SEOUL – South Korean President Moon Jae-in has a message for the United States: President Biden must now enter into talks with North Korea.
In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Moon urged the US leader to begin negotiations with the government of Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, after two years in which diplomatic progress stalled, even reversed. According to the South Korean president, deprivation is a ‘matter of survival’ for his country.
He also called on the United States to work with China on North Korea and other issues of global concern, including climate change. According to him, the deteriorating relations between the superpowers could undermine any negotiations on deprivation.
“If tensions escalate between the United States and China, North Korea could benefit and benefit from it,” Moon said.
It was partly a plea, a partial point of sale of mr. Moon, who sat down with The Times when the United States tried to rebuild its relations in the region with a view to combating China’s influence, and North Korea is building up its nuclear arsenal. Mr. Moon, who met with Mr. Biden will meet, appearing to be ready to re-enter the role of mediator between the two parties.
In the interview, Moon was proud of his deft diplomatic maneuver in 2018, when he led the two unpredictable leaders of North Korea and the United States to meet in person. He was also pragmatic and tacitly acknowledged that his work to bring about deprivation and peace on the Korean Peninsula has since been unraveled.
President Donald J. Trump left office without removing a single North Korean nuclear warhead. Mr. Kim started gun tests again.
“He beat around the bush and did not succeed,” he said. Moon said about Trump’s efforts toward North Korea. “The most important starting point for both governments is to have the will for dialogue and to put it face to face early.”
In his last year in office, Mr. Moon is determined to start from scratch – and knows he is facing a very different leader in Mr. Biden.
Mr. Moon bet on Trump’s style and emphasized the personality-driven “top-down diplomacy” through one-on-one meetings with Mr. Kim. Mr. Biden, he said, is returning to the traditional bottom-up approach, in which negotiators negotiate details before seeking their bosses’ approval.
“I hope Biden will act as a historic president who has made significant and irreversible progress toward the complete denial of peace and security on the Korean Peninsula,” he said. Moon in the interview of Sangchunjae, a traditional hanok based on the executive residence, Blue House.
Mr. Moon’s visit to Washington comes at an important moment. The Biden administration is engaged in its month-long policy review of North Korea, one of the most pressing geopolitical issues for the United States.
Mr. Biden reversed many of his predecessors’ foreign policy decisions. But Mr. Moon warned that it would be a mistake to cancel the 2018 agreement in Singapore between Mr. Killing Trump and Kim setting out broad goals for unraveling the Korean Peninsula.
“I believe that if we build on what President Trump left behind, we will realize this effort under Biden’s leadership,” he said.
Mr. Moon called on the United States and North Korea to move in “gradual and phased” steps toward deprivation, while exchanging concessions and incentives “simultaneously” along the way. It was a worn-out screenplay for Mr. Moon, who sometimes paused during the interview to refer to his notes and suppressed his speech with small but determined hand gestures.
Some American negotiators and conservative critics of Mr. Rejects such a strategy and says North Korea will stop and undermine international sanctions, which is Washington’s best leverage against the impoverished country. In his annual threat assessment released last week, the U.S. director of national intelligence said that Mr. Kim “believes that in time he will gain international acceptance and respect as a core force.”
But the team of mr. Moon argues that the phased approach is the most realistic, even if it is imperfect. As his government sees it, North Korea will never give up its arsenal in one quick deal, otherwise the regime will lose its only negotiating stone with Washington.
The key, Mr. Moon said is that the United States and North Korea are working out a ‘reciprocal road map’.
U.S. negotiators under Mr. Trump had never made it to that point. Both sides could not even agree on a first step for the North and what reward Washington would offer in return.
Mr. Moon is not only saving his “peace process from the Korean Peninsula”, but is probably also his greatest diplomatic legacy.
As his policies in North Korea faltered, critics called him a naive pacifist who focused too much on Mr. Kim’s untested commitment to denial has taken root.
“His good intentions have had bad consequences,” said Kim Sung-han, a professor at Korea University. “His mediation has not worked, nor are we making progress with unraveling. His time is running out. ”
Since the negotiations ceased, the problems of Mr. Moon increased at home. His approval ratings have dropped to low records amid fixed and other scandals. This month, angry voters cast crushing defeats on his Democratic Party during the mayoral election in the two largest cities in South Korea.
It is a sharp turn of the fortune from the beginning of its administration, when Mr. Moon transforms a crippling geopolitical crisis into a signing policy initiative.
“When I took office in 2017, we were very concerned about the possibility that another war would break out on the Korean Peninsula,” he said.
North Korea launched its Hwasong 12-range ballistic missile at close range four days after taking office, which he said could target Hawaii and Alaska. Then the North tested a hydrogen bomb and three intercontinental ballistic missiles. In response to this, Mr. Trump threatened “fire and rage” while the U.S. Navy’s carrier groups steamrolled to the peninsula.
Mr. Moon’s first diplomatic victory came when Kim accepted his invitation to send a delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Shortly afterwards, Mr. Moon gathers at the heavily armed inter-Korean border.
During the meeting, Moon said that the North Korean dictator intimidated that disarmament is a real possibility. “If security without nuclear weapons can be guaranteed, why would I struggle to hold on to it, even at the expense of sanctions?” Mr. Moon remembers what Kim said.
He said he met Mr. Trump made the pitch and requested that Mr. Meet Kim. During their TV summit in Singapore, Mr. Trump promised ‘security guarantees’ for North Korea, while Mr. Kim pledged to “work for a complete denial of the Korean Peninsula.”
“It is clearly an achievement for President Trump that he held the first ever summit between North Korea and the United States,” he said.
But Mr. Moon also regrets that Mr. Trump never carried through, after declaring that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.” When Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump met again in 2019 in Hanoi, Vietnam, the negotiations went nowhere, and the men left without an agreement on how to proceed with the Singapore agreement.
While Mr. Moon was careful to praise mr. Handing out Trump, he also seemed frustrated by the former president’s erratic behavior and Twitter diplomacy. Mr. Trump canceled or reduced the annual joint military exercises that the United States is doing with the South and demanded that Mr. Moon called an “excessive amount” to keep 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea.
Mr. Moon said he had decided to suspend negotiations on the so-called defense cost-sharing deal during Trump’s last months in office. South Korea was willing to pay more, given the growing economic scale, but Trump’s demands violated the foundations of the relationship between the two countries.
“His claim did not have a reasonable and rational calculation,” Mr. Moon said.
The fact, he said, that Washington and Seoul within 46 days after the inauguration of Mr. Biden was able to conclude an agreement was a ‘clear proof of the importance that President Biden attaches to’ the alliance.
Mr. Moon is hopeful about the progress the new US leader can make in North Korea, although any significant breakthrough may be unrealistic, given the deep mistrust between Washington and Pyongyang.
Mr. Biden said last month that he was “prepared for some form of diplomacy” with North Korea, but that “it should be conditioned on the end result of denial.”
North Korea has offered ideas for a phased approach starting with the demolition of its only known nuclear test site, followed by the dismantling of a test facility for rocket engines and the nuclear complex in Yongbyon north of Pyongyang.
Mr. Moon said he believed such steps, if consistent with US concessions, could lead to the removal of the Northern Cape’s more valued assets, such as ICBMs. In that scenario, the irreversible move to a complete denial system is said.
“This dialogue and diplomacy could lead to denial,” he said. “If both parties learn from the failure in Hanoi and put their heads together for more realistic ideas, I am confident they can find a solution.”