South Korean President Lee Jae-myung seeks pragmatic peace with North Korea, motivated not by reunification ideals but by economic benefits, investor confidence, and market stability, signaling a shift in policy toward realism.
On June 4, Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party became South Korea’s new president. The liberal president will seek to restore order and calm after his conservative predecessor, Yoon Suk-yeol, disastrously attempted to implement martial law in December 2024. This provoked the country and eventually led to Yoon’s impeachment and removal.
Who Is Lee Jae-Myung?
In the 2025 presidential election, Lee Jae-myung trounced his conservative opponent by more than eight percent of the vote. Lee was boosted by his rags-to-riches background, having risen from poverty to become a skilled administrator with a successful record in local government. Due to the wide margin of his victory, Lee undoubtedly feels that he has a broad mandate to redirect South Korean politics in a more liberal direction.
In terms of South Korea’s policy towards North Korea, analysts have speculated that this might mean a return to the reconciliation-seeking policies of the previous Democratic presidents Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003), Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008), and Moon Jae-in (2017-2022).
Lee Jae-myung is likely to adopt a more conciliatory approach towards North Korea. However, if he does so, he will do it for different reasons than his liberal predecessors. The former three Democratic presidents were ideologically convinced that South and North Korea are one nation and have a shared destiny to reunite. Lee does not share that view.
While he desires improved relations with Pyongyang, this desire does not stem from ideological conviction about a shared destiny but from cold pragmatism. Lee’s pragmatism extends to all facets of his policy agenda, but is perhaps most notable in his approach to North Korea.
How Will President Lee Change His Nation’s North Korea Policy?
When Lee unsuccessfully campaigned as a presidential candidate for the first time in 2022, he was asked about his stance on economic cooperation with North Korea. Instead of framing economic cooperation as a tool to achieve unification, as his Democratic predecessors had done, Lee stressed the financial benefits of such collaboration. He stated plainly that “if we invest in the North, it opens up economic opportunities,” noting that North Korean labor costs are “among the lowest in the world“. “It’s about efficiency, not fairness, the return on investment is high,” he added.
In the 2025 election campaign, Lee again adopted a pragmatic approach to his North Korea policy. Inter-Korean tensions rose under Lee’s conservative predecessor, so the press asked him how he would approach North Korea if elected. Lee argued that it was essential to maintain peaceful relations with Pyongyang, but rather than underpinning this argument with an appeal to national unity, he again appealed to profits. “Peace is essential, for the stock market to recover, for foreign investors to feel safe putting their money here,” he pointed out.
He further emphasized that tension on the Korean Peninsula was one of the causes of the “Korea discount,” which refers to the fact that Korean companies tend to be undervalued on the stock market. Peace, in other words, is suitable for economic growth.
Peace on the Korean Peninsula Is Profitable
Thus, on the surface, Lee’s North Korea policy might seem to follow in the footsteps of his presidential predecessors in the Democratic Party. However, economic interests motivate it much more than a conviction of a shared national destiny. Importantly, this means that Lee, unlike his more ideologically committed predecessors, will be ready to abandon his conciliatory North Korea policies if they conflict with South Korea’s economic interests.
There are clear parallels between Lee Jae-myung’s North Korea approach and the newfound anti-war sentiment in conservative circles in the Western world. Nowadays, one often hears from conservatives in the US and Europe that wars abroad must be avoided, not for moral reasons, but because they cost too much and run counter to the national interest. This calculating reasoning of the contemporary conservative movement in the West largely overlaps with that of the liberal Lee Jae-myung’s North Korea policy, perhaps indicative of a rightward drift across the Korean political spectrum in recent years.
Last year, North Korea claimed to have abandoned unification as a goal and now supposedly approaches South Korea in a purely realist manner, not entirely unlike Lee’s approach to the North.
It remains to be seen whether peaceful inter-Korean relations can be maintained without any ideological commitment to national unity.
About the Authors: Eun Hee Woo and Ulv Hanssen
Eun Hee Woo is an Assistant Professor at Josai International University’s Faculty of International Humanities and an Affiliated Researcher at the Institute of Korean Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and specializes in South Korean domestic politics, especially party politics, candidate selection, elite formation and reproduction, and elections.
Ulv Hanssen is an Associate Professor at Soka University’s Faculty of Law and an Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He holds a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from the Graduate School of East Asian Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His primary field of research is Japanese foreign and security policy with a particular focus on Japan-North Korea relations.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Republic of Korea.
