Inter-Korea Relations: Things Fall Apart

By the time Kim Jong Un made the announcement as part of his annual public address on January 1, 2018, close observers would have been able to predict what he would say: North Korea was going to take part in the Winter Olympics to be held that February in PyeongChang, a ski resort town just across the border in the South Korean part of Gangwon province. In Kim’s words, the year of not only the Winter Olympics but also the 70th anniversary of the founding of North (and South, though for obvious reasons he didn’t mention that) Korea would thus be ripe with potential to “improve frozen inter-Korean relations” and “glorify this meaningful year as an eventful one noteworthy in the history of the nation.”

Though hardly unambiguous in its endorsement of South Korea’s existence, the news of North Korea’s active effort to restore inter-Korean ties was widely welcomed, marking a refreshing change from one of the rockiest periods of recent memory for Pyongyang’s relationships with the outside world. From the first days of 2016 through the late autumn of 2017, an aggressive North Korean leadership had made dramatic progress in nuclear and missile development programs, creating extreme tensions across the region. Forty-plus missile launches and an unprecedented three nuclear tests served to push the notion of a North Korean missile-mounted nuclear warhead reaching the continental United States from the aspirational column toward something approaching plausibility.

North Korea’s international standing predictably plunged in the face of its increasing bellicosity, even alienating the country’s most reliable ally, China. This left it dangerously exposed on the economic front, given the country’s reliance on its giant neighbor for trade and aid. However, it was in the United States where the moves went down worst. President Donald Trump, elected in November 2016 on an amorphous platform of restoring America to greatness, did not take kindly to North Korea thumbing its nose his way. Employing an incoherent style that echoed Nixon’s madman theory, he turned regularly to Twitter to articulate his anger in a way that would doubtless have resulted in even greater risks for the region had it not been for the work of senior American officials to make sure nobody got the wrong message, or at least not for too long.

Memorably, one Trump tweet in August 2017 asserted that “talking is not the answer” to the challenge posed by North Korea; very soon thereafter, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis dialled Trump back, telling reporters, “We’re never out of diplomatic solutions.” Similarly, following North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho’s speech at the UN General Assembly in September, Trump tweeted that North Korea “won’t be around much longer,” forcing a White House press secretary to explain to the media that, contrary to Ri’s subsequent remark that Trump “declared war on our country,” he had not done anything of the sort. The pattern continued throughout most of 2017.

For most of that year, the rhetoric, if not quite the reality, seemed to point toward armed conflict. Understandably, then, the policy whiplash in January 2018 was intense. The contours of North Korean participation in the Winter Olympics took several weeks to emerge following Kim’s New Year’s Day  revelation, but it was evident from the outset that what had begun with quiet inter-Korean contacts on the fringes of a football tournament in China late the previous year had traction. The result would be dramatically improved peninsula relations.

Thereafter, 2018 saw not only senior-level meetings on the fringes of the Winter Olympics and three inter-Korean summits, but also three China-North Korea summits, and even, on neutral territory in Singapore, the first of two U.S.-North Korea leaders’ meetings. There was substance to the diplomacy, too. In April, North Korea closed its sole nuclear test site and, in late July, returned 55 boxes of remains of troops killed in the Korean War, mostly American. In September, following two meetings with Kim Jong Un on South Korean soil in the spring, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea made a visit to Pyongyang, where he gave a brief public address to a local audience, the first by a sitting South Korean president. An impressive-looking military agreement also provided for the designation of border region no-fly zones, demolition of several guard posts on each side, demilitarized zone minesweeping, and highly symbolic steps that, if implemented, would have seen surveillance equipment and firearms removed from the truce village of Panmunjom, restoring it to a situation comparable to that last seen in the 1970s.

The pace of inter-Korean change was extraordinary. Arguably it was unparalleled, even in the sunshine policy period of inter-Korean engagement between 1998 and 2007. But for anyone with a grounding in Korean peninsula history, the obvious question to ask, even then, was: How long will it last?

By the middle of 2019, an answer emerged. Progress stalled. The period of energetic diplomacy had resulted in agreements that could have changed the political landscape of the Korean peninsula permanently. But relations between North Korea and the United States soon became a brake on progress. When a second U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi in February 2019 failed miserably, the entire edifice of inter-Korean relations began to crack, too.

There is a pattern to inter-Korean relations, one established over the course of three decades since the end of the Cold War. The two Koreas tend to instrumentalize the other in order to influence one or more of the Great Powers. In the case of North Korea, outreach to Seoul offers a channel to influence one or both of Beijing and Washington, D.C., but once ties with China have been reanimated and/or the siren call of changing relations with the old foe across the Pacific fades from earshot, inter-Korean relations are set aside. The pattern is even more entrenched now that a web of U.N. sanctions resolutions dramatically limits South Korea’s freedom to engage economically with the North. Since the Hanoi debacle, Moon has lacked any levers to revive dialogue. As a consequence, what seemed like a positive dynamic in 2018 rapidly deteriorated into a static one in 2019, and that is where it remains.

It is tempting to declare that we are now right back where we were in 2016: waiting for a U.S. presidential election. There is some truth in that. North Korea’s approach to dealing with its enemies and competitors has long been cyclical, and the likelihood is that Pyongyang will try to repeat aspects of a strategy that has proven so successful at maintaining the country’s post-Cold War political autonomy for decades despite significant odds.

But at the same time, several pertinent factors have changed during the last five years, meaning that the future cannot be identical to the past. First and foremost, North Korea has declared the successful completion of its nuclear deterrent. Of course, Pyongyang has a storied history of irresponsible acts dating back to the founding of the state itself, and it would be unwise to take the country’s leadership at their word that the nuclear testing days are over.

Nevertheless, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic. North Korea is not and never has been content to be seen as a rogue nuclear state. Its goal is international acceptance of its nuclear status, which requires that, where nuclear matters are concerned, it convey an image of relatively responsible statehood. For this reason, domestic television reporting on the country’s sixth and most recent test on September 3, 2017 emphasized the role of debate and consensus in the decision to test, suggesting political maturity and downplaying the unfettered authority of Kim Jong Un. Having declared its success, that declaration would be a hard one to reverse.

Several further issues provide little incentive for the Kim regime to order a return to nuclear testing. Testing is an economically, environmentally, and moreover politically costly activity. The Chinese government understandably bristles at broken windows and widening cracks in the playgrounds of schools in border cities every time a test takes place in the North. Testing as diplomacy by other means is subject to the law of diminishing returns; for North Korea, it is becoming a significant liability. We may indeed have seen the last of this particular form of brinkmanship.

Second, whatever one may think of the results of two summits between Trump and Kim, the simple fact of their meetings having taken place represents the breaking of a longstanding taboo. Accordingly, as long as there is the political will (which Joe Biden is already signalling there may not be if he wins the presidency in November), this would make future summits easier to bring about. In turn, given the structure of the North Korean political system, where decision-making is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of the leader, the potential for a future deal between the two countries has increased noticeably thanks to the creation of a structure that harbors potential for the leaders of the two countries to meet face-to-face.

Pyongyang’s hoped-for outcome from the 2018-19 period was to retain its nuclear deterrent at the same time as restoring relations with China, while also bringing about the removal of broad swathes of economically damaging sectoral sanctions put in place by the U.N. Security Council in 2016-17. But achieving all these things at the same time was never terribly likely, and we cannot say that North Korea failed because it fell short. In the end, it accomplished two out of the three objectives. With a functional (in so far as it deters intervention in its internal affairs) nuclear deterrent and economic relations with China approximately normalized (putting aside the exceptional border closure due to COVID-19), North Korea can (as long as it manages the risks of the pandemic) go forward with certainty that its sovereignty is assured, even if it is left yet again with an unsated desire to expand its range of trading relationships beyond China.

What is not yet clear is what all of this means for the future of relations between the two Koreas. There is evident policy uncertainty in the North Korean capital. In the first half of 2020, Pyongyang grew increasingly bellicose in the words it directed south of the border, with Kim Jong Un’s trusted aide and sister, Kim Yo Jong, signing off on a series of angry statements accusing South Korea of reneging on inter-Korean agreements (not altogether unreasonably, though Seoul was hardly the only one doing so) and kowtowing to the United States. But then, in late June, having taken the extreme step of dynamiting the Inter-Korean Liaison Office at Kaesong, a resonant symbol of 2018’s active diplomacy, North Korea suddenly rowed back most of its aggressive rhetoric, saying that future relations would depend on how South Korea acts. It remains to be seen whether Seoul’s subsequent actions – among them the resignation of a minister of unification and launch of a crackdown on organizations conducting cross-border freedom of information activities for North Korea – will be enough to get back in Pyongyang’s good books.