which gives Kim leverage he otherwise might not have.
If anybody in Washington or Seoul thinks Yoon’s recent speech could be the beginning of a new era, they should sit down on a couch and close their eyes until the feeling passes.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.