North suggests officially ending war for progress

WASHINGTON » It’s been just over two months since President Donald Trump met North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore, and there has been little visible progress so far in persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

On Wednesday, North Korean state media seemed to offer an explanation why: First, the Korean War must officially end.

“Let us adopt the declaration on ending war, build a peace mechanism to make durable peace,” the Korean Central News Agency said. “Let us not insist on ‘denuclearization first’ only and never pardon the unreasonable act of the U.S. forcing the north to make a unilateral concession!”

Why war didn’t end

Though the war lasted from 1950 until an armistice in 1953, the last two of those years were pretty much a deadlock.

The first months of the war saw the North invade the South and storm nearly all the way down the peninsula; then a counterattack by United Nations troops that brought them to the North’s border with China; and finally an invasion by China that pushed U.N. forces back to the area around the 38th parallel, where the front lines would remain.

Even if little territory was exchanged, the rest of the war was devastating. North Korea was subjected to a huge bombing campaign, and estimates suggest that a total of 2.5 million civilians died during the conflict. For years, there was talk of an armistice agreement.

The election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin helped spur negotiations, and North Korean and Chinese forces and the U.N. Command finally signed an armistice on July 27, 1953.

In theory, the armistice was meant to be temporary, calling for a “complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea until a final peaceful settlement is achieved.” But a peace conference held in Geneva in 1954 failed to find a full peace deal, in large part because both sides considered themselves the victors. Escalating tensions in what was then French Indochina also complicated matters. The United States subsequently abrogated one part of the armistice by moving nuclear weapons into South Korea in 1958.

Though full-fledged fighting never resumed, military tensions remained high. There have been a number of violent incidentsSince the 1990s, North Korea has frequently said it would no longer abide by the armistice.

The situation

When North Korea’s Kim met South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Panmunjom truce village in the DMZ in April, the two men agreed to work toward “declaring an end to the war and establishing a permanent and solid peace regime.”

For North Korea, the appeal of the end of the Korean War is obvious: It would help legitimize the North Korean regime — perhaps even leading to diplomatic recognition from the United States — and also add another small barrier to renewed conflict on the peninsula.

Some experts have suggested that the process could start with a joint U.S.-North Korea declaration that the Korean War has ended — a move that would carry big symbolic weight but require fewer legal hurdles than turning the armistice agreement into a full peace treaty. That would potentially require coordination with Beijing as well as the approval of Congress.

Seoul is not a party to the armistice.