There are two major points President Park Geun-hye is focusing on in her current historic visit to Iran: economic cooperation and nonproliferation vis-a-vis North Korea.
Park, who arrived in Tehran on Sunday as the first South Korean head of state to visit Iran since the two countries formed diplomatic relations in 1962, will have talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday.
For Park, the high-level talks in Tehran could not have come at a better time. For starters, the Korean economy, stuck in a low-growth trap and with its once powerful industries struggling in an extended slump, needs an impetus and Iran is in a good position in this regard.
Park’s hope for expanding economic cooperation with Iran, now free from international sanctions that had suppressed its economy since 2006, is attested by the fact that she took a 236-strong business delegation -- the largest of its kind -- to Tehran.
Along with government officials, the Korean tycoons and executives will sign deals and hold negotiations on projects in the fields of construction, energy, natural resources development, information technology and health care.
Iran’s already big economic potential -- it has a population of 80 million and one of the world’s richest reserves in crude oil and natural gas -- has grown further with the lifting of sanctions early this year. Chinese President Xi Jinping must have seen the same opportunity when he became the first foreign leader to visit Iran in January this year.
Park and her economic policymakers, as well as Korean industrialist, need to make sure what they agree on or discuss with their Iranian counterparts will bear fruit and provide fresh vigor into the Korean economy as the first “Middle East boom” in the 1970s and 1980s did.
Regarding North Korea, Park’s visit to Iran was also well timed in that the North is now under the toughest-ever international sanctions -- similar to those that had been in place for Iran over the past decade -- for its latest nuclear and missile provocations.
North Korea, which was slapped with sanctions for detonating what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb in January and a long-range ballistic missile the following month, remains defiant against the U.N.-led sanctions.
South Korean and U.S. officials say the North is ready to conduct a fifth nuclear test at any time, which they believe its young dictator Kim Jong-un wants to use to rally the country behind him on the occasion of the May 6 Workers’ Party congress, the first of its kind in 36 years.
The talks between Park and Iranian leaders will certainly give prominence to North Korea’s irrational nuclear arms program and help her reinforce international pressure on North Korea to -- as Iran did -- abandon nukes and get free of international sanctions.
North Korea and Iran had kept close ties since 1980 when the North supplied its Scud missiles to Iran during its war against Iraq. The scene of Park standing alongside Iranian leaders will certainly send a message to Kim that he will only deepen his country’s isolation if he sticks to nukes and missiles.
North Korea had a chance to become today’s Iran in 1994 when it agreed to receive light-water reactors and heavy oil in return for stopping its own nuclear program. It would have been much better off had it not abandoned the agreement. This is the message Park and Iranian leaders are together delivering to Kim. It not too late for the North to become a second Iran.
