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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears on a Korean Central Television (KCTV) broadcast inspecting ongoing construction for the Wonsan-Kalma Coastal Tourist Area on Nov. 1. This was Kim’s third KCTV appearance in 2018. (Yonhap News)

During the eight months since North Korea and the US embarked on the journey toward denuclearization at the Pyeongchang Olympics, the security environment on the Korean Peninsula has already changed beyond recognition. To truly perceive that change, it’s sufficient to think of three things we had to endure until last year: North Korea’s nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests, which never failed to create a crisis on the Korean Peninsula; the large-scale South Korea-US joint military exercises, which were held several times a year and provoked a sharp backlash from the North; and the hair-trigger standoff between South and North Korea around the armistice line and the Northern Limit Line (NLL).

In 2018, not one of these events has occurred, and in fact, work began on ending them permanently. I’m confident that, if the process of denuclearization is completed successfully, peace and joint economic prosperity are in store for the Korean Peninsula.

Despite such dramatic changes, the prolongation of the deadlock in the North Korea-US denuclearization talks is already causing skepticism to appear in various quarters. But both the US and North Korea have already profited too much from this brief denuclearization process to justify such skepticism.

Although Trump’s approach to the North Korean nuclear issue is being criticized by skeptics both inside and outside of the government, the US has essentially never seen as much concrete progress on the North Korean nuclear issue as it does today. No American president prior to Trump has stopped North Korea from carrying out nuclear tests and missile test launches. But the current American administration has achieved that and also arranged the demolition of North Korea’s underground nuclear test site at Punggye Village without paying a single penny to the North. Compare that with the 500,000 tons of wheat that the US gave the North in 1998 in exchange for getting a look at a single tunnel at Geumchang Village that was suspected of being a nuclear test site.

While North Korea has expressed its dissatisfaction and pushed back against the US’s position that the North must give up its nuclear weapons before sanctions can be eased, in reality it has also gotten a lot out of the denuclearization process. Most importantly, the suspension of the South Korea-US joint military exercises has created the security and social foundation for the North to focus its energy on economic development.

For us, those exercises are purely defensive, but North Korea regards them as a dress rehearsal for invasion. As a consequence, whenever these exercises begin, North Korea responds by mobilizing the entire country and putting it on a war footing. In such a situation, it’s impossible to concentrate resources on the economy. When North Korea reoriented its national development policy on “focusing resources on building the economy” in April, it openly stated that carrying out that policy would require a peaceful environment on and around the Korean Peninsula. After halting its own nuclear weapon and missile provocations, what the North Korea wanted the South and the US to do to create that peaceful environment was halting their joint military exercises.

While holding frequent summits with the leaders of South Korea, the US and China during the process of denuclearization over these past eight months, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has managed to repair his image and the image of North Korea overseas and establish his reputation as a diplomatically accomplished leader at home. In particular, the North Korea-US summit has liberated North Koreans from their fear of the US as their arch enemy and has kindled hope that economic sanctions may be lifted.

In this manner, the process of denuclearization has dramatically improved the security environment on the Korean Peninsula and brought considerable benefits to both North Korea and the US from its very outset. This means that both the US and North Korea have definite incentives for continuing to move forward with denuclearization. But at the moment, the two sides are struggling to bridge their methodological disagreement about the sequence of denuclearization.

This time, I think that North Korea needs to be a little bolder in showing flexibility. When North Korea and the US’ positions are assessed purely in terms of logic, the North Korean proposal of taking confidence-building measures while implementing the points of the North Korea-US joint statement in a balanced, synchronous and phased manner is reasonable, considering that North Korea-US relations have been characterized by extreme distrust. In contrast, the American position that sanctions cannot be lifted until North Korea has denuclearized is too one-sided.

But as the US has recently demonstrated in the issue of trade, a global superpower sometimes insists on unreasonable arguments in order to fulfill its national interests in foreign relations when its rationale for doing so is clear. In such circumstances, even world powers attempt to find a way to compromise with the US. In the stark reality of geopolitics, that’s the practical way for each country to advance its own national interests.

Furthermore, a significant portion of the American unilateralism that’s evident in the denuclearization process derives from the historical distrust that has formed over the course of North Korea-US relations. To some extent, in other words, the North has brought this on itself.

North Korea ultimately needs to offer a proposal that goes a little further in order to elicit the US’ flexibility. I believe that such a concession will foster American trust in North Korea, which will have a positive impact not only on forming balanced relations between the two sides and enabling simultaneous implementation as the denuclearization process moves forward, but also on the future potential that denuclearization will offer the North.

By Lee Jong-seok, former Minister of Unification and senior research fellow at the Sejong Institute

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