President Lee Jae-myung’s softer North Korea strategy, echoing past failed efforts, is unlikely to succeed. Pyongyang seeks tension and handouts, not peace or economic integration, with reunification now officially off the table.
South Korea’s new president Lee Jae-myung is willing to take a more conciliatory approach toward North Korea to achieve peace. He also supports the apparent wish of his essential ally, the US president, to restart talks with Kim Jong-un. But this won’t be enough to entice the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) into detente.
North Korea Is Not a Reliable Partner
Lee’s plan for engaging North Korea is basically the “Sunshine Policy” with less gusto. The questionable premise is that the DPRK would trade the status quo for peace and cooperative economic development with South Korea if only Seoul could earn Pyongyang’s trust. The pursuit of the Sunshine Policy from 1998 to 2008 and 2017 to 2020 involved South Korea making unilateral concessions, which are understood as investments that would yield dividends in the form of improved bilateral relations.
However, past Republic of Korea (ROK) investments in trust-building have not paid off. South Korea sunk about $1 billion into the Kaesong Industrial Complex, the most serious North-South joint economic venture. The revenue generated there helped fund North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Political tensions frequently disrupted operations in the Complex until the ROK abandoned it following the DPRK’s missile and nuclear tests.
Another failed joint venture was the Mount Kumgang Tourist Resort. Even after South Korean companies paid much of the cost to build infrastructure, Seoul later banned ROK citizens from traveling to the resort after a security guard shot and killed a South Korean woman under suspicious circumstances.
In 1991, Seoul and Pyongyang agreed on “reconciliation” and “non-aggression.” The following year came another agreement that neither side would produce or possess nuclear weapons.
Kim Dae-jung paid $500 million for a summit meeting with Kim Jong-il in 2000. In 2018, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in agreed to establish an Inter-Korean Liaison Office, later located in a building on the North Korean side of the border, which was built at South Korea’s expense. In 2020, North Korea demolished the building in retaliation for leaflet balloons sent from South Korea.
Another product of the Moon-Kim summit was the Comprehensive Military Agreement of 2018, wherein both sides committed to demilitarize specified areas near the inter-Korean border. The DPRK unilaterally abrogated the agreement in 2023.
President Lee Plans to Create a Relationship with North Korea
The legacy of all this effort is that today the DPRK has an expanding nuclear arsenal, the two countries are seemingly permanently rooted on the brink of war, and there is virtually no bilateral trade or investment between them.
Lee’s approach to North Korea seems to return to well-trodden ground. In his inauguration speech, Lee said, “We will open a channel of communication with North Korea and build peace on the Korean Peninsula through dialogue and cooperation.”
His nominee for chief of national intelligence, Lee Jong-seok, is a veteran of the Roh Moo-hyun Administration who favors soft treatment for North Korea. Lee’s nominee for prime minister, who serves as executive assistant to the president in South Korea’s political system, is Kim Min-seok, who gained notoriety for participating in a 1985 protest at the US Cultural Center in Seoul.
On June 11 of this year, the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) silenced the loudspeakers blaring propaganda statements and K-Pop music across the North-South border. An ROK government spokesman said this was to help promote “trust and peace.” Lee likely plans to recriminalize South Koreans’ dissemination of anti-DPRK propaganda leaflets into the North and favors resurrecting the 2018 military agreement with the DPRK.
Lee could assent to a partial withdrawal of US troops from South Korea if Washington wanted it. Pyongyang, of course, wants this badly, and the US president and his chief defense intellectual have spoken about it favorably. In 2021, Lee referred to the US troop presence in his country as an “occupying force,” although he later said he was referring to the period immediately after the end of World War II.
President Lee’s Plans to Befriend North Korea Will Fail
Lee’s approach faces several problems.
First, one might argue that the Sunshine Policy could work if Seoul tried harder to appease Pyongyang. However, the more convincing theory is that the DPRK leadership doesn’t want peace and economic cooperation with the South. Instead, the regime wants a constant state of tension as a way of bolstering its legitimacy, telling North Koreans they endlessly need the Kim government to continue protecting them from the hostile foreign forces allegedly bent on destroying the DPRK.
Similarly, the Kim regime does not want prosperity per se. It sees privately-held wealth as empowerment of society at the expense of the domination of the state. Hence, there was an attempt to wipe out private stashes of cash through a surprise currency revaluation in 2009. The regime is careful about the possible ideological contamination of its citizens through doing business with outsiders. The leadership wants economic handouts from South Korea, not economic integration.
A second problem is that Lee promises a more restrained version of the Sunshine Policy. Lee has moved toward the political center, meaning he is less accommodating than the DPRK would like. Further, he takes a middle-of-the-road position on North Korean denuclearization, favoring a gradual step-by-step process, rather than either giving up on denuclearization or demanding that Pyongyang disarm before gaining any rewards.
The President also says the US-ROK alliance, anathema to Pyongyang, is “the foundation of the Republic of Korea’s foreign policy.” He supports the “three-axis” defense plan, which Pyongyang perceives as highly aggressive and the strategic cooperation with Japan, a country toward which the DPRK is deeply hostile. Even if the DPRK government is not interested in a meeting with Lee.
A third problem is that Pyongyang is less receptive to outreach from the ROK today than when Moon Jae-in, Roh Moo-hyun, and Kim Dae-jung were in office.
Talks with either the South Koreans or the Americans are less compelling now. The summits in 2018 and 2019 ended in humiliation for Kim Jong-un and reduced hope that the US would drop its sanctions for a price acceptable to the DPRK. Since then, Pyongyang’s partnership with Russia offers new military and economic benefits that partly alleviate North Korea’s isolation. North Korean officials have reportedly rebuffed attempts by the second Trump Administration to resume high-level US-DPRK dialogue.
In sum, Lee’s approach will offer less of what Pyongyang has previously found insufficient.
Most dramatically, Kim’s government has proclaimed South Korea an enemy state and renounced reunification as a policy objective, seemingly ruling out either reconciliation or economic cooperation. This may be a temporary policy intended to give the DPRK bargaining leverage, but many observers had the same hope about the North’s nuclear weapons program.
Unlike previous liberal South Korean presidents, Lee will likely clash relatively little with the US government over policy toward North Korea. However, like his predecessors, he will fail to persuade Kim Jong-un to join him in pulling the Korean Peninsula out of its ongoing cold war.
About the Author: Denny Roy
Denny Roy is a Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He researches and writes about strategic and security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. Roy is the author of Return of the Dragon: Rising China and Regional Security (Columbia University Press, 2013) and regularly contributes to The National Interest.
Image Credit: Shutterstock/Gyeonggi-do News Portal.
