Pragmatic approach to 'END' initiative

Troy Stangarone

Last month, I took part in two conferences focusing on the "END" initiative, the North Korea policy announced by President Lee Jae Myung at the U.N. General Assembly in September. While the policy is still under development, the conferences made clear that there are areas where more clarity would be beneficial if the policy is to take a pragmatic approach.

The END initiative is built around three pillars: exchange, normalization and denuclearization. With inter-Korea cooperation at a halt, the Lee administration is seeking a pathway to restoring engagement and economic cooperation with North Korea that would allow for progress on the other two pillars.

This won’t be easy. The Lee administration faces the most challenging environment for exchanges with North Korea of any recent administration. The situation is markedly different from even the Moon administration or the first Trump administration, as Pyongyang has fewer incentives to engage than it has in decades.

North Korea has abandoned the idea of reunification and shifted to a policy of two hostile states. Even if Pyongyang considers this more a rhetorical than permanent policy shift towards South Korea, its relationships with Moscow and Beijing are completely different than during the Moon administration.

China and Russia are no longer partners in denuclearization. Instead, they have drawn closer to North Korea, as Kim Jong-un’s prominent position alongside Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping during China’s World War II commemorations demonstrates.

This shift began as U.S.-North Korea talks broke down towards the end of the first Trump administration. In 2019, Moscow and Beijing proposed a resolution in the U.N. Security Council calling for a reduction of sanctions on North Korea in exchange for a return to negotiations. They advanced a similar resolution in 2021. This marked a shift from relying on economic pressure to induce North Korea into talks over its nuclear program toward advocating for sanctions relief.

While China has lessened sanctions enforcement, Russia is the most significant obstacle to establishing exchanges or economic engagement with North Korea. North Korea has provided Russia with more than 12 million artillery shells, over 100 ballistic missiles and in excess of 12,000 troops for Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom’s Korea office estimates the aid provided by Pyongyang to Moscow as worth nearly $10 billion. The Korea Institute for Defense Analyses suggests that it could be as high as $20 billion.

While it is difficult to determine exactly how Russia is compensating North Korea, the scale of support Pyongyang has provided to Moscow suggests that the benefits to North Korea may be worth, on average, 15–30 percent of its GDP over the past two years. Such substantial gains significantly reduce North Korea’s incentives to pursue economic exchange or engagement with South Korea or the United States.

While reestablishing exchanges with North Korea will be difficult given the shift in relations with China and Russia and the benefits that brings to Pyongyang, the normalization pillar poses interesting questions. Normalization could potentially run along a spectrum from mere political recognition to the full normalization of relations, including political, economic and social exchange. How the Lee administration envisions normalization proceeding and in what form is unclear at this point.

Which countries would be involved in normalizing relations with North Korea adds to the question about the shape of normalization. Lee’s U.N. remarks suggest the focus is on North Korean normalization with the United States and the international community more broadly rather than inter-Korean normalization. This approach would require Seoul to deeply coordinate with the United States and potentially deemphasize inter-Korean relations.

Lee has built his foreign policy on pragmatism and that should be no different for the END initiative. Focusing normalization on Washington is pragmatic as well. Pyongyang has previously tried to restrict talks to bilateral discussions with Washington. This accepts that reality. It also makes the United States a key component of any policy beyond coordination on engagement projects and sanctions relief. That requires the U.S. to become more deeply involved.

Close coordination with Washington is essential, no matter the policy emphasis. Concentrating on U.S. normalization rather than inter-Korean normalization, however, focuses the process more on U.S. than South Korean priorities. How much of a backseat is Seoul prepared to take in the normalization process?

Further pragmatism is already built into the END initiative. Denuclearization cannot be achieved in the short term, as Lee acknowledged in his remarks at the U.N. This means taking a more deliberate approach. But embracing a pragmatic approach to the END initiative also means taking North Korea for what it is rather than one hopes it to be. It means setting realistic goals for engaging North Korea and for what a future process of normalization might be able to achieve, rather than what one hopes to achieve. It also means viewing this as the start rather than the end.

Troy Stangarone is the director of the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy and the deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.