NK peace
Are we on the cusp of change in Korea?
It is a question that makes us reach for our helmets in this part of the world.
For decades, the pattern has been remarkably consistent: crises, talks and tensions, all managed so superbly under the American umbrella that North Korea has been held in check and South Korea has become a major industrial power.
Two developments this week suggest that the tectonic plates under the peninsula might shift.
The first came on Saturday, when President Lee Jae Myung used his Liberation Day speech to call for talks with North Korea aimed at formally ending the Korean War and replacing the 1953 armistice with a permanent peace agreement.
The second is coming from Washington. Reports say President Donald Trump is pushing his aides to arrange a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as early as this autumn.
Trump has already ordered a substantial reduction in US-South Korean military exercises, saying he wants to revive his relationship with Kim.
We should not over-analyze, but it is worth being on alert for how Kim might respond to both initiatives — and how Trump might respond to Kim.
It may surprise readers overseas to know that the war that stopped in 1953 has never formally ended. We live under a routinely violated ceasefire agreement, not a permanent peace.
It may further surprise readers to know that the reason for this is that South Korea and the US did not want a peace treaty. The North has always called for it and we have always responded by flipping the bird.
Not that Seoul has rejected peace per se. In 1991, the two sides worked out a non-aggression accord and agreed to work towards a permanent peace at a 2007 summit.
But it’s never happened because nobody trusts the North to abide by a peace treaty. The fear has been that a peace treaty would provide Pyongyang with a powerful argument for the withdrawal of the U.S. security umbrella.
Under normal circumstances, the U.S. and the political opposition would be criticizing Lee for calling for a Korean War peace treaty without any evident change in North Korea that suggests we can trust them — but the response has been quite muted.
There are probably two reasons. One is that in America, the Trump administration is not so much inclined to reaffirm commitments to its allies — although it does to that — as to beat up on them for not contributing what it sees as their fair share for the U.S. umbrella.
The other is that Lee's proposal in many ways sounded like the typical speech every president makes on Liberation Day. But it was more than just, "Isn't peace a good thing?" It was more than a request to kick-start what was agreed in 2007 about a permanent, formal peace to end the Korean War.
The previous framework was nixed by Kim Jong-un a couple of years ago when he declared South Korea was a “hostile state” and said the North was permanently giving up on its previous sacred mission of national reunification.
Lee’s proposal is a way of saying, “Let us prove we are not hostile.”
Kim, of course, is likely to reject this — not because Pyongyang opposes ending the Korean War, but because of who is suggesting it. South Korea is obviously a key party, but its troops were part of the United Nations Command led by the U.S. and Seoul did not sign the armistice. The signatories were the U.S., North Korea and China.
Kim Jong-un is not going to say to Lee, "Great idea, buddy. Let's talk." He has spent the past two years declaring that South Korea is a separate, hostile state and abandoning reunification as a national objective. He wants to deal with Washington, not Seoul.
This brings us to Trump.
The American president's second term looks increasingly different from his first. He is trying to put his personal stamp on problems that have resisted conventional diplomacy, from the Middle East to Iran. North Korea now appears to be moving up the agenda.
It's possible that means bombs could start falling. But it's unlikely, not least because Kim has nuclear weapons. Trump is unlikely to threaten him with war. His instinct is more likely to threaten him with peace.
That sounds paradoxical, but it could be the crucial point. Trump could decide that the time has come to end the Korean War and negotiate directly with Kim. Leaving Seoul largely on the sidelines would have been unthinkable in previous administrations. It is much less difficult to imagine under Trump. who is a huge critic of his country's own allies.
If he were to agree, Kim would enter such a meeting from a stronger position than he did in 2018. He has a much larger nuclear arsenal, a formal strategic partnership with Russia and, above all, has abandoned the old assumption that reunification with the South is the ultimate goal.
Should such talks go ahead, one possible outcome could be diplomatic relations between Washington and Pyongyang.
If Kim says that he is not interested in talking with Trump, we need to think what Trump might do to encourage him to change his mind. In that event, we might want to put our helmets on.
Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.