Two sticking points in inter-Korean ties

By Stephen Costello

The key to any progress on Korea has always been to first address sanctions and military exercises. Now that Kim Jung-un has begun to talk with his South Korean counterpart, President Moon Jae-in must decide how much he wants to impact South-North relations.

If he continues to uphold the Park Guen-hye and George W. Bush assumptions that North Korea rejected working deals in the 1990s, and prefers guns to butter, then progress is likely to await another leader in some other years down the road.

If instead he wants to have some real impact on the peninsula’s security and economic development, then he will have to confront and squarely address those two sticking points. Four questions are worth considering.

First, why were sanctions applied? The story has been that since 2006 they were applied in reaction to the North’s nuclear weapons program. But that’s only half the story. After all, in 2001 when George W. Bush became U.S. president, there were no nuclear weapons. None. Missile development at the time was being contained.

The U.S. effort to reverse its previous policy and destroy the structure of the Agreed Framework, against the wishes of its ally South Korea and its nonproliferation partners _ China, Russia and the Europeans _ took years. But why was that done?

Helpfully, then U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was clearer than anyone else when he reportedly said, “We don’t negotiate with evil. We defeat it.” This rejection of any negotiated settlement with Pyongyang, with its political and ideological need for the appearance of capitulation or surrender, continues to be U.S. policy.

Second, what is the real U.N. and South Korean interest in using sanctions? Both have said, like the U.S., that their aim is to bring North Korea “back to the table.” But that is clearly not the U.S. aim. Instead, today the U.S. is doing everything possible to prevent sanctions relief or serious negotiations.

Three U.S. administrations, Bush, Obama and Trump, have refused to return to the win-win formula that anchored and allowed the previous agreements. Even if they had, why would the North Koreans believe them?

Unlike the U.S., South Korea’s new pragmatic administration and the U.N.’s new secretary-general would only see sanctions as a tool to be suspended or eliminated if new agreements were made with Pyongyang. That would be their purpose: to be suspended or eliminated.

Third, what would happen if President Moon Jae-in were to gather a coalition of U.N. members and work to pause a broad range of sanctions while serious North-South negotiations were underway? He would have broad support from almost all members of the U.N., certainly from members of the Security Council.

The U.S. may be opposed, but their aim is now different from that of the U.N. and South Korea. It is easy to predict that President Trump, facing another example of his marginalization as middle powers move on to do what they need to do, would embrace the new strategy and claim credit for it.

Fourth, why would Moon make such a bold move, which requires that his government make rare use of coordinated and sophisticated diplomatic capabilities? A simple answer is that the sanctions, as they are being used today to bring the North Koreans to their knees and capitulate, prevent all sincere negotiations.

They are a clear and absolute block on South Korea’s ability to return to mutually-beneficial talks, exchanges and negotiations. It is also clear how the Trump administration is using them. Try as he might, Moon can’t get around this.

Similarly, South Korea has every right and responsibility to pause, scale back or relocate military exercises. This has been done in the past for exactly the purpose of relieving pressure on the North. Nothing is easier to do.

If the South accepts the line that exercises are somehow immune from use as a diplomatic tool, even as part of a “freeze for freeze” arrangement, they would look shockingly naive, and unable to advance the country’s interests. That assessment of the Moon government is the premise of U.S. policy today. Soon we will see if it is correct.

Stephen Costello (scost55@gmail.com) is a producer of AsiaEast, a web and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C. The views expressed in the above article are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.