The leaders of South Korea and US made the unprecedented move of releasing a separate joint statement on the North Korean nuclear issue after their summit on Oct. 16.
The decision is evidence of how major a focus the issue was for President Park Geun-hye and her US counterpart Barack Obama. But the actual response plan announced by Park during her US visit is highly rigid.
At the core of Park’s proposed solution to the nuclear issue is a combination of pressure and reunification of South and North Korea -- but only in abstract terms, without any evident policies or pathways to actually resolving the problem. A plan for negotiations through the six-party talks or other frameworks was nowhere in sight.
“There need to be consistent efforts to break this vicious cycle of rewarding North Korea for its provocations,” Park said at a speech and Q&A session on Oct. 15 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC.
“My belief is that we can expect support for North Korea to have an effect only after North Korea has been compelled unambiguously to give up its nuclear program through international coordination [by the other five states in the six-party talks],” she continued.
The framework Park proposed was one in which support would only come after Pyongyang first gave up its nuclear program. It’s an approach that is certain to prevent meaningful progress from being made in inter-Korean relations, the state of which would be tied directly to the nuclear issue.
Park went on to say that a unified Korea would “be a midwife for peace.”
“[The North’s] nuclear weapons and long-range missiles would no longer be directed at the international community,” she predicted.
Park also described a strategy for reunification through expansion of the South Korea-US alliance.
“The South Korea-US alliance has resulted in many miraculous success stories for the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. It’s time now to expand that history of miracles to all of the peninsula,” she continued.
The strategy described by Park marks a step farther from remarks made on Sept. 4, when she said that “peaceful unification” was the “ultimate and fastest way of solving the [North Korean] nuclear problem.” It’s also expected to have an impact on inter-Korean relations, since the process it describes will almost certainly be seen by Pyongyang as an attempt at “unification by absorption.”
“The concern is that there are going to be serious repercussions, not just for future inter-governmental talks [between South and North] but also for the divided family reunion event next week,” said Chang Yong-seok, a senior researcher at the Seoul National University Institute for Peace and Unification Studies.
North Korea previously reacted sensitively to Park’s calls in a Sept. 28 keynote speech at the UN General Assembly for Pyongyang to “work to help residents escape their difficulties through reforms and openness, rather than engaging in more provocations.”
“The person holding power in South Korea has made foolish remarks of fraternal antagonism on the UN stage. The divided family reunion event is on very thin ice,” a spokesperson for North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said on Sept. 29.
Taken together, Park’s vision for an Korea-US alliance spanning the entire peninsula and South Korea being a “key partner” in Washington’s “rebalancing Asia” strategy have a significance that goes beyond inter-Korean relations. It’s an approach that is not only poised to conflict with the Park administration’s own foreign policy goal of developing the US alliance and relations with China side by side, but certain to prove unacceptable to Beijing. By way of analogy, it would mean a US Forces Korea presence extending as far north as the Chinese border on the Yalu (Amnok) and Tumen (Duman) Rivers -- an intolerable situation for China.
“There is significance in reaffirming the importance of South Korea-US relations, but the direction we need to be going is a positive feedback loop with our relations with both the US and China,” said Inje University professor Kim Yeon-chul.
“When we put our emphasis on conflicting goals [to combat concerns that the South Korea has become too close to China], we end up with nothing,” Kim advised.
Park has expressed strongly negative perceptions of North Korea in the past. “North Korea isn’t refraining from provocations right now -- it’s being deterred,” she said on one occasion. “Vietnam, Myanmar, and now Cuba have changed course toward reforms and openness, and a nuclear deal has been reached with Iran, but North Korea insists on a road of isolation, intensifying its nuclear provocations and nuclear capabilities,” she said on another. Even when speaking of inter-Korean exchange and cooperation, she has mentioned only “efforts to restore sameness between South and North Korean residents” through efforts in “non-political areas” such as culture, sports, and the environment.
She has yet to mention the need for intergovernmental talks on political or military subjects, or for economic cooperation. The concern for many is that this approach will not only prevent meaningful progress from being made in inter-Korean relations, but also have a negative impact on recent budding civilian exchange efforts.
Park’s comments on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities are also expected to cause controversy, with her reference to the North possessing “several nuclear weapons” appearing to take for granted the genuineness of Pyongyang’s claims to have miniaturized and diversified its weapons since its third nuclear test in Feb. 2013.
By Lee Je-hun, staff reporter of the Hankyoreh
