North Korea’s overture toward Seoul raises hope, but huge obstacles loom

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — On both sides of the divided Korean Peninsula, the timing seems right.

The New Year’s Day proposal by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, for direct talks with South Korea came as sanctions appear to be biting, with reports of shortages in the North and new pressure by Washington to intercept ships engaged in fuel smuggling.

The initiative was quickly embraced by South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who sees his first concrete chance to carry out his campaign agenda of engaging with the North, while also easing tensions as Trump’s warlike threats have rattled his country.

But if this is a potential opening for a thaw, it is a small one. Skepticism abounds not only in Washington but also among South Koreans.

Many in the country are mindful of how the so-called sunshine policy of two previous progressive leaders, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moohyun, failed to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and remain wary of its revival. As Moon learned from his predecessors’ experiences, any South Korean leader accused of risking the alliance with Washington in trying to improve ties with the North could become a lightning rod of conservative ire.

“If there are still those who think they can solve the North Korean nuclear problem and problems between the South and the North through dialogue, they must be crazy,” said Yoo Dong-ryul, a right-wing director of the Seoul-based Korea Institute for Liberal Democracy.

While most South Koreans today favor dialogue and peaceful accommodation with North Korea, many also fear that hastily engaging and granting the North economic concessions would throw a lifeline to Kim just as sanctions are squeezing his government.

In his New Year’s Day speech, Kim offered to send an Olympic delegation to the Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, next month. But he also boasted that his country was now a nuclear power capable of thwarting a U.S.-led war on the peninsula, and he urged the South to abandon Washington’s campaign for sanctions and to work with “fellow countrymen” for peace — an opening Moon seized on.

“The Pyeongchang Olympics and the Paralympics there will become a clarion of peace on the Korean Peninsula,” Moon said Wednesday, the day Kim also restored a cross-border telephone hotline that could facilitate such negotiations. “We must move through the crisis and toward peace like an icebreaker.”

South Koreans have grown increasingly nervous over the past year about Kim’s nuclear brinkmanship. But they have also begun questioning the implications of their alliance with a Washington led by an often unpredictable Trump, who has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and this week talked of his power to wage nuclear war against Kim.

Moon insists that dialogue has become more urgent than ever because the South would bear the brunt of any war on the peninsula. South Korean officials privately say that the next several months may be the only opportunity to use negotiations to halt the North’s nuclear weapons program before it acquires a functional intercontinental ballistic missile.