3 Things You Should Know About The Inter-Korean Summit
In a historic first, Kim Jong-un is in South Korea to meet directly with President Moon Jae-in. This is the first time a North Korean leader has visited the South since the Korean War.
The priority of the summit will be to discuss security concerns and the North’s nuclear weapons. I sat down with Sokeel Park, Liberty in North Korea’s Director of Research and Strategy, to get his thoughts.
Here’s 3 things you should know about the talks.
1. Kim Jong-un isn’t going to give up his nukes.
Ian: Last year the headlines were all about the chance of war, now all of a sudden the headlines are about denuclearization and peace. Has Kim Jong-un really had a change of heart?
Sokeel: I don’t know a single analyst who thinks Kim Jong-un is going to denuclearize.
There are some obvious and not-so-obvious reasons for wanting to build nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. More obviously, nukes are the most powerful weapon invented by humankind. If you have them you don’t get attacked. If you don’t have them then you might get attacked — as we’ve seen with Libya and Iraq. North Korea is one of the most militarized and paranoid states in the world, is already a ‘rogue state’, and is in a confrontation with the strongest military on the planet, so I guess the question is why wouldn’t they try to secure the most powerful weapon available.
The less obvious reasons are on KJU’s domestic front. When Kim Jong-il died in late 2011, KJU was a young and unproven successor barely known among North Korean ‘elites’ and ordinary citizens. Unable to rely solely on purges and coercion, he had to prove himself and build domestic legitimacy. He signalled early on that his priorities would be national defense and economic improvement. The nuclear and missile programs were already in progress and were probably easier to accelerate and bring to “successful completion”, marking a significant policy success and ‘proving’ his competency and strength as leader to both elites and ordinary citizens — at least to some degree.
There just isn’t an incentive big enough that can overturn KJU’s logic for retaining nukes, especially if you consider that even if they decided to deal them away it would seem pretty much impossible to convince the US that they weren’t cheating. Sorry to bring up Iraq again, but they will recall that in 2003 UN weapons inspections were cut short because the US and UK decided to invade anyway.
2. Human rights are not up for discussion.
Ian: The South Korean government has said they are not going to raise human rights issues with Kim Jong-un in these talks. Why?
Sokeel: I think this is a missed opportunity driven by a short term rush for rapprochement. They are not raising it because they are prioritizing traditional security concerns and because they think it is too sensitive a topic.
However, ultimately the security concerns and nuclear weapons program are symptoms of a wider problem, and that problem is the nature of the North Korean state itself. If we only deal with the symptom then it will keep coming back around — ultimately what we need is for North Korea to change and open up, become less security-oriented, and to normalize in the international community.
This means coming in from being the extreme outlier it is and having more normal relations between the North Korean government and the North Korean people, and also with neighboring countries and the international community in general. Only then will we be able to sustainably resolve all the problems emanating from North Korea, including the security problems.
Particularly with North Korea’s extreme autocracy, KJU’s attitudes and views on government-society relations and varied human rights issues are therefore extremely important for the future. This is a unique opportunity to go direct to him, without filtering by underlings, and engage him on these issues both to get a read on his thinking and also to try to influence him, including by giving him the message that these will be important factors in the way the international community deals with North Korea. This is by no means the only way to try to make progress on human rights issues and help the North Korean people, but it is a way that is worth trying.
The alternative is that human rights are only raised at the UN and when relations are bad, which inadvertently sends the message that human rights are a tool for making the international community gang up on North Korea when expedient, and will drop the issue when it’s inconvenient.
3. Kim Jung-un wants to have his nuclear cake and eat it too.
Ian: So what is driving these summits between Kim Jong-un and other leaders?
Sokeel: KJU wants to have his nuclear cake and eat it too. He wants to have nuclear weapons and gain as much acceptance from the international community as possible. Only eight other countries have pulled off this trick of developing nuclear weapons and the international community basically going, “Okay you can have nukes but no-one else!”
Even if full acceptance is impossible, the pathway to getting partial / grudging / de facto acceptance is navigated by playing the part of responsible leader with nuclear weapons. This involves sitting down with other leaders and making all the right sounds about how we should all cool it and back off, and how these nuke things are truly ghastly and the world would be better off without them.
Also, he probably accurately calculates that by signing nice-sounding agreements and cooperating and complying through a process — even partially — he will be able to loosen the sanctions implemented by China over the last year and maybe get some other goodies too. And if and when the process falters, as it has done so many times in the past, Pyongyang can frame it as because of Trump, not themselves. And to the extent that Chinese and South Korean policy elites sympathize, they will constrain the US’s ability to punish Pyongyang with force or sanctions, may disrupt the US-South Korea alliance, and basically come out with better cards than they started with.
