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South Korean President Moon Jae-in and US President Donald Trump

“The US is ramping up its conditions for resuming dialogue with North Korea to mean denuclearization.”

In the space of a week, this claim is already being treated as rock-solid truth. It’s also being cited as major evidence that the Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump administrations are out of sync in their North Korea policies. But while it’s not exactly “fake news,” it’s not very close to the truth either.

It all started with a press briefing by US State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert on June 15. Speaking at a commemorative ceremony for the 17th anniversary of the South-North Joint Declaration of June 15, 2000, Moon had said dialogue would be conditional on Pyongyang halting its nuclear testing and missile launches, and a question was asked about whether the Trump administration supported this.

“Our position has not changed,” Nauert said in response.

“For us to engage in talks with the DPRK, they would have to denuclearize,” she continued.

If Nauert’s remarks are accurate, this would mean a 180-degree turnaround in the Trump administration’s North Korea policy. It would be tantamount to declaring that there will be no dialogue at all with Pyongyang during Trump’s term. Even if Pyongyang suddenly had a change of heart and began hurrying to dismantle its nuclear program and existing nuclear weapons tomorrow, it would still take upwards of a decade to do that.

It’s hard to imagine the State Department changed in North Korea policy overnight just to counter Moon’s remarks. That’s how unclear the “North Korea has to denuclearize” remarks were.

In point of fact, Nauert is a rookie, a former Fox News anchor who gave her first State Department briefing on June 6. The briefing on June 15 was her fourth. Certainly, she would have been hard-pressed to come up with a deft response in front of reporters questioning her on tricky issues spanning the globe.

I asked the office of the State Department Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs spokesperson what exactly Nauert had meant with her remarks. That office is better versed on the issues, being in daily communication with State Department officials who handle Korean issues.

Bureau spokesperson Alicia Edwards said the administration was “open to dialogue with North Korea with the aim of returning toward sincere and credible negotiations on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

She also said North Korea bore “responsibility for engaging in meaningful measures toward denuclearization and refraining from provocations.”

This means the threshold for starting negotiations is Pyongyang stating that those talks are aimed at denuclearization, and adopting good-faith measures while avoiding actions that raise tensions. This is nothing new.

The Trump administration has been giving much thought to the conditions for resuming dialogue with Pyongyang. It has declared the Barack Obama administration’s “strategic patience” approach to North Korea policy a failure, but staffers will still admit off the record that their North Korea policy isn’t all too different from Obama’s. This means they recognize the need for new momentum and ideas. While the tragic death of US student Otto Warmbier after his detention in North Korea may have the effect of putting off dialogue with North Korea, the administration can’t simply leave the nuclear issue unaddressed.

China previously maintained that a low threshold needed to be set for what conditions Pyongyang had to satisfy for dialogue to resume. Recently, however, it has reportedly been shifting toward calls for unconditional resumption. Chinese experts have said that President Xi Jinping ordered a start to negotiations with North Korea “at whatever cost” by late September ahead of a Chinese Communist Party congress in early November.

This was the environment that greeted Moon’s proposal. Nobody can say South Korea should simply sit back and watch the discussions between Washington and Beijing.

South Korea needs to become actively involved. But rather than simply tossing things out there, it may be a smarter approach procedurally to carefully sound out the responses from the US, China, and North Korea behind the scenes first and develop a workable proposal from there. Even the most reasonable-seeming ideas won’t work without the trust of the other countries involved.

By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]