President Moon Jae-in was overshadowed in his first year in office by a standoff between President Trump and Kim Jong Un.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean President Moon Jae In has always wanted to lead the diplomacy aimed at ending the North Korean nuclear crisis, even as he was overshadowed in his first year in office by a belligerent standoff between President Trump and Kim Jong Un.
Moon now has his wish granted as he prepares for a meeting in late April with Kim and basks in the international glow of having engineered another upcoming summit — previously thought wildly unlikely — between the American and North Korean leaders.
It doesn’t mean the decadeslong effort to thwart the North’s nuclear ambition is settled, but it’s clear that Moon is having a diplomatic moment.
He is popular at home, and abroad he has emerged as a reliable intermediary between North Korea and the United States, enemies that spent the last year threatening each other with total destruction.
Since taking office last May, the liberal Moon has maintained that South Korea needs to lead on the North Korea issue.
In part, it was a matter of national pride for many South Koreans, who liken their country’s geopolitical situation to ‘‘a shrimp stuck between whales’’ — the whales being the United States and China.
Moon initially found little room to maneuver diplomatically.
The Trump administration was wary about Moon pushing for greater ties with North Korea even as Pyongyang carried out its biggest-ever nuclear test explosion and test-fired intercontinental ballistic missiles.
So Moon was forced to go more hard-line than he probably wanted and to join Trump’s sanctions and pressure campaign against Pyongyang.
Moon ordered provocative precision-guided missile tests immediately after North Korean weapons tests, something that even his conservative predecessors didn’t do. He also allowed the United States to install a high-tech missile defense system despite strong oppositions by China.
All the while, though, he kept working to reach out to the North.
