Can South Koreas Leader End Trump's North Korea Crisis?
By Gareth Porter
South Korean President Moon Jae-in. (Julie Jacobson / AP)
The agreement for cooperation between North and South Korea on the Olympics
provides a pause in the drumbeat of war threats by postponing joint
U.S.-South Korean military exercises until after the Winter Games are
finished. But the real payoff from the Olympics détente is the possibility
that the governments of South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Koreas
Kim Jong Un could reach agreement on modifying joint U.S.-Republic of Korea
(ROK) military exercises in return for a North Korean nuclear and missile
testing freeze.
That intra-Korean deal could open a new path to negotiations between the
United States and North Korea over Pyongyangs nuclear and missile programs
and a final settlement of the Korean Warif Donald Trump is willing to take
such an off-ramp from the crisis. But its not just Kim Jong Un who has
taken the diplomatic initiative to open such a path out of the crisis. Moon
Jae-in has been working to advance such a compromise since he was
inaugurated as South Korean president last May.
The Moon proposalwhich has never been reported in U.S. news mediawas first
floated just 10 days before Moon was to arrive for a June 29 summit meeting
with Trump in Washington, D.C. Moons special adviser on unification,
foreign affairs and national security, Moon Chung-in, presented the proposal
at a seminar at the Wilson Center in Washington as a reflection of President
Moons thinking. Moon Chung-in said one of the presidents ideas was that
South Korea and the U.S. can discuss reducing the South Korea-U.S. joint
military exercises if North Korea suspends its nuclear weapons and missile
activities. He added that President Moon was thinking that we could even
decrease the American strategic assets that are deployed to the Korean
Peninsula [during the exercises].
Speaking with South Korean correspondents after the seminar, Moon Chung-in
said there is no need to deploy strategic assets such as aircraft carriers
and nuclear submarines during the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle exercises.
Military planners use the term strategic assets to refer to aircraft and
ships capable of delivering nuclear weapons, to which North Korea have long
objected strenuously.
Moon Chung-in suggested stripping those strategic assets, which had never
been part of the joint exercises before 2015, out of the joint exercises,
arguing that their addition had turned out to be a strategic mistake. Since
the U.S. has forward deployed its strategic assets, he said, North Korea
seems to be responding in this way because it thinks that the U.S. will
strike if the North shows any weakness.
Moon Chung-in told South Korean reporters later that he was presenting his
own ideas, which were not the official policy of the government, but that
it would not be wrong to say that President Moon agreed with them. And a
senior official in Moons office who insisted on anonymity in talking to
reporters did not deny that the idea discussed by Moon Chung-in was under
consideration by President Moon, but said the office had told Chung that his
statement would not be helpful for the future relations between South Korea
and the United States.
Another figure with ties to the new government, veteran diplomat Shin
Bong-Kil, presented essentially the same proposal at a forum in Seoul in
late June. Shin, former director of the Inter-Korea Policy Division of the
ROK Foreign Ministry for many years and a member of the diplomatic team the
Moon administration had sent to explain its policies to the Chinese
government, had just returned from a conference in Stockholm in which North
Korean foreign ministry officials also participated. Based on what he heard
at the conference, Shin argued that offering to eliminate such elements from
the joint Key Resolve and Foal Eagle exercises would provide what he called
huge leverage to get North Korean acceptance of a nuclear and missile
testing freeze.
The same week that Moon Chung-in made the proposal public, President Moon
himself argued in an interview with CBS News against the Trump
administrations demand for immediate complete dismantlement of North
Koreas nuclear program. Moon said, I believe that first we must vie for a
freeze of North Koreas nuclear and missile programs.
He was suggesting the need to substitute the freeze for freeze proposal
embraced by Beijing, Pyongyang and Moscow, which would require a complete
end to joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises for a freeze on North
Korean nuclear and missile testingan option the U.S. military has rejected.
Two American Korea experts already had been developing their own detailed
proposal for downsizing the U.S.-ROK exercises. Joel Wit, a former senior
adviser to Ambassador Robert Gallucci in the negotiation of the agreed
frameworkwho now runs the website 38 North, focused on North Koreaand
William McKinney, former chief of the Far East branch in the
political-military division of Army headquarters at the Pentagon, argued
that the flights of nuclear-capable aircraft and other strategic assets
werent necessary for U.S. military objectives.
As McKinney noted in an interview with me, the U.S. flights simulating
nuclear attacks on the North using dual capability aircraft are generally
outside the exercise program. The purpose of those flights, McKinney said,
is to be a visible expression of our deterrent capability, and it could be
argued that it has already been shown.
Among other changes, McKinney and Wit proposed that the joint U.S.-ROK
Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercise scheduled to begin in August be replaced by
a South Korean government exercise that would be observed by senior U.S.
officers, and that the Foal Eagle exercise, which involves coordinated naval
and air operational exercises, be conducted over the horizonmeaning
farther away from the Korean Peninsula.
Moon quietly pressed his case with the Trump administration, requesting that
Ulchi Freedom Guardian be carried out without strategic assets being
included, and although it went almost unnoticed, the U.S. command in South
Korea quietly agreed. The South Korean television network SBS reported on
Aug. 18 that the United States had canceled the previously planned
deployment of two U.S. aircraft carriers, a nuclear submarine and strategic
bomber as part of the exercise at Moons request.
The Winter Olympics provided Moon with the rationale for pushing his
diplomatic agenda further. He announced on Dec. 19 that he had requested
that the U.S. military postpone the joint U.S.-ROK exercise scheduled for
January through March until after the Olympics, contingent on North Korea
not carrying out a test. But before an official U.S. response was
forthcoming, Kim Jong Un responded with his own political-diplomatic
initiative. In his annual New Years Day speech, Kim called for what he
called détente with South Korea in order to ease the acute military
tensions between north and south.
The North Korean leader asked the Moon government to discontinue all the
nuclear drills they have staged with outside forces and refrain from
bringing in nuclear armaments and aggressive forces of the United States.
That formulation, distinguishing between joint military drills and nuclear
drills, suggested that Kim was signaling Pyongyangs interest in negotiating
an agreement along the lines that Moons advisers had raised publicly six
months earlier.
Moon responded with an invitation to North Korea for high-level talks on
Jan. 9 about Olympic cooperation and easing military tensions, beginning the
process of North-South nuclear diplomacy.
Not surprisingly, the corporate media have looked askance at Moons North
Korean diplomacy. The New York Times story on Kims New Years address
speculated that the North Korean leader was successfully playing President
Moon against the Trump administration, but in fact, the South Korean
government understands that the initiative cannot succeed without Trump
administration support.
The North-South talks that have begun will revolve around coming up with a
formula for a deal on modifying the joint military exercises in return for a
freeze on North Korean strategic weapons testing. The talks could take
longer than the Olympics, which might require further postponement of the
U.S.-ROK exercises that normally begin in March. When South Korean Foreign
Minister Kang Kyung-Hwa announced on Jan. 25 that a U.S. first strike on
North Korean missile and/or nuclear targets is unacceptable to the ROK
government, she declined to say whether the South would resume the drills
after the Olympics.
That statement hints at a reality that neither the Trump administration nor
corporate news media have publicly acknowledged: The United States South
Korean ally regards beginning negotiations with North Korea as a high
priorityhigher than resuming the military exercises that have riled North
Korea for decades and especially since 2015.
