Moon Jae-in is trying for peace on the peninsula. Liberals should have his back.
The Democratic Party has no coherent North Korea policy. The party’s approach has been a mixture of tough talk and reactive criticism of Trump, not the coherent vision that’s badly needed on a critical issue. And while there’s been robust criticism of Democratic foreign policy from the left, North Korea has barely been mentioned. For example, in a major speech on foreign policy given at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies on Oct. 9, left-leaning Sen. Bernie Sanders made only one casual reference to North Korea before moving on to discussing the Middle East.
The inability to formulate a clear policy on North Korea is a severe weakness. North Korea has a strong claim to being the No. 1 U. S. foreign-policy issue. The stakes cannot be any higher with North Korea: a nuclear war that could destroy millions of lives, including thousands of American lives either in the mainland United States reachable by North Korean ballistic missiles or the lives of the U. S. soldiers stationed in South Korea and Japan. The North Korea issue puts America’s most critical allies in Asia—South Korea and Japan—at risk of a nuclear attack, and it ties directly to the U. S. relationship with an increasingly assertive China.
Further, a fundamental change in the inter-Korean relationship may be afoot. Donald Trump became the first U. S. president to hold a summit with a North Korean leader when he met Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June. Until last year, it was seen as a major breakthrough when the leaders of the two Koreas met, having only done so twice in the 70 years of the Korean Peninsula’s division. But since taking office in May 2017, South Korean President Moon Jae-in has personally met with Kim three times already. With Moon’s latest visit to Pyongyang, followed by U. S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent meeting with Kim, the two Koreas and the United States are discussing the possibility of declaring a formal end to the Korean War.
A geopolitically critical country potentially undergoing a transformative change, with a nuclear war at stake, should grab the attention of anyone who is interested in foreign policy. Yet the Democratic Party and the wider left only offer a mishmash of shortsighted partisanship, residual hawkish attitudes, and overcorrecting suggestions of retrenchment.
In his speech this week, Sanders referenced Kim Jong Un as merely one of many examples (along with Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Viktor Orban of Hungary, and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines) of Trump palling around with dictators—paying no attention to the fact that Erdogan, Orban, and Duterte are not threatening a nuclear war against the United States and its allies. A chorus of former Obama administration officials are openly skeptical about a declaration to end the Korean War, to the point that one casually suggested that the United States should “make war, not peace.” On the other hand, a number of progressive writers who are wary of U. S. militarism advocate that U. S. troops should leave South Korea and let China handle North Korea. Bruce Cumings, the leading progressive scholar of Korean history, went so far to agree with Trump’s claim that the joint war games conducted by South Korea and the United States were “provocative” and ought to be canceled.
This confused approach is bad diplomacy and bad politics. Bad diplomacy, because it diminishes the stature of U. S. liberals in the eyes of a critical ally. South Koreans are close observers of the domestic politics of their most significant ally, and they are certainly not fans of Donald Trump: In a poll conducted in the spring of 2017, only 17 percent of South Koreans said they trusted Trump on world affairs.
