SEOUL — When President Trump tweeted on March 9 that he was willing to meet with Kim Jong-un, many South Koreans were jubilant —…
SEOUL — When President Trump tweeted on March 9 that he was willing to meet with Kim Jong-un, many South Koreans were jubilant — including many who didn’t expect much from the summit.
Shin Daeyoung, a 26-year-old man who had recently returned to Seoul after earning his BS in biotechnology from SUNY Buffalo, was among the excited early skeptics.
“Trump might change his mind in one second, just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, adding that both Kim and Trump “are unpredictable guys. They just don’t care what others think.”
As one of the journalists on a recent press tour in South Korea’s capital, I spoke with a cross section of locals — both fans and critics of Trump’s approach — and then reconnected with some of them on the eve of the June 12 summit in Singapore. During the past three months, even many of the initial scoffers have come around to the opinion that we could be witnessing a real turning point in inter-Korean relations — albeit a gradual bend in the road rather than a sharp U-turn.
Differences of opinion tend to be generational. Some older South Koreans, who still remember how Kim’s father and grandfather used negotiations to play for time while building up the North’s weapons program, don’t trust the North Korean dictator to play fair. But their children and grandchildren tend to be more hopeful that Trump’s devil-may-care negotiating style could spark real change on the Korean peninsula.
Park Hyun-sook, an English-language tour guide in her mid-40s, was among those who initially thought Kim would never give up his nuclear weapons. Reached this week at her home in Seoul, Park said she and her similarly aged friends were now optimistic about the summit. “Perhaps shooting missiles off was part of Kim’s plan,” she said. She even praised Trump’s public letter initially canceling the summit “to make Kim embarrassed and nervous.”
Park said her mother-in-law, like many of South Koreans in their 80s, is worried the negotiations are moving too abruptly and Kim will cheat the United States. Meanwhile, Park’s 20-something niece fears that the North could become an economic drag on the South if the two countries reunify. Although South Korea’s economy is currently booming, job mobility is difficult and youth unemployment is above 10 percent. More than 70 percent of young South Koreans said they disapproved of reunification in a recent government-sponsored poll.
Choi Woosuk Kenneth, an editor at the conservative national newspaper Chosun Ilbo, would eventually like to see the two Koreas reunified. As the 54-year-old child of North Korean refugees who fled to the South a few years before the 1950 outbreak of the Korean War, he believes he has cousins in the North he has never met.
Choi, who has a son currently serving his compulsory military service, pointed out that millions of South Koreans are directly affected by the constant nuclear threat because they have a son or brother in uniform. He hopes Trump keeps focusing on the denuclearization of North Korea with complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement, commonly abbreviated as CVID.
“This is a vital precondition of economic assistance,” he said. “Otherwise, we’re afraid that any aid will be used for the nuclear program.”
Choi said the US role is more central today than it was during negotiations between the two Koreas a decade or more ago. The South was able to offer economic assistance to the North when the two Koreas met in 2000 and again in 2007. Now tough sanctions make that impossible. “If Kim agrees to CVID with Trump, South Korea is ready to move,” with economic aid to the North, he said. “If Kim does not agree to CVID, it will be the beginning of his end. Whether that means military action or even more sanctions, the regime will not survive.”
When I asked him this week if Trump would deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for successful negotiations, he agreed — conditionally.
“Just getting a summit in itself is not going to warrant a Nobel Peace Prize. I don’t think it’s that easy to get one,” he said. “But if true CVID follows, that means North Korea is not going back to its nuclear weapons program [and] then of course he deserves a peace prize.”
The world woke up to North Korea’s growing nuclear threat a year ago, when the Hermit Kingdom began rapidly accelerating its missile tests, culminating in the country’s largest underground explosion to date in September. Pyongyang claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb, and a series of aftershocks persisted for months.
Kim said he destroyed this site as a “goodwill” gesture in May, inviting foreign journalists but not technical experts to observe his claim. Chinese scientists estimate that the earthquakes may have already rendered the tunnels unusable.
But South Koreans have been living under this cloud of fear for generations. Seoul is only as far from the demilitarized zone as Times Square is from Jones Beach. This point was driven home for me when I met Jung Kyu Sung, a seasoned journalist in his mid-50s. As he flashed his most winning smile at me, he asked what I thought now that North Korea’s nuclear missiles could reach all of the continental United States. (A point that is debatable on technical grounds.)
He implied that the US is now in the thick of it with the South Koreans in a way we’ve never been before.
While many South Koreans seemed optimistic, some living in the country are worried about potential repercussions if the summit fails. John Bocskay, a longtime American expatriate who moved to South Korea 20 years ago to teach English, said this concern pervades his South Korean wife and co-workers. “They see both Trump and Kim as being primarily interested in burnishing their own reputations and prestige,” Bocskay, 47, said.
He said the Singapore summit felt like the old slogan for the New York Lottery: “Hey, you never know.”
“Though like the lottery,” he added, “I have yet to hear anyone I know express anything like real confidence in a positive outcome.”
J. Alex Tarquino is the incoming president of the Society of Professional Journalists
