Moon seen as ‘odd man out’ in tripartite meeting

SEOUL: When South Korean President Moon Jae-in of South Korea sits down with US counterpart Donald Trump and the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in New York today, he will be meeting two of his strongest allies in pressuring North Korea over its nuclear and missile programs.

But Mr Moon will also find himself a bit of the odd man out.

As the three leaders prepared for their trilateral summit meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting this week, the White House has struck an increasingly bellicose tone toward North Korea. Mr Trump, addressing the meeting on Tuesday, said the United States would “totally destroy North Korea” if necessary.

On Wednesday, Mr Abe defended the Trump administration’s approach, telling the General Assembly that for North Korea, “dialogue was the best means of deceiving us and buying time”.

Like Mr Trump and Mr Abe, Mr Moon strongly advocates imposing sanctions and pressure on North Korea. But unlike them, he has repeatedly and categorically ruled out military action.

“President Moon appears isolated from the other two,” said Lee Won-deog, an expert on Korean-Japan relations at Kookmin University in Seoul. “There is a suspicion that Prime Minister Abe is using his close personal chemistry with President Trump to help shape the American leader’s views on South Korea.”

During his presidential campaign, Mr Moon promised to seek dialogue with North Korea, insisting that sanctions alone would not persuade it to give up its nuclear missile programme. But as North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests have accelerated since his election in May, Mr Moon has aligned himself closely with the tough line espoused by Mr Trump and Mr Abe, while continuing to oppose their openness to a military option.

When the three leaders met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit conference in Germany in July, they agreed to cooperate in enhancing their defence capabilities against the North Korean threat.

Such an agreement between South Korea and Japan was highly unusual. South Koreans have been wary of giving Japan, its former colonial master, any reason to rearm its postwar pacifist military. The leadership in the South also does not want the country dragged into a struggle for regional hegemony between US-backed Japan and China, which is angry at Mr Moon’s deployment of a US-made antimissile system on South Korean soil.

“Although there is not much common ground between Mr Moon and Mr Abe, the gravity of the North Korean nuclear crisis has brought them together in an uncomfortable partnership,” said Yun Duk-min, a former chancellor of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy who now teaches at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.

Some South Koreans suspect Mr Abe of using the growing threat from the North to push his nationalist agenda at home. They also wonder whether Mr Abe has been encouraging the Trump administration’s increasingly combative stance toward North Korea, making the situation even more volatile.