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US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga walk through the Colonnade to take part in a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 16. (AFP/Yonhap News)

Japanese officials have repeatedly misrepresented the outcome of the US Joe Biden administration’s review of North Korea policy to serve Japanese interests. Considering that Japan played a considerable role in obstructing the Korean Peninsula peace process in 2018 and 2019, South Korea and the US will need to engage in honest dialogue to prevent that from happening again.

Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi held a press conference Monday in London, where a conference of top diplomats from the G7 countries was being held, and presented the results of his meeting with the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a work dinner with the other G7 diplomats.

Motegi said during the press conference that “Japan and the US had reconfirmed their intention to work together closely to bring about North Korea’s complete denuclearization in line with UN Security Council resolutions.” He added that he’d led a discussion at the work dinner in which the participating countries “agreed about sticking to the goal of North Korea eliminating all weapons of mass destruction [including nuclear weapons] and ballistic missiles of all ranges through the CVID method [of complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement] and to continue completely implementing UN Security Council resolutions.”

If Motegi’s explanation is accurate, it means that the Biden administration will have to base future negotiations with North Korea on the CVID approach. But Motegi was presumably misrepresenting the US’s actual intentions in an attempt to benefit Japan.

While announcing the completion of the Biden administration’s North Korea policy review in a press briefing Friday White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that “our goal remains the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” referring to a denuclearized South Korea promoting the denuclearization of North Korea. Psaki didn’t use the phrase “the denuclearization of North Korea,” which would mean the North’s unilateral abandonment of nuclear weapons.

White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan, who coordinates the US foreign policy and national security policy, said during an interview with ABC on Sunday that “our policy toward North Korea is not aimed at hostility” but at “achieving the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reemphasized that the US’s goal is the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula during a press conference after a meeting with the UK’s foreign minister in London on Monday.

On the same day, the US State Department said in a summary of Blinken’s meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong that the two countries would pursue goals “including US-Japan-ROK trilateral cooperation toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Even though the US has repeatedly spoken of pursuing the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Japan is the only party insisting on using language about the “denuclearization of North Korea.”

A similar pattern is evident in Japan’s claims about CVID, which North Korea explicitly rejected in harsh terms as a “unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization” in a statement by the spokesperson of North Korea’s Foreign Ministry on July 7, 2018.

While Motegi said he’d led the discussion at the work dinner and persuaded the G7 diplomats to agree to pursue denuclearization through the CVID approach, that hasn’t been corroborated by a G7 joint statement or a statement from the US State Department.

This suggests that the G7 representatives had refrained from disagreeing with Motegi out of diplomatic courtesy, which Motegi then repackaged as agreement when he was speaking to Japanese reporters at the press conference.

This wasn’t the first time Japan has adopted this kind of attitude. “The US and Japan are in agreement about forcing [North Korea] to eliminate all its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles of all ranges through the CVID approach,” Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said following a summit with US President Joe Biden on April 16. But Biden, who was standing beside Suga, avoided any mention of this language, indicating a disagreement between the two countries.

In fact, American officials have taken every opportunity to refer to a “practical” approach to North Korea following their announcement of the completion of the North Korea policy review.

Since the US has proposed to North Korea that the two sides seek a solution, it probably won’t insist on the CVID approach, which would close the door to diplomacy between the two sides.

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

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