Moon takes the driver's seat

By Stephen Costello

WASHINGTON, D.C. ― “You must satisfy the Japanese about their abducted people, and you must satisfy the Americans about your nuclear weapons program. If you can’t do those things, we can’t help you. No one can.”

It was June 2000 in Pyongyang, and then South Korean President Kim Dae-jung was deep into talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

The U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework was almost six years old, and the allies were using their overlapping interactions with the North to simultaneously cap its weapons programs and lead it toward slowly-expanding economic interactions with the South and with the international system.

Four months later General Jo Myong-rok visited Washington as Kim Jong-il’s special envoy, and the two governments pledged “no hostile intent” and to “make every effort in the future to build a new relationship free from past enmity.” At the time, the North possessed zero nuclear weapons, and was under an IAEA inspection regime.

Eighteen years later it’s logical that South Korean President Moon Jae-in has sent his special envoy to Pyongyang to explore the possibilities and opportunities that he helped create.

It is not yet clear that Moon can arrange for a meaningful gesture from his DPRK counterpart so that North Korea-U.S. discussions can take a small step forward. And it’s not yet clear that Moon knows he must lead both the South-North process and the international coalition-building that will be required to support further rapprochement.

But if he does, he will squeeze himself ― finally ― into the “driver’s seat” regarding Korean Peninsula policy. U.S. President Donald Trump may find himself before long taking Moon’s old place in the trunk of the policy car, as Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin jockey for the back seat, and Kim Jong-un rides shotgun next to Moon up front. On this ride, they should all buckle their seatbelts.

The most important gesture from the North would be the release of the three American captives still held there. Another possibility would be the announcement that nuclear and missile tests are paused for six months or so.

Such gestures will not change the emptiness of the U.S. position, which focuses exclusively on the nuclear weapons program and ignores the security and development dimensions. But it will provide room for the two Korean leaders to explore what is possible in the next four years.

National Security Office chief Chung Eui-yong has now become more important. Previously the administration’s top America-wrangler, he now has the delicate job of exploring the gestures and symbolism that will placate the U.S. and keep it from getting in the way, while Suh Hoon, director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), explores the equally delicate task of reconnecting North-South economic and political arrangements that have atrophied under a decade of conservative disinterest.

Although Moon has wanted to be leading policy for 10 months, he cannot do so alone. His two most important partners will be Xi Jinping and Antonio Gutierres, the U.N. secretary-general.

The Xi-Moon relationship has always been a key barometer of how successfully the ROK President can steer diplomacy. Now it will become crucial to back up whatever initiatives emerge from the Pyongyang visit by the Blue House special envoy team this week.

Either the Moon-Gutierres dialogue is missing something, or the two are playing a very dangerous game of assuaging Trump while they operate on more realistic assumptions. Both continue in public to entertain the toxic ― and most likely wrong ― narrative that “extreme pressure has brought North Korea to the table.”

A stronger case can be made that the U.S.’s maximum pressure and its many manifestations have had the opposite effect: They have prevented productive diplomacy for over a decade.

This matters, because it is unlikely that the North Koreans will make meaningful concessions while they are under multiple sanctions and repeated and theatrical military threats from the U.S. Some sanctions will have to be on the table, and early.

In order to put sanctions into play, President Moon will need the help of the U.N., and Secretary-General Gutierres. One hopes that the two discussed this in PyeongChang last month.

The South’s timeframe is approximately three years, before the domestic struggle for the next presidency will rival debates over policy. The president is limited to one five-year term.

He will have to assume that he will be dealing with a Trump White House for his entire term. That may not be the case, but he can’t afford to expect any changes from the U.S. Moon’s former boss, the late President Roh Moo-hyun, was politically weaker, and he faced a far more capable U.S. administration. The combination fatally limited his foreign policy achievements.

The overriding challenge for President Moon’s government is to avoid the obstacles that thwarted previous progressive efforts by Seoul and Washington.

Why single out progressive efforts? Because although the linked issues of DPRK denuclearization, security, and development and ROK growing middle power capacity are not fundamentally “left vs. right,” history and political expediency have loaded them with ideological and partisan meaning.

In both Seoul and Washington, conservatives have opposed diplomacy and supported coercion. The result has been a generational, multi-level policy disaster. This is true primarily for Northeast Asia, but also for American interests.

A major reason for the politicization of diplomacy in both capitals is that negotiated agreements and the necessity for cooperation with other governments and international institutions threaten the old and simplistic world views of conservative parties.

It is no coincidence that at the same time, those parties have become decoupled from any recognizable coherent or strategic worldviews. Another reason was the decision to ignore expertise, lower ambitions, and prioritize domestic political optics over strategic opportunities, as the Democrat Obama White House demonstrated.

After 17 years of such conceptual confusion, the realistic options that are now available are confounding to most of the mainstream policy community. That community now includes scholars, think tanks, university institutes and the media, both traditional and expanding digital outlets.

It seems almost too much to ask them to disentangle the extreme polarization and breakdown in political and policy systems from the real and ongoing strategic and tactical choices that are available. But of course, that’s their job.

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.