The two Koreas have just finished a first round of sounding each other out about resuming their severed dialogue. The result, as expected, was disappointing with North Korea brushing the South’s hand aside, to the chagrin of the latter.
This should be a reason for additional attempts, not hasty turning away and finger-pointing, as both governments are doing now.
Pyongyang’s apparent rejection could actually be a counterproposal of sorts aimed at upgrading Seoul’s offer with detailed incentives. But the North should have accepted the South’s proposal for unconditional talks instead of caviling at its lack of specific terms and conditions, through one of its propaganda machines.
The North Korean leadership’s anxiety to make up for time lost during the five years of the previous South Korean administration is palpable, but as an old saying goes, “No one can expect their first attempt to be perfect.”
President Park Geun-hye for her part might have found it hard not to express strong regret over the North’s near refusal, especially at a time when more than a hundred South Korean investors in the joint industrial park between the Koreas are wringing their hands in the face of the North’s de facto sabotage of normal operations. The last thing Korea’s first woman president would want is to appear weak before intimidators.
Yet Park is advised to regard the recent exchange between the Koreas as the start of long, arduous road toward reconciliation, not an excuse to return to business as usual, at the behest of “I-told-you-so” hard-liners.
Park also ought to fill gaps within her national security team. While the president was stressing the need for inter-Korean dialogue, her prime minister said Seoul’s proposal for talks would only aggravate the situation by sending a wrong signal to Pyongyang. Also, the Unification Ministry first left the room for further analysis of the North’s reaction but turned more hawkish in just half a day. Park must end this type of diplomatic back and forth.
It was also disturbing to find similar discord in Washington over the assessment of North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities, raising doubts over U.S. diplomatic efficacy based on incorrect information.
No less dismaying was the diplomatic buck-passing between the two Koreas’ respective main allies over the weekend. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, a rare dove who is calling for solving problems through dialogue, was right to urge Pyongyang to go back to a Sept. 19, 2005 agreement, in which the United States would provide economic aid and turn the armistice into peace treaty “only after” the North first shows efforts toward denuclearization. But he should go further than there from now on by, for instance, shifting boldly to a simultaneous process.
China also stopped at calling on the U.S. to resume bilateral and multilateral talks with North Korea without saying how it would help the process in detail.
The ongoing developments reaffirm the need for all parties to step up efforts not just on the surface but underneath it.