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US President Joe Biden delivers a speech about foreign policy on Feb. 4 during his first visit to the State Department since his inauguration. (Yonhap News)

Unusual mention of N. Korea’s official name may signal that Biden wants to avoid “war of words”

There was one unusual aspect of the White House’s summary of US President Joe Biden’s phone call with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Feb. 4: it referred to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

The first time in North Korea-US relations that the US government used the name “DPRK” was in the Agreed Framework, signed on Oct. 21, 1994. Since then, the US has only used that name on a handful of occasions, including the joint statement that former US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un released after their summit in Singapore on June 12, 2018.

Previous US administrations have generally used the name “North Korea,” and sometimes resorted to pejorative terms such as “mafia state” or “axis of evil.”

North Korea-US relations is a history of North Korea’s arduous struggle to be recognized by the US, which has done its best to ignore it. That makes the North extremely sensitive to the rhetoric of the US government.

That’s why it’s unusual for the White House to say that Biden and Moon “agreed to closely coordinate on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” rather than on “North Korea.” Indeed, the three-sentence readout doesn’t contain any attacks on or criticism of the North.

Even more suggestive is the use of the term “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” in the White House’s summary of Biden’s phone call with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga on Jan. 27. That’s consistent with the language used in the Singapore joint statement.

Since previous US governments have used the phrase “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” — often shortened to “CVID” — as de facto official terminology, the White House’s use of the term “complete denuclearization” can be seen as a deliberate choice.

Given Biden’s determination to overturn all of Trump’s policy — symbolized by the phrase “anything but Trump” — the fact that the White House didn’t avoid a term coined by Trump may itself be a signal to North Korea.

Several former high-ranking officials in the South Korean government told the Hankyoreh on Feb. 5 that the White House’s phrasing was notable and intriguing.

“Even in a conservative reading, this suggests that [Biden] wants to avoid a ‘a war of words,’ at least until he’s completed his review of North Korean policy,” one former official said.

By Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer

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