The inter-Korean summit begins with the tantalizing hope of peace in the background. But the South Korean leader has warned against “excessive eagerness to fix all problems at once.”
As the April 27 summit between South Korea and North Korea begins, Seoul has maintained its poise. Though U. S. officials like National Security Adviser John Bolton have expressed an impatience for North Korea’s total, unilateral denuclearization, South Korean President Moon Jae In recently cautioned his aides against “an excessive eagerness to try to fix all problems at once.”
The summit, which is taking place on the South Korean side of the joint security area in Panmunjom, the iconic village straddling the border between North and South Korea, will be the first meeting between the two countries’ leaders since 2007. In October of that year, then-South Korean president Roh Moo Hyun crossed the military line of demarcation on foot into North Korea, where he was greeted by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. This Friday, Kim Jong Un, his son, will cross the border to the South. Local media is reporting that he and South Korean president Moon Jae In will plant a commemorative tree by a path near the border, sprinkling it with water taken from North Korea’s Taedong and South Korea’s Han rivers. After lunch, the two leaders will go for a leisurely walk and exchange small talk along one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders, before resuming the negotiations.
It will be a dramatic moment, and one that seemed impossible barely a year ago, when news reports from the peninsula tended to reference “heightened tension.” At the time, Kim was accelerating the pace of his nuclear and missile testing while President Trump lobbed threats back in his direction. But the tone shifted suddenly with the Korean Olympics and Trump’s promise of a U. S.-North Korean summit meeting. In the interim, the tantalizing possibility of peace is one that Moon campaigned on, and the inter-Korean summit is an important test of that promise on a major stage.
For Moon, the immediate question is whether he can secure movement toward a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War—stopped, but not technically concluded, by armistice over six decades ago—and, consequently, set the conditions for Kim to conclude some kind of denuclearization deal when he meets with Trump in the coming months.
And yet, for such a seemingly historic moment, it’s one that seems destined not to yield many surprises. Unlike the 2007 summit, which focused on a range of issues concerning peacemaking and economic cooperation while separate nuclear-disarmament negotiations were ongoing, this inter-Korean meeting is expected to focus mainly on the issue of North Korean denuclearization, with peace discussions a possible means toward that end. As Moon said at a recent meeting with an advisory committee of veteran North Korea negotiators and policymakers: “It has become the case that improving the relationship between North and South Korea cannot just be achieved by agreement between the two countries, but requires the fulfillment of a denuclearization agreement between the United States and North Korea.”
In the meantime, the discussion about improving the relationship is likely to deal with measures to work toward peace, possibly including agreements to scale back military tensions on the border, or to hold inter-Korean summit meetings on a regular basis.
