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President Moon Jae-in presides over a National Security Council meeting on North Korea’s missile launch at the Blue House in Seoul

A new word has popped up in early predictions for President Moon Jae-in’s North Korea policy approach: “Moonshine.” The expectation is that Moon’s policy approach will follow along the lines of the Sunshine Policies of former Presidents Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003-08).

One month has passed since the new administration took office, but the “moonlight” in inter-Korean relations has remained faint. It’s not that the administration in Seoul has done nothing. Over the past weeks, it has cautiously looked for way to restore ties, granting approval several times for private groups to contact North Korea. Its aim is to get the ball rolling with inter-Korean relations at the levels of humanitarian assistance and private interchange.

But the response from North Korea has been cool. Apart from a proposal to stage a joint event for the 17th anniversary of the June 15 Joint Declaration, it has not answered any requests from contact from private South Korean groups. Even the discussions that did manage to take place on the joint event failed to yield results, and the decision was finally made to stage events separately. For now, private exchange efforts appear likely to have trouble gaining traction.

Military antagonisms between the two sides also remain unchanged. North Korea has conducted five test launches of missiles in the time since the new administration took office, including ballistic, cruise, surface, and antiship types. The international community’s sanctions have intensified in response, including the UN Security Council’s June 2 passage of the new Resolution 2356 for sanctions. The South Korean government has been similarly stern, with Moon calling a plenary meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) on June 8 and declaring that he would “not back down or give one inch when it comes to national security and the people’s safety.”

The failure to find common ground is being understood as a early battle of wills between the two sides. Indeed, inter-Korean relations have typically gone through periods of adjustment in the past after a change in administrations in Seoul. Both sides have need a time to feel out the aims of their newly arrived counterparts. Indeed, Pyongyang was hesitant to approach dialogue with the South during the Kim Dae-jung administration until the inter-Korean summit happened in 2000. The Roh administration went through a chilly period early on when relations with the North remained strained. The blinking contest taking place now under Moon is not too much of a break with “tradition.”

The administration’s position now is to start with the simple things that can be done right away. This means beginning with areas like private exchange that present less of a burden for either side, and moving from there to more serious political and military cooperation. In part, this is a forced choice to get around ongoing sanctions against the North, including UNSC resolutions and the May 24 Measures adopted after the 2010 ROKS Cheonan warship sinking in 2010 - but it’s also consistent with the approach past South Korean administration have traditionally adopted.

North Korea has gone in the other direction. A June 6 commentary piece from an individual contributor published in the Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the North Korean Workers’ Party, stressed that inter-Korean relations “do not improve on their own simply because the administration has changed.”

“The question is not who has assumed power, but whether or not they are committed to respecting and implementing the June 15 Joint Declaration [of 2000] and the October 4 Declaration [of 2007],” it asserted.

The message is that any solution must start with the fundamental issues. What constitutes a “fundamental issue” varies from one situation to the next - it may mean the withdrawal of US Forces Korea or abolition of South Korea’s National Security Law. But Pyongyang has consistently used the same approach: positing some sensitive issue as fundamental and feeling out the response from Seoul. In essence, both sides have stuck relatively close to the traditional methodology: making a move and seeing what the other side does. It’s also the reason there could be improvements for inter-Korean relations in the long term.

But some uncertainties are present that didn’t exist in the past. The “best” times in the past all came when Kim Jong-il was in power. The Kim Jong-un regime, in contrast, has almost no experience with inter-Korean dialogue. A few senior-level meetings did happen under the Park Geun-hye administration (2013-16), but they didn’t last - and they didn’t do anything to help inter-Korean relations. Currently, Seoul doesn’t have anyone in its ranks with direct experience with Kim Jong-un since he took over as KWP chairman in Dec. 2011. The possibility of North Korea making some unexpected new move with inter-Korean relations cannot be ruled out either.

By Park Byong-su, senior staff writer

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