How can the Moon administration respond to Kim Jong-un’s outreach without alienating the United States?
As has been widely reported, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s Address contained a notable overture toward improved inter-Korean relations with his offer to send a delegation to participate in the upcoming PyeongChang Winter Olympics in South Korea. In Seoul, the Moon administration has quickly and enthusiastically taken up the offer.
For months, Seoul had proposed North-South talks and hoped Pyongyang would participate in the games as a way to reduce tensions and possibly move forward with more substantial negotiations. On January 2, with encouragement from the Blue House, South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon proposed the two Koreas meet next Tuesday at the truce village at Panmunjom. If a meeting does ensue, it will be the first high-level inter-Korean talks since December 2015.
Although it has not yet responded specifically to Seoul’s offer for high-level talks at Panmunjom, Pyongyang did on Wednesday reopen the inter-Korean communication line and Seoul apparently made its first call today. Pyongyang had cut off the communication channel in February 2016 following then South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s closure of the jointly operated Kaesong Industrial Complex.
This week’s reciprocal overtures are the most recent iteration of a decades-old process of inter-Korean interaction. During the early 1970s amidst large power diplomatic maneuvering embodied in U. S.-Soviet détente, U. S.-Sino rapprochement, and Japanese-Sino normalization, both Koreas established their own independent inter-Korean diplomatic track. In 1972, North and South Korea issued the July 4 Joint Communiqué, which was the first document both sides had agreed upon since the division of the peninsula in 1945.
The communiqué established three principles for reunification, namely: independence from external forces or interference; peaceful reunification; and national unity above ideology or political system. It led to the setup of a hotline between Seoul and Pyongyang and a new level of inter-Korean dialogue, such as the North Korean-South Korea Red Cross talks, aimed at reuniting divided Korean families, and establishment of the South-North Coordinating Committee (SNCC), charged with easing tensions, preventing armed clashes, and solving the issue of unification.
However, dialogue quickly fell apart due, among other reasons, to clashing interpretations of the communiqué and disagreement over how reunification might be achieved. Moreover, from Seoul’s perspective, no abiding settlement could be reached without U.
