[Column] The need for a peace regime on the Korean peninsula

Posted on : 2013-06-10 14:08 KST Modified on : 2013-06-10 14:08 KST
North Korea and the US still at loggerheads over the issue that could finally end the Cold War standoff

By Jin Jingyi, professor at Peking University

It has now been 60 years since an armistice agreement ended the combat phase of the Korean War. This means that for the last 60 years, we have failed to sign a peace treaty. The issue of North Korea’s nuclear program, which surfaced around the time the Cold War was coming to an end, has also remained unresolved for two decades. This is one of the reasons no peace regime has been established on the Korean peninsula.

In the six-party talks framework adopted to address the issue, North Korea consistently demanded a peace regime before it gave up its nuclear program, while South Korea and the United States argued that denuclearization had to come first. The argument from Pyongyang was that the nuclear issue would take care of itself if a peace treaty were signed, since this would remove security concerns and issues with its relations with Washington and Seoul. From this standpoint, a peace treaty would have been sufficient, tantamount to a peace regime in and of itself.

North Korea is arguing that everything will go away with a peace treaty, and may understand just how difficult a proposition a peace treaty is so long as current issues remain unresolved. This is the gist of the argument from Seoul and Washington, which claim that a resolution to the nuclear issue would be a signal that diplomatic relations have been normalized. So it may be fair to say that a resolution to the nuclear issue and a peace treaty are equally necessary.

The treaty that Pyongyang presents as sufficient for a peace regime and the nuclear program resolution that Seoul and Washington claim will do the trick represent two sides of the same coin. If the parties had been willing, a solution could have been sought by addressing both issues at the same time rather than making one contingent on the other. The reason they haven’t been willing is because North Korea and the US have failed to find any compromise between the Pyongyang’s strategy for survival and Washington’s strategy for East Asia.

Now, on the 60th anniversary of the armistice agreement, North Korea is once again calling for a peace treaty. This is the same North Korea that declared the armistice null and void and wrote the legitimacy of its nuclear program into their constitution. It is no longer a matter of “one before the other.”

Is it possible? The entire international community, including South Korea, the US, and China, is calling for North Korea’s denuclearization. Maybe Pyongyang itself does not actually believe a peace treaty is realistic without any discussion of denuclearization. At this rate, the two sides stand to continue on their parallel lines, never to meet in the middle.

The peace treaty is something North Korea has been demanding for decades now. But it has been equated with the country’s own strategy of going directly to Washington for talks leaving South Korea out of the loop while demanding the removal of USFK. That’s part of the reason South Korea and the US prefer the idea of a peace regime, a higher-order concept that would encompass a peace treaty. What this shows is that the US is at the heart of the perpetual peninsular Cold War on both issues, North Korea’s nuclear program and the signing of a peace treaty.

The current armistice regime is also based on a Cold War system. The root of the nuclear issue is that North Korea would like to end this system, while the US would like to perpetuate it. In some sense, the “nuclear game” has been a boon to Washington’s East Asia strategy. The fact that that the US presence remains so strong in East Asia even after diminishing elsewhere can be tied to the way the nuclear issue has been leveraged to strengthen the country’s alliances with South Korea and Japan to unprecedented levels.

A peace treaty would change everything. Washington, certainly, would be faced with a very complicated situation. The Cold War system it is trying to maintain could break down. And if the system that has prevailed for the past 60 years collapses, that could mean setbacks for Washington’s East Asia strategy. This is why we shouldn’t be expecting it to play much of a role in resolving peninsula issues. But a peace treaty, like an end to the North Korean nuclear program, is an inescapable part of building a peace regime. A treaty would do by itself, or it would do as part of a larger peace regime. Isn’t it time now it for this issue to be introduced alongside the nuclear one as part of the six-party talks?

At any rate, the current situation is basically making an end to North Korea’s nuclear program into a prerequisite for building a peace regime. Ironically, this only proves the value of a nuclear program. What would happen if Pyongyang comes out at the right moment to say it has a plan for economic development and intends to give up its nuclear weapons? Or that it wants to trade its nuclear program for a peace agreement?

It seems like fiction, but North Korea has a way of making fiction into reality.

 

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