After President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un spent the last several months trading threats and insults, including Trump’s boast that his “nuclear button” was bigger than Kim’s, recent talks between the North and South have begun to reduce rising tensions. Officials from both nations who met for negotiations at the border village of Panmunjom on Jan. 9, produced an agreement to send North Korean athletes to the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea next month and plans to schedule future meetings to improve relations.
The talks, the first between the North and South since December 2015, also announced the reopening of a military hotline that can be used to reduce the chances of a conflict breaking out due to an accident or miscalculation. At the conclusion of negotiations, Northern officials rejected Seoul’s proposal to begin talks to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, stating, “All our weapons including atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs and ballistic missiles are only aimed at the United States, not our brethren, nor China and Russia.”
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Catherine Killough, Roger L. Hale fellow with the Ploughshares Fund. Here, she talks about opportunities for North and South Korea to improve their relationship and prospects for reaching a future agreement with the U.S. over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program.
CATHERINE KILLOUGH: South Korean Presiden Moon Jae-In has been explicit from the beginning about how he wants these Winter Games to be a peace Olympics. And so South Korea has invited North Korea to participate. And it wasn’t until New Year’s when the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un kind of surprised everyone with a speech that essentially offered an olive branch to South Korea. He signaled his willingness to have North Korea participate, but most importantly, to reopen a dialogue with South Korea.
So that’s where we are right now. And the talks are, they’re centered around the North’s participation in the games. But they will likely broach broader topics of how to improve inter-Korean relations. So, this is a breakthrough moment. And I can’t emphasize enough how important it’s been to have this tension-reducing step at a time when it was getting so escalatory that we really did feel like we were on the brink of a nuclear war.
BETWEEN THE LINES: South Korean President Moon Jae-in is known for his embrace of the sunshine policy of looking for better relations with the North, and of course, he entered office at a time when there was a growing escalation of rhetoric between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in North Korea. What do we know about Moon Jae-in’s agenda here in terms of improving relations and reducing tensions?
CATHERINE KILLOUGH: President Moon Jae-in is in a really tough spot. Before he was elected, he campaigned hard for greater engagement with North Korea. Now that he’s in the position he’s in, he’s got to deal with not only our president, who has been reckless and unpredictable – he’s dealing with a conservative administration that has not fully embraced diplomacy and engagement in the way Moon would like, but he’s also got a rising militarism in Japan. And he’s trying to maintain relations with China, who is their biggest trading partner. So he’s in a really tough spot.
And I think in the face of all this, he’s done a really great job of balancing all the various elements. Just on Friday, he released a statement that he’s not going to stand weak-kneed in front of North Korea just to gain a dialogue like we did in the past. He’s basically trying to reassure what a lot of U.S. hardliners have been criticizing as a trap – that the North Koreans are essentially trying to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea. So I would emphasize here that the onus of not messing up – it shouldn’t be on President Moon. I think it really needs to be on the U.S. because we have historically – when there’s a conservative administration, constrained the South Korean progressive efforts to engage with the north.
BETWEEN THE LINES: There have been mixed signals within the Trump administration. We’ve had Secretary of State Rex Tillerson talking about no pre-conditions to sit down and talk with North Korea several weeks ago. The White House quickly pulled back from that. Rex Tillerson revised his remarks to basically say, there were still preconditions before talks could begin, and that really boils down to demanding that North Korea pledge to get rid of its nuclear weapons program. Is that something of a dealbreaker for future talks between the U.S. and North Korea?
CATHERINE KILLOUGH: For North Korea, I mean, direct bilateral talks with the U.S. – that’s always been the objective. It’s no longer the case that they’ll engage if nuclear weapons are up for discussion. And to take that even further, North Korea’s been emphatically clear that they have no intention of getting rid of their nuclear weapons so long as the United States maintains, as they put it, a “hostile policy.”
So if we ask ourselves, what would it take to convince North Korea that the U.S. isn’t hostile, the answer is, “It’s not optimistic for us.” It would require some kind of security assurance that the U.S. is not going to topple their regime. And the big North Korean ask is a normalization of relations – and that can only come in the form of a peace treaty to resolve the [unintelligible].
If you really draw this out, it’s not likely any time soon, at least not in this administration that we would agree to such demands because it would entail pulling out U.S. troops from the region and for various regions, the U.S. wants to maintain its footprint in South Korea. I think if there is a silver lining here, it’s that these issues – the future of the Korean peninsula, what it would really take to denuclearize and resolve this 70-year-old crisis is re-entering the public discourse in a way that I don’t think it has before and these are debates that are worth having, especially as the stakes for war are growing dangerously high.
For more information on the Ploughshares Fund, visit Ploughshares.org.
