South Korea has offered to help upgrade the North’s rail network and link it to its own. Now the Security Council has signed off on a joint study of the idea.
SEOUL, South Korea — The United Nations Security Council has approved a plan by North and South Korea to conduct a joint field study on connecting their railways, exempting the project from the extensive sanctions it has imposed on the North over its nuclear weapons program, officials said on Saturday.
During his three summit meetings this year with the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea has offered to help renovate North Korea’s decrepit railway system and link it with the South’s, dangling the project as one of the biggest economic benefits the North could expect should it denuclearize.
To whet the North’s appetite, South Korea offered to send a train and engineers across the border to conduct a joint field study on the conditions of the North Korean rail system. North Korea quickly accepted.
But plans to conduct the study were thwarted in August, and again last month, because of American concerns that it might violate United Nations sanctions, which include severe limits on shipments of fuel and other goods to the North. South Korea would have to bring fuel and equipment into the North to conduct the study.
More broadly, the Trump administration did not want its South Korean ally to push ahead with inter-Korean projects too quickly without concrete progress on denuclearizing North Korea. Last month, President Trump forced South Korea to walk back a proposal to lift some of its unilateral sanctions against North Korea, asserting that Seoul could “do nothing” without American approval.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the allies needed to make sure that “we don’t talk past each other, that we don’t take an action or the South Koreans don’t take an action that the other is unaware of or hasn’t had a chance to comment on or provide their thoughts.
