North’s wrecking of liaison office “death knell” for ties with South
KOREA»The SEOUL, SOUTH
North Korean warning aimed at South Korea has steadily been escalating in intensity for more than a year: Your matchmaking diplomacy between our leader and President Donald Trump is failing.
On Tuesday, the accumulated frustrations of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, who embarrassingly returned home empty-handed from his second summit meeting with Trump in February 2019, exploded in cathartic fashion. The North blew up an inter-Korean joint liaison office created as a sign of goodwill toward President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, who had brokered and encouraged the meeting.
That blast effectively shattered a détente on the Korean Peninsula that had lasted two years. The period had raised hope for diplomacy that would lead to the dismantlement of the North’s nuclear arsenal or even a peace treaty with the United States, which technically remains at war with North Korea after nearly seven decades.
With the blast, Kim wrecked one of the most concrete legacies of Moon’s friendly engagement with the autocratic North Korean leader, and signaled his exasperation with Trump’s approach as well.
By destroying the building in the North Korean city of Kaesong that housed the liaison office, which functioned as a de facto embassy, Kim also acted on his repeated admonition that he was steering relations on the divided Korean Peninsula to a new phase, treating South Korea not as a partner for reconciliation but as an “enemy.”
Moon’s government reacted with an uncharacteristically strong statement that recalled the worst days of North-South confrontation.
“We make it clear that the North will be held accountable for all the repercussions of its act,” said Kim You-geun, deputy director of national security at Moon’s office. “We issue a stern warning that if North Korea continues to aggravate the situation, we will take strong corresponding steps.”
On Wednesday, North Korea said it had dismissed Moon’s recent proposal to send special envoys to
Pyongyang as “tactless and sinister.” Also on Wednesday, the North’s military said that it was seeking Kim’s approval to “resume all kinds of regular military exercises” near the disputed western sea border despite an earlier inter-Korean agreement to ban such drills.
The exchange between Pyongyang and Seoul signaled that the downward spiral in inter-Korean relations had become “irrevocable,” said Lee Byongchul, a North Korea expert at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul.
“North Korea has just tolled the death knell for its relations with Moon Jae-in’s government,” he said.
The liaison office had allowed person-to-person contact between the two Koreas and had raised hopes that it would eventually lead to the establishment of diplomatic missions in each other’s capital. Its demolition was only the most dramatic in a series of indications of how the triangular relationship among Kim, Moon and Trump has gone askew.
Kim and Trump spent much of 2017 exchanging personal insults and threats of nuclear war, as the American leader warned of “fire and fury” in the aftermath of North Korea’s nuclear and longrange ballistic missile tests and Kim called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Moon’s work to mediate bore fruit when Kim and Trump met in Singapore in 2018 in the first ever summit meeting between the two nations.
Moon was relentless in trying to nurture the relationship, saying the two leaders were a once-in-alifetime pair to negotiate a history-making peace deal on the Korean Peninsula, where threats of renewed war and repeated cycles of tensions over the North’s nuclear weapons development make it one of the world’s most enduring flashpoints.
But the relationship between Kim and Trump has soured.
Their second summit, held in Vietnam in February 2019, collapsed without an agreement on how to eliminate the North’s nuclear arsenal and without a reprieve from international sanctions that Kim badly needed to rebuild his country’s economy.