Anna Fifield
SEOUL - South Korea’s new president said Wednesday that he would be willing to hold talks in Washington and Pyongyang in efforts to ease the North Korean nuclear crisis, wasting no time in embarking on a new approach to dealing with Kim Jong Un’s regime.
The offer of shuttle diplomacy by Moon Jae-in came shortly after he was sworn in as president after winning a snap election triggered by the impeachment of former conservative leader Park Geun-hye.
Moon had vowed on the campaign trail to resume engagement with North Korea, a sharp change from the hard-line approach taken by South Korea’s past two governments - and by the international community - in response to North Korea’s nuclear tests and missile launches.
“I will try to solve the security crisis urgently,” Moon said at the National Assembly in Seoul. “If needed, I will fly to straight to Washington. I will also go to Beijing and Tokyo and even Pyongyang in the right circumstances.”
Reinforcing his stance, Moon appointed two top aides with experience in dealing with North Korea.
He nominated Suh Hoon, a former intelligence official who arranged the two inter-Korean presidential summits held in the 2000s, to lead the National Intelligence Service.
Suh lived in North Korea for two years beginning in 1997 to run an energy project that was part of a 1994 denuclearization deal with North Korea. He met the North’s leader at the time, Kim Jong Il, during North-South summits in 2000 and 2007.
Moon also appointed as his chief of staff a former lawmaker who, as a student, went to North Korea to meet the state’s founder, Kim Il Sung.
Moon’s first words and actions as president show his determination to revive the South Korean “sunshine policy” of engaging North Korea rather than isolating it.
But this would put South Korea at odds with the United States, where President Trump has vowed to use “maximum pressure” to force the North to give up its nuclear weapons program, and with an international community that is largely supportive of tougher sanctions.
The sunshine policy was started in 1998 by Kim Dae-jung, a former pro-democracy activist who became South Korea’s first liberal president.
The policy got its name from an Aesop fable in which the wind and the sun compete to make a traveler take off his coat. The sun gently warms the traveler and succeeds, the moral of the fable being that gentle persuasion works better than force.
Kim Dae-jung engaged Pyongyang by laying the groundwork for a tourism project at a mountain on the North Korean side of the border which South Koreans were allowed to visit. After his summit with Kim Jong Il, families separated when the peninsula was divided were allowed to meet for reunions. Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his efforts.
His successor, Roh Moo-hyun, continued the policy, opening a joint industrial park near the inter-Korean border where North Koreans would work in South Korean-owned factories, helping both sides. Roh went to Pyongyang for his own summit with Kim Jong Il near the end of his tenure in 2007.
Moon, who had started a law firm with Roh, served as his chief of staff in the presidential Blue House and was involved in North Korea policy during this time.
But the two conservative presidents who succeeded Kim and Roh abandoned the sunshine policy, instead promoting direct and multilateral sanctions to punish North Korea for its nuclear ambitions.
After North Korea’s fourth nuclear test last year, Park closed the joint industrial park, declaring that the money was going directly to the North Korean regime. In the 12 years that the complex was in operation, North Korea had made a total of about $560 million from the site, her government said.
During his campaign, Moon said that he would seek to reopen the industrial park and tourism projects, and would be willing to met Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang if necessary.
Returning to an engagement approach would “increase of predictability and permanence of inter-Korean policies” and help the South Korean economy, Moon said.
But reviving such inter-Korean cooperation will be difficult, analysts say.
For starters, the world is a very different place now than it was in 1997.
Then, North Korea did not have a proven nuclear weapons program. Now, it has conducted five nuclear tests and Kim Jong Un seems hellbent on developing missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads to the United States.
Plus, North Korean attacks on South Korea - including the sinking of the Cheonan naval corvette in 2010 and the shelling of a South Korean island, which together claimed 50 lives - have sapped a lot of the South Korean energy to be nice to North Korea.
Increasingly strict sanctions have been imposed through the United Nations in response to North Korea’s nuclear tests and missile launches, and both the United States and South Korea have also imposed direct prohibitions on dealing with North Korea.
“The international community has moved decisively toward a more sanctions and less engagement approach with North Korea and even South Korea’s own domestic laws will make grandiose unaccountable inter-Korean engagement more difficult,” Marcus Noland and Kent Boydston of the Peterson Institute for International Economics wrote in an analysis.
If South Korea was to say that special considerations apply on the peninsula, the Moon administration would “bring South Korea into immediate diplomatic conflict with the U.S. and undercut China’s already tepid willingness to implement sanctions,” they wrote.
Even raising the specter of a sunshine policy approach will complicate the international community’s efforts to make North Korea give up its nuclear program, said David Straub, a former official in the State Department who worked on North Korea.
Moon’s policy is much closer to China’s than to the United States’ policy, he noted.
“South Korea has tremendous influence in the international community on this issue, and that in itself is a challenge for President Trump,” Straub said, noting that Kim Dae-jung and Roh both bad-mouthed President George W. Bush’s approach at that time.
But Lee Jong-seok, who served as unification minister during the Roh administration, said a decade of sanctions had not worked.
“It’s now time for the U.S. to review its policy of imposing pressure on North Korea over its nuclear program. Has North Korea recognized its wrongdoings as a result of this policy of applying strong pressure?” Lee asked.
Moon recognized that pressure alone was not sufficient for resolving the North Korean nuclear issue, but that the key was in pursuing both dialogue and pressure, he said.
“President Moon will combine sanctions and dialogue, but which comes first will be decided after talking to relevant nations like the U.S. and China,” Lee said. “South Korea can’t unilaterally hold talks while everyone else is sanctioning North Korea.”
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The Washington Post’s Yoonjung Seo contributed reporting.
문재인 대통령 북핵 해결 방안 제시
안나 피필드
서울 - 대한민국의 새 대통령이 수요일 북핵 위협에 의한 한반도 긴장을 완화하기 위해 워싱턴, 그리고 평양 양쪽 모두와 대화할 의향이 있다고 말했다. 취임하자마자 시간을 두지않고 바로 북핵 문제에 대한 대안을 제시한 것이다. 문재인 대통령은 전임 대통령 탄핵 후 갑작스럽게 실시된 대선에 승리하자마자 대북 외교에 대한 자신의 의견을 피력했고 적극적으로 대화에 나설 의지가 있음을 분명히 한 것이다.
문 대통령은 선거기간중에 이미 당선 시 북한과의 대화를 재개할 것이라 약속했었다. 지난 두 번의 보수 정권이 유지했던 대북 강경 정책을 중단하고 보다 유화적인 태도로 전환할 것을 시사한다. 문 대통령은 국회 연설을 통해 “북한문제를 신속하게 해결하도록 노력할 것이다. 필요하다면 워싱턴, 베이징, 도쿄, 심지어 평양에도 적절한 환경이 조성된다면 날아갈 것”이라고 말했다.
자신의 의지를 더 분명히 하기 위해 그는 2명의 인사를 단행했다.
새 국정원장으로 서 훈 전 국정원 3차장을 임명했다. 그는 2000년대 정상회담을 지휘한 경험이 있다. 그리고 그는 북핵을 포기한다는 조건 하에 성사된 에너지 프로젝트를 이끌기 위해 1997년부터 북한에 2년간 거주 한 경험도 갖고 있다. 2000년 2007년에 있었던 남북정상회담 중에는 김정일을 직접 만난 적도 있다.
비서실장으로는 임종석 전 의원을 임명했다. 그는 과거 임수경 방북 사건에 관련돼 구속된 전력이 있다.
문재인 대통령의 의지는 햇볕정책을 부활시키는데 있다. 북한을 고립시키기 보다는 대화에 끌어들여야 한다는 것이다.
문제는 미국이 제시하는 대북정책과 문 대통령이 마음에 두고 있는 정책 방향이 다르다는 것이다. 트럼프 대통령은 북한을 극도로 압박해서 핵을 포기하도록 만들겠다는 생각을 갖고 있고 다른 세계 여러 국가들도 대북 압박 수위를 높이는데 수긍하는 분위기다.
문 대통령은 선거기간 중 개성공단 재개 및 확대와 북한 관광 프로젝트 재가동을 공약으로 발표했었다. 대화는 북한 문제를 보다 예측가능하고 안정적으로 만들어 줄 것이라는 것이 근거다.
그러나 관계자들은 북한과의 대화는 어려울 것으로 보인다고 설명했다.
남북정상회담을 성사시키던 1997년과 상황이 판이하게 다르기 때문이다. 현재 북한은 미국 본토를 위협할 수 있는 핵무기를 갖고 있다. 그리고 천안함 사건, 연평도 포격같은 사건이 일어나기 훨씬 전 이야기이다.
유엔을 통해 세계는 대북 경제 제재를 강화시키는 쪽으로 움직이고 있다. 문재인 정부가 북한과의 대화를 강조한다면 이는 미국과 직접적인 외교적 마찰이 생길 수 있음을 보여주는 것이며
그렇지 않아도 대북 제재에 소극적인 중국의 의지를 더 약화시킬 수 있다.
“지금같은 분위기에 햇볕정책을 들고 나온다면 북한이 무기를 포기하도록 만들기 위해 힘을 쏟고 있는 세계적인 노력에 혼란을 줄 수 있다”고 전직 미 국무부 직원 데이비드 스트라우브가 설명했다.
스트라우브에 따르면 문 대통령의 대북 정책은 미국보다는 중국의 관점에 더 가깝다.
“한국은 북한문제에 있어 세계무대에서 큰 영향력을 갖고 있습니다. 트럼프 대통령으로서는 문제가 더 까다로워진 것일 수 있다.”
-도움: 워싱턴포스트 서윤정 기자. (번역: 이동근)