MOONRISE

While other world leaders shorten their fuses, South Korea’s new president stands out as the peacenik

MOON JAE-IN IS willing. While the US, China and North Korea play the most dangerous game, the new president of South Korea is willing to travel to prevent nuclear conflict in his region. He will even travel to Pyongyang if they promise not to strap him to a Nodong missile and light the fuse. But first, he has to manage the controversy over the US THAAD missile defence system, which was operationalised in South Korea earlier this month. Kim Jong-un is not the only person upset about the development. Interest groups in South Korea, which THAAD will protect, are upset because Beijing is volubly upset. American missile radars in the Korean peninsula can snoop on China. Moon must be feeling torn. The US is South Korea’s most important strategic ally, while China is its biggest trading partner.

Seoul has got its first liberal president in decades, at precisely the right time, when the region needs the soothing touch. For years, the North Korean missile programme has focused on giving Californians the jitters. And now, the US has a nervy president who, experts have begun to warn, cannot be trusted with the nuclear codes. Washington is likely to be Moon’s first destination, and he has also threatened to visit China and Japan, which is covered by the US nuclear umbrella. He hopes to pull together all the threads by which peace in Asia hangs.

The danger zone in Asia has shifted from the western zone to the Far East, the region which the world’s only enthusiastically rogue nuclear state can menace most successfully. Moon has taken the path of wisdom, declining to engage with a neighbour in search of a fight. But he may find it hard to restart the tradition of inter-korean summitry, on which he worked in the last decade.