Can reshuffle jumpstart engagement, denuclearization?

By Stephen Costello

The appointment of Suh Hoon to National Security Council director should be a good move for the South Korean administration, now going into its fourth year. Director Suh seems to have the background and the seriousness to make this key position work for the president's complicated goals.

Those goals would include making the South Korea-U.S. alliance serve both countries' interests; keeping the South Korea-China relationship high-level, productive, and honest about its limits; reminding both sides of the South Korea-Japan relationship of the specific gains that increased cooperation can bring; and treating inter-Korean engagement as the first-order “core interest” that it is.

By appointing Park Jie-won to lead the National Intelligence Service, President Moon Jae-in is continuing to treat that agency with the seriousness that it deserves. The NIS has some of the very best analysts and thinkers in the government, and its corruption by some past presidents was terribly destructive.

Park's past experience with the details of South-North cooperation, and with a generation of North Korean officials, can be timely and valuable.

It is also a big advantage that Park was a New Yorker, a businessman, and a committed supporter of the democracy movement in the 1990s when it was organizing to contest power with the authoritarians of that time. It is precisely because of Park's broad capabilities that opponents of South-North rapprochement in Seoul and Washington will howl with objections.

The appointment of Lee In-young as unification minister should reinvigorate that critical institution, and perhaps allow it to do its job fully.

Since expanded inter-Korean peace and cooperation, accompanied by the capping and rollback of the DPRK's nuclear and ICBM capabilities, are the key to each of South Korea's interests, the role of the Ministry of Unification has long been central to any modern or realistic ROK government. President Lee Myung-bak's early attempt to abolish it is a reminder of the backward-looking worldview of many non-Democrats in Korea.

However, none of these appointments will matter much at all unless there is a change in the president's approach.

The problems with its U.S. ally have been clear from the moment Moon was elected. Many people pointed them out. Even before the election of Donald Trump, the U.S. policymaking process was broken and assumptions underlying policy toward North and South Korea had been proved wrong for over a decade.

Trump's incapacity to help either South Korea or the U.S. was not a secret. His hiring of aides, from John Bolton to Stephen Biegun, has not changed this deficit. This was the time for Seoul to lead a multilateral effort to return to a productive deal with Pyongyang. Now three years have gone by.

In addition, Moon's analysis of the peninsula situation was flawed. Despite his many statements supporting the views of Kim Dae-jung, the president came to office convinced that North Korea required “extreme sanctions” by the U.N. in order to negotiate its development and denuclearization.

Embarrassingly, he urged Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in Vladivostok three years ago to support a U.S.-proposed oil embargo on the North. Putin politely pointed out the impracticality of that policy.

Seoul's national security, inter-Korean and U.S. alliance policies have not been in crisis due to cabinet ministers. And they are unlikely to be solved or improved with these new appointments, even if Park, Suh and Lee are excellent choices.

A new outreach to Kim Jong-un will only be successful if it is accompanied by a shift to a proactive posture by President Moon. U.N. sanctions must be addressed urgently, because for 20 years they have been the key to South Korea and U.S. interests and goals. Rather than “being nice to Kim,” rolling back sanctions is the only route to getting what Washington and Seoul need.

Finally, the South Korea-U.S. alliance could be resuscitated and reinvigorated if Seoul were to confidently take the lead, on issues that are its primary responsibility, and stop expecting Washington to do something it cannot do.

For now, the U.S. needs to be led back to an updated Hanoi deal. But the route to such a deal is through the U.N., Asian regional support, the EU, Australia and others.

President Moon has the right team to do this complex diplomacy, and he has more good people waiting to be asked to help. Importantly, he also has good people in the U.S. who would gladly assist in this effort. But he must take on a new project, and no longer rely on the excuse of U.S. immobility.

Stephen Costello (scost55@gmail.com) managed the Kim Dae Jung Peace Foundation Washington office in the 1990s. He directed the Korea program at the Atlantic Council there from 1999 to 2004. He now directs AsiaEast.Org, a policy initiative focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington and Seoul.