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South Korea President Moon Jae-in speaks in an interview with the New York Times in the Blue House. (provided by the Blue House)

A sharp scuffle appears to be going down behind the scenes between the governments of South Korea, the US and Japan about the outcome of the US review of North Korean policy, which the Biden administration will soon be announcing. Last-minute efforts to adjust the ultimate policy seem to be dragging on, with South Korean President Moon Jae-in firmly expressing his government’s stance during a recent interview with the press.

The US State Department, in a regular press briefing Friday, said that the US doesn’t have a specific timeline for the policy review when asked if the US was going to wait until Moon visits the US at the end of May.

“While we don’t have a specific timeline for the review, again, what I’ll say is that the Biden administration is conducting a thorough interagency review of our policy towards North Korea,” US State Department principal deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter said.

While Porter dodged the question about whether the review’s outcome would come out after Moon visits the US, her response suggests that the review could take somewhat longer than expected.

The reporter’s question at the US State Department press conference appears to have been prompted by Moon’s vigorous expression of his viewpoint about the Biden administration’s North Korea policy in an interview printed by the New York Times on Wednesday.

“The most important starting point for both governments is to have the will for dialogue and to sit down face to face at an early date,” Moon said in the interview. He also said the two sides should take a “gradual and phased” approach to denuclearization while “simultaneously” making concessions to each other.

More specifically, Moon called for building “a mutually trusted road map” for denuclearization “on what President Trump has left,” referring to the joint declaration reached by North Korea and the US during their 2018 summit in Singapore.

Moon apparently agreed to the interview out of concern that Biden was leaning closer to Japan’s position on North Korea policy following a summit with the Japanese leader on April 16.

In fact, a senior White House official said in a press conference the day before, on April 15, that the two leaders would “have a chance to put the finishing touches” on the outcome of the US review of North Korean policy, strongly suggesting that the results would be announced soon.

In effect, Moon sought to use an interview with the most influential newspaper in the US to counter Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s outreach to the US.

Biden and Suga released a joint statement in their summit on April 16 under the title of “US-Japan Global Partnership for a New Era.”

In the statement, the US and Japan agreed on four principles about North Korea: calling for North Korea to abide by UN Security Council resolutions, promoting the denuclearization of North Korea (rather than the Korean Peninsula), strengthening “deterrence to maintain peace and stability in the region” – implying more South Korea-US and Japan-US military exercises, and blocking proliferation.

But disagreements were also evident in the statement. Suga said in a press conference after the summit that the two countries had agreed on the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles of all ranges, but that wasn’t included in the joint statement.

It would appear that South Korea and Japan are standing on either side of the US and yanking its arms in the opposite direction, with Seoul calling for gradual and phased denuclearization based on the Singapore joint declaration, and Japan pushing for CVID, an approach that North Korea has roundly rejected.

On Thursday, the day after Moon’s interview ran in the New York Times, Noh Kyu-duk, South Korea’s special representative for Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs, spoke on the phone with Sung Kim, the acting assistant secretary in the US State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

In a press release, South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Noh and Kim’s phone call had “confirmed that close cooperation is taking place between South Korea and the US in regard to the US’s review of North Korea policy, which is now being wrapped up.” Seoul appears to have reiterated the position that Moon expressed in the interview during deliberations between these lower-level officials.

But it’s still uncertain to what extent the US will accommodate South Korea’s preferences and whether it will put off announcing the results of the review until after Moon visits the US.

“[The results of the review] will come out soon, though not in a few days. Waiting until after the South Korea-US summit would push the announcement until the second half of the year, which would be too late. It will come out earlier than that,” predicted a high-ranking official at South Korea’s Foreign Ministry.

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

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