No knee-jerk reaction

White paper stops describing North Korea as enemy

The Ministry of National Defense deleted a phrase describing North Korea as an “enemy” of South Korea in its 2018 white paper published Tuesday. The deletion certainly reflects the rapidly changing geopolitical situation on the peninsula following inter-Korean detente and denuclearization talks between Pyongyang and Washington.

The removal of the phrase should not come as a surprise. Conservative opposition parties and their supporters might argue it is premature to stop defining the North Korean government and military as our enemy. It is understandable that conservatives harbor worries about military threats from the North, still technically at war with the South after the Korean War ended with armistice.

Nevertheless, it is irrational to have a knee-jerk reaction to the change in the defense white paper. In this sense, the conservative camp should not yield to the temptation to revive the debate over whether North Korea is our enemy or not. Such a debate, if revived, will do more harm than good. It could be seen as an anachronistic attempt to go back to the old days of the Cold War, only reviving red-baiting and a self-destructive ideological conflict between conservatives and progressives.

One may raise concerns that our defense posture could be weakened by not referring directly to the North as the enemy of the South. However, the white paper used the term “enemy” to describe broader national security threats. The defense ministry said, “The expression, enemy, is described as a concept that encompasses not only North Korean threats but also transnational and nonmilitary threats, as well as increasing potential threats.”

In a word, the concept of “enemy” is not fixed. It can change in tune with the changing security and geopolitical environment. For example, the Kim Young-sam administration defined North Korea as South Korea’s main enemy in 1995 after Pyongyang threatened to turn Seoul into a sea of fire the previous year. But in 2004 the liberal government under President Roh Moo-hyun omitted the definition, only mentioning that the North posed a direct military threat to the South.

Then, the conservative Lee Myung-bak administration brought back the “enemy” expression regarding the North in 2010. This reflected ever-mounting military tension with Pyongyang which was accused of a torpedo attack on the South’s warship Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors, and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island.

Now the situation has changed greatly since the inter-Korean summits and the first U.S.-North Korea summit last year. Seoul, Pyongyang and Washington are making efforts to ease tensions, make peace and move toward co-prosperity, although denuclearization talks between the U.S. and the North have hit a snag.

North Korea could be an enemy of South Korea, especially given that they fought each other in the Korean War. The two Koreas have often been pitted against each other since then. But it is also necessary to see the North as our counterpart, with which the South needs to promote reconciliation, cooperation and exchange for coexistence, co-prosperity and eventually unification.