Will Moon Jae In achieve a breakthrough—or will his peace offensive blow up in his face?
To be in South Korea in mid-May—when North Korea released American hostages and Donald Trump announced his summit in Singapore with Kim Jong Un and the leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea gathered in Tokyo to talk denuclearization and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula—was to feel as if the spring of 2018 might be one of those moments when history, after plodding along for decades, suddenly moved very fast.
And pushing it along was South Korean President Moon Jae In, who had lobbied hard for talks between Trump and Kim and whose diplomatic investment seemed to be paying off as the summit approached. Even last week, when history seemed to come to a screeching halt as Trump canceled the summit, Moon kept pushing, holding his own surprise summit with the North Korean leader on Saturday. Moon had been blindsided by Trump’s decision, but he was moving to reassert control over what he still hopes could be a historic breakthrough for peace on the Korean peninsula. Human history, one of Moon’s advisers told me recently in Seoul, “is… governed by certain law of heavenly mandate. There is a time for peace—that is a dictate of nature. And Moon Jae In is following that heavenly mandate.”’
A Top Adviser to the South Korean President Questions the U. S. Alliance
Whatever his mandate, Moon is scrambling to save the summit, which Trump now says might still happen, despite the “trail of broken promises” an administration official accused North Korea of leaving behind. On Sunday, in fact, American officials arrived in North Korea to proceed with summit preparations. Shortly before Trump pulled out of the summit over the North’s “open hostility” and his administration’s doubts about the North’s commitment to denuclearization, South Korea’s national-security adviser had placed the odds of the Trump-Kim meeting occurring as scheduled at 99.9 percent. Sometimes history turns on 0.1 percent probabilities.
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The story of how South Korea nearly managed to bring Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un together for an unprecedented meeting, and to help pull the American and North Korean leaders back from the precipice of war, is often told as if it begins with the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea. But the tale actually starts much earlier — and it’s still unfinished.
Moon, a child of North Korean refugees and former chief of staff to President Roh Moo Hyun, a practitioner of the liberal “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea, assumed office a year ago this month anxious to pursue rapprochement with North Korea. He was determined not to repeat the mistakes of Roh, who had been openly confrontational with the United States and held a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il at the end of his five-year term, when there was little time to implement the results.
But Moon—who became president shortly after a spell of heightened tension in April, when Trump dispatched an aircraft carrier to the Korean peninsula as the U. S. and North Korea traded threats of devastating war—was initially inhibited. The Trump administration was focused on applying economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure on North Korea in response to its missile and nuclear tests. Moon, whose liberal government wasn’t a natural partner of the conservative Trump administration, enlisted in the “maximum pressure” campaign.
“ Some of his staff argued last year that because of Trump’s pressure and sanctions, inter-Korean detente is now stalemated. We have to just ignore Trump!” Kim Hyun Wook, a professor at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy, which is affiliated with South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told me. “But President Moon didn’t listen to them. [He said,] ‘No that’s not true. We have to anchor the U. S.-South Korea alliance and then [undertake] inter-Korean detente all together.’”
“Sanctions and pressures are the logical response” to North Korean military provocations that violate UN Security Council resolutions, explained Chung In Moon, a special adviser to President Moon Jae In for foreign affairs and national security, when I met with him in Seoul. But they are a means to compel North Korea to negotiate, not an end in themselves. With regard to North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, “by the very structural nature of the issue, it is between” the United States and North Korea, Moon told me, in apparent reference to the fact that the North has been developing its nuclear arsenal—particularly nuclear-capable long-range missiles—with the stated purpose of deterring a U. S. attack. (Many South Koreans doubt that North Korea would actually use its nuclear weapons and see those weapons as primarily threatening the United States.) But the South Korean president has made clear that “as to peace, stability, and prosperity on the Korean peninsula, it is we who should sit in the driver’s seat.”
The South Korean president is essentially a “functionalist,” Moon continued, intent on initiating a lengthy process in which economic exchanges and other forms of cooperation between the Koreas function as a gateway to peaceful coexistence, then to de facto unification between sovereign nations, and perhaps then to more formal unification if it occurs naturally.
President Moon outlined all this—and a roadmap for how talks on denuclearization and inter-Korean peace could progress in tandem that closely resembles the flurry of diplomatic activity in recent months—in a July speech in Berlin, where he expressed hope that East and West Germany’s unification could be replicated in Korea, the “last divided nation on this planet.” But the address fell on deaf ears in Washington, which just days earlier had watched North Korea become a direct threat to the mainland United States for the first time with the successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile. “We have reached the tipping point of the vicious circle of military escalation,” Moon warned in Germany.
