[Park Sang-seek] President Park’s approach to North Korea

In her address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on May 9, President Park Geun-hye outlined her North Korea policy. Dubbed trustpolitik, the policy consists of a trust-building process on the Korean peninsula, a trust-building process in Northeast Asia, and an international peace park in the Demilitarized Zone.

There can be two contrasting views of her plan. Some might think that her plan is the rehash of the old strategies that her predecessors have already tried but to no avail. Others might support the plan because they believe its label may be old but contains new ideas and will work. 

It seems that her trustpolitik is based on the

conviction that South Korea’s past North Korea strategy was basically a Cold War approach whose goal was to defeat the enemy by all means. This Cold War approach has relied on various strategies according to changes in the security environment ranging from confrontation, containment, congagement (containment and engagement) to engagement.

But all these strategies have intensified antagonism between the South and the North by deepening mutual distrust. Consequently, South and North Korea have never had peaceful coexistence.

Conservatives argue that North Korea is entirely responsible for this antagonism because the North Korean communists by nature cannot abandon their ultimate goal ― communization of the entire Korean Peninsula although they are now too preoccupied with their own survival to confront the South. The liberals and progressives contend that the South is partially or totally responsible for mutual distrust and antagonism and has never trusted the North.

President Park, recognizing this Cold War mentality and vicious circle, wants to build trust from the bottom, not from the top. She has presented three broad plans. I think that her trustpolitik can succeed if it is based on the following principles.

First, Seoul needs to refrain from turning all inter-Korean disputes and conflicts into national security issues and politicizing them. It is extremely difficult to build trust in the political and security fields, but it is not so difficult to build trust in the economic, social and cultural fields.

Second, the trust-building process should start from low politics to high politics. This principle is closely linked to the first.

Third, exchange and cooperation in the non-security and non-political fields should not be directly linked to the solution of security and political issues until mutual trust is substantially built. In other words, a transformational strategy should be avoided.

It goes without saying that security and political issues are closely intertwined with non-security and non-political issues. But unless the efforts to delink them are made, trustpolitik will not work.

The next question is how to apply these three principles to concrete cases. Can Seoul postpone the denuclearization of North Korea and concentrate on the efforts to turn other security issues into low political issues? Trustpolitik should also be used in dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue. The question is how this will work in the nuclear negotiations.

If the negotiators first make efforts to overcome their respective perceptional differences, they would be able to become more trustful of each other. In the past nuclear negotiations, Seoul and Washington blamed Pyongyang for using the time for negotiations to advance its nuclear capabilities, while Pyongyang blamed them for using the time to strangulate it.

A better solution is to make efforts to remove the sources of mutual mistrust instead of bartering denuclearization for economic and other compensations. Just as the South does not believe that the North will abandon its nuclear weaponry, so does the North not believe that the South and the U.S. will keep it alive.

North Korea seems to believe that it is faced with the same predicament the former Soviet Union experienced in the last period of the Cold War: it could no longer continue the arms race with the U.S. because it could no longer compete economically and technologically, and it could no longer keep its people away from the outside world, particularly after the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe was established in 1972. North Korea also knows too well that the former Soviet Union collapsed by itself mainly because it resorted to a wrong approach: glasnost (opening) and perestroika (restructuring). No wonder Pyongyang sticks to nuclear North Korea and rejects glasnost.

Trustpolitik also needs to consider another aspect of North Korean diplomacy. North Korea always sticks to bilateral negotiations in the inter-Korean dialogue and the nuclear negotiations. It should be noted that it had wanted to discuss substantive issues with the U.S. throughout the six-party talks. Trustpolitik envisions bilateral (inter-Korean talks), multilateral (the Northeast Asian peace process), and mixed (the international peace park) formats.

President Park’s trustpolitik provides broad guidelines in the three trust building processes: In inter-Korean relations economic assistance will not be politicized; the international park in the DMZ will be open to the world; and the Northeast Asian dialogue process will deal with non-security and non-political issues ― at least low political and low security issues.

But in the inter-Korean dialogue economic assistance, exchange and cooperation should be delinked from security and political issues for the time being, and in the Northeast Asian dialogue purely non-security and non-political issues should be placed on the agenda for some time.

By Park Sang-seek 

Park Sang-seek is a professor at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University in Seoul. ― Ed.