President Moon’s innovative approach towards North Korea increased contact between the US and North Korea under the Trump administration. Sustaining momentum will depend on the willingness of the Biden administration and the convergence between US efforts and China’s preference for a dual-track approach.
When it comes to the most pressing issue on South Korea’s foreign and domestic policy agenda – namely, the perennial challenge of defusing tension with North Korea – Moon has little choice but to look to both the US and China for continuing support and cooperation.
Throughout his presidency, Moon has been an assiduous and indefatigable advocate of personal diplomacy, reflected in his promotion of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, the Panmunjom and Pyongyang summits, as well as Trump’s own bilateral summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. In particular, Moon used a combination of flattery and red-carpet diplomacy (most notably in the autumn of 2017 when facilitating the first state visit by a US president to South Korea in more than three decades) in order to keep Trump involved in Korean peninsula security issues. Moreover, Moon’s full-throttled promotion of engagement with the North, undiminished by the failure of the US–DPRK summit in Hanoi in 2019, is a measure of how his administration continues to try to play the role of catalyst for the resumption of talks with the North, albeit with mixed success. This policy has persisted even when North Korea has, in characteristic fashion, responded with condemnatory and pejorative language intended to discredit diplomatic overtures from the South, or by provocatively blowing up the North–South liaison office in Kaesong in June 2020. Notwithstanding these setbacks, personnel changes in Seoul in July 2020 – including the appointment of a new unification minister, national security adviser and national intelligence director, all with strong links to the North – reflect Moon’s determination and persistence. So does the effort to use the COVID-19 pandemic to explore options for new humanitarian and NGO-based overtures towards Pyongyang.
In the short term, the 2020 US presidential elections kept bilateral talks between the US and North Korea in stasis; neither the Americans nor the North Koreans were motivated to re-engage substantively.
Moon’s ability to make progress with his own version of Nordpolitik has been undercut by the political calendar. In the short term, the 2020 US presidential elections kept bilateral talks between the US and North Korea in stasis; neither the Americans nor the North Koreans were motivated to re-engage substantively, particularly at a time when Washington was inclined to tighten rather than relax sanctions against the DPRK. In the long term, Moon will have to confront his inevitable lame-duck status given the constitutional one-term limit (a new president takes office in 2022), and the dwindling opportunity to make a breakthrough.
US support will be indispensable in brokering any deal with the North. Particularly given North Korea’s ingrained tendency to marginalize the South Koreans in favour of talking directly to the Americans, and more importantly because of the US status as the North’s primary military adversary, as well as deep-seated concerns in the US about the increasing nuclear threat from the North. Fears that a Biden White House will revert to the policy of detached involvement in peninsula affairs, reminiscent of the Obama administration’s policy of ‘strategic patience’, are probably overplayed. Already, via a visit to Washington in November 2020 by then South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, the Moon presidency has sought to reach out to the Biden team to lay the foundation for bilateral security cooperation on North Korean matters.
Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is experienced in Northeast Asian affairs, having previously worked on trilateral concerns involving the US, South Korea and Japan. It would be surprising if the new Democratic administration’s commitment not to lose sight of the need to make progress on a real disarmament deal with North Korea weakened or in any meaningful way compromised coordination with South Korea. Indeed, judging from earlier comments by Jake Sullivan, the new national security advisor, allies will remain critically important to the US. Instead of being lectured to or coerced by the US to comply with Washington’s wishes, they will be encouraged to be more active partners with greater autonomy and more responsibility. As Sullivan noted in an influential 2019 article in The Atlantic:
Along with the US, China will remain vitally important in helping to incentivize North Korea to re-engage with negotiations, particularly given Beijing’s repeated statements that it will not accept a nuclear-armed North Korea. Strategically, China’s continuing interdependent relationship with North Korea (two ‘allies sealed in blood’), underscored by the 70th anniversary of the Korean War in 2020, is a further incentive for Seoul to continue to reach out to Beijing in helping broker an agreement with the North. Pyongyang, for its part, has reaffirmed its public support for its Chinese ally in the midst of worsening Sino-US relations, perhaps encouraged by Beijing’s apparent willingness to tolerate continuing sanctions violations by the North, including DPRK cryptocurrency deals facilitated by Chinese money launderers, and illegal North Korean coal exports to Chinese buyers. Legitimate Chinese food and fuel exports to the North also help to sustain the country at a time when floods and COVID-19 have seriously limited Kim Jong-un’s ability to deliver the economic prosperity that he has promised his people.
China’s vision of denuclearization embraces the entire peninsula, not just the North. Beijing’s preference for ‘double suspension’ of US–South Korean military exercises and North Korean missile tests, along with a ‘dual-track’ approach based on the simultaneous pursuit of a peace regime on the peninsula and denuclearization, suggests an important gap with the US in terms of the modalities for any future negotiations with Pyongyang. However, a change in administration in Washington may offer creative opportunities for narrowing this gap. With public and academic opinion in China predisposed to be critical of the North, China’s willingness to push for progress in talks should not be discounted, especially if Biden finds a way to reset relations with Beijing.
Dialogue between the Moon administration and China on North Korean issues is well established, particularly via the work of key foreign policy advisers such as Yonsei University professor, Chung-in Moon. There is acceptance in Seoul and Beijing on the importance of a graduated, step-by-step approach towards talks with the North.
Delivering real and lasting progress in nuclear talks and creating peace on the Korean peninsula will invariably be a tough challenge. Seoul will need to solicit and maintain support and cooperation from both the US and China – two critical powers that remain necessary although not sufficient for finding a permanent solution to the North Korean problem.
