The newly elected president of South Korea Moon Jae-in told his national assembly on Tuesday that he was willing to meet with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un under the right conditions.
“I will quickly move to solve the crisis in national security,” said Moon, as quoted by the UK Guardian. “I am willing to go anywhere for the peace of the Korean peninsula if needed. I will fly immediately to Washington, I will go to Beijing and I will go to Tokyo. If the conditions are right, I will go to Pyongyang.”
This is, curiously enough, almost exactly what U.S. President Donald Trump said recently about the possibility of meeting with Kim Jong-un. The comment was greeted with some controversy when Trump made it.
“If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it. If it’s under the, again, under the right circumstances. But I would do that,” Trump said on May 1st.
Moon campaigned on promises to improve relations with North Korea, although the Guardian quotes analysts speculating that Moon’s supporters will be disappointed with how much South Korea’s diplomatic posture actually changes.
“Analysts say he is unlikely to weaken sanctions or reduce diplomatic pressure, given the much higher risks presented by North Korea after a decade of nuclear tests and vast improvements in its missile technology,” the Guardian writes, noting that even Moon’s proposed meeting with Kim would likely require a pledge from Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear and missile programs.
North Korea’s ambassador to the United Kingdom just told Sky News that another illegal nuclear test is coming soon, “conducted at the place and time as decided by our supreme leader.”
Reuters reports that President Moon swiftly “named two liberal veterans with ties to the ‘Sunshine Policy’ of engagement with North Korea from the 2000s to the posts of prime minister and spy chief.” The prospective new head of the National Intelligence Service, Suh Hoon, supported the idea of Moon meeting with North Korea’s ruler.
The Sunshine Policy was South Korea’s ten-year effort to convince North Korea to behave better by treating it as a friendly neighbor with unchallenged legitimacy and inviting the North to participate in joint projects like the Kaesong industrial park. Moon worked as a government adviser during the Sunshine Policy era.
Supporters of the policy insist it had some successes, despite obviously failing to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions, or even persuading it to stop murdering South Koreans. Critics say the North used the Sunshine Policy to take advantage of Seoul’s generosity.
“I am confident to lead the diplomatic efforts involving multiple parties, which will lead to the complete abandonment of the North Korean nuclear program, and bring the relationship between South and North to peace, economic cooperation, and mutual prosperity,” Moon stated in an April 25th presidential debate, as recalled by CNN.
CNN suggests the Trump administration may need to work on its relationship with the new Moon administration since Trump officials who visited Seoul since January have largely avoided meeting with any of the candidates in South Korea’s emergency presidential election. The fate of the U.S. THAAD anti-missile system under Moon’s government also remains in doubt.
On the subject of THAAD, North Korean television aired two pictures on Wednesday that it claimed were satellite reconnaissance photos of the anti-missile system, which is being installed on a golf course in the town of Seongju.
“THAAD is a source of a nuclear disaster being brought to our race at the moment,” declared the North Korean broadcast, warning that deployment would turn the Korean peninsula into “a battlefield for a nuclear war among powerful countries.”
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency notes that the photos seem intended to flaunt North Korea’s intelligence-gathering capabilities, but the accuracy of the images could not be confirmed, and North Korean media gave no indication where or how the photographs were taken.