[INTERVIEW] South Korea needs multifaceted strategy to bring N.Korea to dialogue

Kyungnam University President Park Jae Kyu speaks during an interview with The Korea Times at his office in Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hyo-jin

'We should not antagonize or exclude any one of North Korea, China or Russia,' says former unification ministerBy Lee Hyo-jin

Since the beginning of this year, tensions on the Korean Peninsula have been escalating to their highest level in years, with South and North Korea exchanging threats and warnings instead of New Year pleasantries.

The Kim Jong-un regime entered 2024 with renewed military threats and a missile launch, declaring its intention to designate South Korea as the "primary foe" in its Constitution.

In response, President Yoon Suk Yeol warned that North Korea would face "multiple times stronger retaliation" in the event of provocations. He reaffirmed his commitment to achieve "peace through strength" based on the robust South Korea-U.S. alliance and extended deterrence.

However, Park Jae Kyu, a former South Korean unification minister and current president of Kyungnam University, advised that Seoul should pursue a "multifaceted strategy" toward its nuclear-armed neighbor, instead of its current one-sided policy, which focuses on deterrence.

"While North Korea's reckless pursuit of nuclear and missile enhancement and its refusal to engage in dialogue have greatly limited Yoon's flexibility on North Korea, a one-sided policy of sanctions and pressure against the North may give Pyongyang a justification for upgrading its nuclear arsenal," Park said during an interview with The Korea Times, Wednesday.

"Even if we need to improve deterrence based on the foundation of (South Korea-U.S.-Japan) trilateral cooperation, South Korea may still need to simultaneously promote a multifaceted strategy of bringing North Korea to the table for dialogue by building cooperative relations with China and Russia."

He added: "To stabilize the situation on the Korean Peninsula in the context of U.S.-China strategic competition, we should not antagonize or exclude any one of North Korea, China or Russia."

Park is a leading expert on North Korea who played a critical role in organizing the first-ever inter-Korean summit in 2000 between then-President Kim Dae-jung and his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-il.

The former minister anticipates 2024 to be a "very difficult year" for inter-Korean relations, saying that a lack of a mechanism to control border conflicts, coupled with the overall volatility in Northeast Asia, will make crisis management difficult.

In particular, the nullification of the inter-Korean military pact of Sept. 19, 2018, which was designed to prevent military conflicts in the border area by creating buffer zones, has heightened the risks of an "accidental situation" caused by mutual misunderstandings.

"Considering that North Korea blew up the joint inter-Korean liaison office in 2020 under the pretext of South Korea’s spreading anti-North Korean leaflets in the North, there is a possibility of a military conflict if leafleting and loudspeaker broadcasting in the frontline regions are resumed," Park said.

The reclusive regime is anticipated to continue its provocations in protest of South Korea-U.S. joint military drills, which the Yoon administration seeks to hold more frequently this year. And the North's belligerent actions may reach a peak in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election that is scheduled for November.

North Korea launches a solid-fuel intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) carrying a hypersonic warhead, Jan. 14, in this photo released by the North's official Korean Central News Agency a day later. Yonhap

"Rather than negotiating with the Joe Biden administration, North Korea will maintain a hardline policy while waiting for the results of the election, with an intention to negotiate with the next U.S. administration," Park said.

In this context, he did not dismiss the possibility of Pyongyang launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at a normal angle, or even conducting its seventh nuclear test, to highlight the perceived failures of the Biden administration's North Korea strategy.

The return of former President Donald Trump to the White House, if realized, may pose challenges to Yoon's foreign policy of strengthening trilateral cooperation with Washington and Tokyo to counter Pyongyang's nuclear threats, Park viewed.

"The overarching goal of current U.S. foreign policy is to keep China in check ... If Trump is elected, one could expect him to assess the trilateral cooperation in terms of how much it can contribute to attaining that goal," he said.

Given Trump’s skepticism about alliances and his tendency to avoid multilateral cooperation, the trilateral ties could weaken under his presidency.

Another noteworthy development in the Northeast Asian region is the burgeoning ties between Pyongyang and Moscow.

In a recent display of friendly relations, North Korea's top diplomat Choe Sun-hui visited Russia last week and held a meeting with President Vladimir Putin. While the details of their discussions were not disclosed by either nation, the meeting sparked more worries from South Korea and the Western nations about deepening military cooperation between North Korea and Russia.

However, the former unification minister said their military partnership has its limits.

"Russia will not be able to provide advanced military technologies to North Korea, because Moscow cannot completely disregard its relations with the global community and international norms. Rather, it is likely that Moscow and Pyongyang will strengthen their ties by focusing on some form of economic cooperation," Park said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui in Moscow, Tuesday (local time). Reuters-Yonhap

China's position could be another crucial factor influencing the extent of Pyongyang-Moscow ties.

"Beijing is unlikely to welcome the strengthening of military ties between Russia and North Korea. It will find it difficult to accept trilateral solidarity with these two countries," he said.

"China does not view Russia and North Korea as its equals, and does not want to see the Korean Peninsula become unstable to the extent that such instability undermines China’s core interests."

Some analysts predict that the escalating inter-Korean conflict will expand into a "new cold war" in the East Asian region, with South Korea, the U.S. and Japan on one side and North Korea, China and Russia on the other.

But Park gave a different assessment.

"I do not expect a new cold war to intensify," he said. "The ongoing rivalry is different in nature from the past Cold War between the Soviet Union and the U.S."

While the previous U.S.-Soviet relationship was characterized by bipolar division along ideological lines and extreme confrontation between the two blocs, the current U.S.-China rivalry is not about eliminating each other.

Instead, the two superpowers share a common political necessity to manage bilateral and external relations in a stable manner, Park said.

He also explained that although U.S.-China, South Korea-China and China-Japan relations occasionally experience confrontational situations, their economies remain interconnected.

Touching on the trilateral relations between the three Asian neighbors — Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo — the former unification minister was skeptical about a three-way summit being held in the first half of this year.

"In addition to the delicate bilateral relations among them, the political timelines of the three countries are also factors in delaying the summit," he said.

South Korea's general elections are set to take place in April, while China’s two largest political gatherings — the National People's Congress and the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference — are scheduled for March, Park said, making it difficult for Beijing to take swift action before these two events.