Moon shines as he drives diplomacy with Pyongyang
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA » To his supporters, South Korean President Moon Jae-in is a master negotiator who’s fixing decades of bad nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. To his critics, he’s falling prey to the same old trap that has claimed previous South Korean presidents — but with an important difference: This time the stakes are much higher.
Whoever’s right, it’s hard to ignore Moon’s role as the architect behind a new global push to settle the nuclear standoff with the North. The outcome of his efforts may hinge on a meeting in Singapore next month between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump, who spent months contemplating military strikes against the North before Moon steered him to the table.
Moon, a soft-spoken liberal, last month hosted Kim in a summit that saw them stride hand-in-hand across the border and pledge the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula, an ambitious declaration that was light on specifics.
Moon doesn’t have the power to resolve North Korea’s weapons programs on his own. But in hustling between Pyongyang and Washington to set up the Kim-Trump summit and offering to broker other meetings with Pyongyang, Moon driver’s seat in diplomacy with the North.
“South Korea has never had a leader like Moon, who actively embraced a leading role in planning and coordinating a global approach to the North,” said Hong Min, a senior analyst at Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification. “He managed to convince Washington that Pyongyang would change course after a year of brinkmanship. He convinced Pyongyang he would be able to move Washington.”
Despite the dangers — a derailed Trump-Kim summit might revive the animosity that enveloped the peninsula last year — Moon’s push has proven wildly popular: A Gallup Korea poll last week measured his approval rating at 83 percent, a striking number in a country deeply divided along ideological and generational lines.
PULLING THE STRINGS
Moon’s central presence could be seen Wednesday in a three-way meeting in to issue a joint statement in support of the inter-Korean declaration, which he’s looking to sell as a meaningful breakthrough that could create a positive atmosphere for the KimTrump meeting.
The recent flurry of diplomatic activity was almost unimaginable for most of last year when the North ripped off a torrid run of weapons tests, including an underground detonation of a purported thermonuclear warhead and three separate tests of intercontinental balnental United States. Kim and Trump exchanged insults and threats of nuclear annihilation, drowning out Moon’s repeated calls for diplomacy.
The dynamics shifted after Kim used his New Year’s speech to propose talks with the South to reduce animosity. The North then sent hundreds of people to the Pyeongchang Winter Games in the South, including Kim’s sister, who conveyed her brother’s desire for a summit with Moon. Moon later brokered the meeting between Kim and Trump.
FINDING HIS SPACE
Moon, the son of North Korean war refugees, has vowed to build on the legacies of late liberal Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun and their so-called “Sunshine Policy,” which Moon had a hand in building. Seoul’s economic and two summits with the North in 2000 and 2007 that involved Kim Jong Un’s late father, Kim Jong Il. Critics say it gave the North a lifeline as it pursued its nuclear dreams.
Moon says the decade of hard-line conservative policies he ended when elected last year did nothing to stop Pyongyang’s weapons advancements. He has balanced his criticism of the North’s nuclear program with hints of ambitious economic promises in exchange for a “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.”
While Moon is in a significantly tougher spot than his liberal predecessors, who governed when the North’s nuclear threat was nascent, he also has more time — four more years in his term — and political space to assert his voice.
Kim Dae-jung’s engage with the hard-line administration of former President George W. Bush. Disagreements between Washington and Seoul continued during Roh’s government, and the Koreas were never able to build on Roh’s last-minute summit with Kim Jong Il in 2007.
For all their differences in personality, Moon has been able to maintain a coordinated approach with Trump on North Korea. Moon has so far stayed firm on sanctions, and he offered vocal support to Trump’s pressure campaign last year during the North’s weapons tests. While reaching out to the North in past months, Moon has credited Trump at every step, even suggesting that he take the Nobel Peace Prize if there’s peace in Korea.
“It’s not a bad way to approach the North — Moon playing the good cop to