Like many South Korean leaders before him, President Moon Jae-in’s term in office has become dominated by his country’s northern neighbor.
« No South Korean president in recent years has had to focus quite so much on the country’s noisy neighbor, » said Oliver Hotham, managing editor at the Seoul-based Korea Risk Group.
« Moon has also faced the most unpredictable and erratic US leader in decades, and has had to, in many ways, pick up a lot of diplomatic slack on the issue. »
On April 27, Moon will meet with Kim Jong Un, the first time leaders of the two Koreas have met since 2007. The inter-Korean summit follows a surprise visit by Kim to Beijing, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
New Sunshine Policy?
In an interview with CNN last year, Moon said he wanted to be remembered as the leader « who built a peaceful relationship between the North and South. »
His first gambit was supremely successful, getting North Korea to participate in the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, even marching under a unified flag and competing as a single nation in the women’s ice hockey.
But now comes the real test.
During his presidential campaign, Moon’s approach was compared to the « Sunshine Policy » pursued by Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, but in practice it has proven different.
Under the « Sunshine Policy » — for which Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 — Seoul actively engaged Pyongyang economically and diplomatically, and provided considerable humanitarian aid.
However, the approach did not secure any concrete gains, and it struggled to gel with a more aggressive US administration under President George W Bush, who labeled North Korea part of the « axis of evil » in 2002. The following year, Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and began pursuing atomic weapons in earnest.
