SEOUL, South Korea | With the nuclear-use threshold lowered, a regional arms race underway, diplomacy dead and communications channels silent, the flashpoint Korean peninsula faces a slew of challenges.
The Ukraine war is also offering North Korea fresh opportunities to exit its diplomatic and economic isolation, putting even more pressure on South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol as he prepares for this week’s state visit to Washington that was supposed to celebrate the coming 70th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korean alliance.
Now a leading liberal voice in Seoul on nuclear issues is urging the conservative Mr. Yoon and President Biden to look to the example set by former President Donald Trump and reopen “imaginative and realistic” communication with Kim Jong Un, the North’s mercurial leader.
“Now is one of the worst times ever,” warned Moon Chung-in, vice chairman of the Asia-Pacific Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation. “U.S.-North Korea relations have hit rock bottom, China has become a kind of bystander — it is moving away from peninsula issues — and inter-Korean relations are very bad.”
Mr. Moon has a deep familiarity with the crisis, having advised all three South Korean presidents who have summited with North Korean leaders, and has joined every presidential delegation Seoul has dispatched to Pyongyang over the years.
“North Korea is an existential threat, so we have to prepare for any kind of military provocation, but at the same time, we should come up with dialogue and negotiations,” he insisted in an interview. “But we have only the first component; the second is all gone.”
Though Mr. Moon is a leading voice in liberal circles, he praises the unorthodox, personal approach taken by Mr. Trump. “Trump knew there is only one person who makes decisions in North Korea, and that is Kim Jong Un,” he said.
A Kim-Trump 2018 summit in Singapore summit laid the groundwork for a second summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2019. There, Mr. Kim offered up his central nuclear facility, Yongbyon, in return for partial sanctions relief.
That cautious start point could have led to an ongoing process of trust building, but Mr. Trump, pressed by more hawkish aides such as National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, sought a more aggressive “all-or-nothing” denuclearization deal and abruptly left the Hanoi meeting.
“He went back with nothing,” Mr. Moon said. “Trump later confessed to [South Korean President Moon Jae-in] that Pompeo and Bolton pushed him very hard.”
Neither Mr. Biden nor Mr. Yoon has resurrected Mr. Trump’s outreach, and both international tensions and factors on the ground are making matters ever more combustible, Mr. Moon said.
As tensions swirl around Ukraine and Taiwan, Washington and Beijing have dialed back their roles as mediators of the Korean crisis. And as Washington accuses Pyongyang of supplying arms to Moscow, Mr. Moon argues, opportunity beckons for Mr. Kim.
These dynamics “provide extended space for North Korea’s survival and prosperity, better than its current situation,” he said. “It could be the beneficiary of a newly emerging Cold War structure, or of bloc diplomacy.”
Seoul has shot back at the endless rhetorical salvos fired by Pyongyang. The conservative Yoon administration has also called prior policies of engagement with the North as “appeasement,” backing itself into a corner, Mr. Moon alleges.
“The Yoon government says the Moon government had a submissive attitude toward [North Korea],” he said. “The dilemma now is they cannot adopt any of those policies — they cannot get out of the current situation.”
Meanwhile, cross-DMZ communications, including those between the leaders, intelligence offices and military commands, have gone silent. The North Koreans “are not answering any of those lines,” Mr. Moon said.
Nuclear doctrine
Mr. Moon said the need to lower tensions is even more critical after North Korea recently announced it was modifying its doctrine on when it would use its nuclear arsenal.
Under its new Nuclear Forces Policy Law, the Kim regime “will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states if it deems the non-nuclear state is ‘colluding with nuclear states,’” said Gen. Paul LaCamera, head of U.S. forces in Korea, told a congressional hearing last week.
North Korea’s doctrinal threats are backed up by serious hardware. Pyongyang has, this year, unveiled a string of game-changing new weapons.
One is solid-fuel ballistic missiles that can overcome current Japanese and South Korean defense systems. Both countries rely heavily on spotting North Korean launch preparations and pre-empting with their own strike assets, but pre-launch timings are significantly cut with solid fuel propellant.
Another is the Haeil, a nuclear torpedo that takes the atomic threat out of the clouds and into the depths.
South Korea’s population densities near the border with the North further complicate defense.
“South Korea has an immense window of vulnerability: More than 20 million people live in the [greater Seoul area] within firing range of artillery and short-range missiles,” Mr. Moon warned “Look at the array of North Korean offensive weapons — there is no way to defend.”
This broad range of the North’s arsenal, combined with new protocols on when to launch missiles if the leadership is incapacitated, virtually guarantees a second strike if North Korea is attacked first.
“Kim and his elite have learned from Iraq and Libya, where they saw the fates of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi,” Mr. Moon said. “If there is a war, it will be the end of the regime and the leader, so they will fight to the last ditch.”
Mr. Moon said the extended deterrence and the U.S. pledge to defend its ally, which have prevented a major war on the peninsula since the 1953 armistice, are no longer enough.
“The U.S. alliance provides security, but not peace,” he said. “I don’t mean I don’t trust the U.S., but the U.S. has capability limitations, and this means there could be a real problem when the real time comes.”
The answer is a new paradigm for the 70-year-old bilateral alliance in the years ahead.
“I want an alliance with the U.S.” Mr. Moon said. “But for peace, not for the status quo.”
