Turn thaw into detente
SEOUL (Reuters) – A day of smiles and jokes at the first inter-Korean talks in two years quickly evaporated on Tuesday night when the North’s chief negotiator threatened to walk out after the South Korean side brought up Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.
“We had started in a good spirit, but this came to an icky mood,” North Korea’s lead delegate Ri Son Gwon complained in closing remarks.
His rebuke highlights the challenges that lie ahead for Seoul after the 11 hours of talks yielded agreements to hold military talks and facilitate North Korea’s participation in next month’s Winter Olympics in South Korea.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in attained his immediate goal of getting North Korea to participate in the games – and reducing the chance its leader, Kim Jong Un, would disrupt the event with another missile or nuclear test. But turning the winter thaw into a longer-term detente will be far more daunting.
To do so, Moon must navigate a volatile mix of mutually exclusive policies, including North Korea’s stance that its nuclear arsenal is nonnegotiable and Washington’s equally strident insistence for complete denuclearization.
Seoul has proposed that the two Koreas make a show of unity by marching together at the Pyeongchang Olympics. The last time they did so was at the 2007 Asian Winter Games in Changchun, China, just three months after North Korea conducted its first nuclear test.
The first UN sanctions against Pyongyang followed that test and over the next 12 years, sanctions ramped up along with North Korea’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear tests left it increasingly isolated. Along the way, six-country talks aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program became moribund.
Participation in the Olympics would help ease the North’s isolation. And Pyongyang may hope South Korea could resume desperately needed economic aid at some point. Moon, after all, was once an advocate of former president Kim Dae Jung’s “sunshine policy” of reconciliation with the North.
Seoul believes improved ties and a series of steps agreed on Tuesday could pave the way for discussion of a “fundamental resolution” of the nuclear issue in the future, the South’s Unification Ministry said on Wednesday. But the two countries can do little themselves about denuclearization “without the United States on board,” said Hwang In-sung, secretary-general of the secretariat of the presidential National Unification Advisory council in Seoul.
“Given the mistrust and high bars set up by both North Korea and the US, we will need to drive the experience from Pyeongchang when it’s over, in a way that contributes to the opening of nuclear negotiations,” Hwang said.
The two Koreas initiated sports diplomacy in 1957 to form a unified team for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. That effort failed.
Culture and sports diplomacy between them since then has followed the ups and downs of their Cold War-era relations. The two countries remain technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armed truce that has yet to be replaced with a peace agreement.
“While the hope is certainly that these things will lead to further political developments, such cooperation has often ended without any larger-scale issues being solved,” said Benjamin Silberstein, associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. “There are few signs to suggest that this time is any different, but it is still too soon to tell.”