Donald Kirk

Moon Jae-in’s problem: his mode of North Korean diplomacy is incompatible with South Korean democracy

The South Korean leader’s strategy for bringing North Korea to negotiations has included silence on Kim Jong-un’s ruthlessness and rights abuses, which could jeopardise South Koreans’ hard-won rights

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un walks with South Korea President Moon Jae-in after their meeting at the northern side of Panmunjom in North Korea in March 2018. Photo: South Korea Presidential Blue House via AP

Donald Kirk

Published: 10:00am, 18 Apr 2019Updated: 10:40am, 18 Apr 2019

South Korea's President Moon Jae-in faces a problem of enormous proportions. He is committed to reconciliation and dialogue with North Korea but is in no position to destroy the historic alliance with the United States. Rather, he sees himself as a go-between, an intermediary, bringing the US into an era of peace and friendship with North Korea, even though Kim Jong-un shows no willingness to give up his nuclear warheads and the missiles for firing them at distant targets.

In his eagerness to bring about North-South reconciliation, Moon also hopes to persuade the US and UN to give up or at least ease up on some if not most of the sanctions imposed after the North’s missile and nuclear tests. Trump has professed his great relationship with Kim but is holding back on abandoning the sanctions essential to pressuring him. Without the sanctions, Kim would obviously feel no need to engage in more than superficial shows of agreement on any deal on his nuclear programme.

In Moon’s anxiety to persuade the American public, and the American president in particular, that Kim will actually deal in good faith, he has gone out of his way to praise North Korea’s leader. He has spoken as if Kim were really a benevolent fellow who would love to form normal relationships not only with South Korea but also with the US and other Western nations.

Moon talks about coming to terms with Kim as if North Korea were a “progressive” country with which South Korean “progressives” such as himself should get along. Moon may think of himself as “progressive” in view of his career on behalf of social reform, workers’ rights and his desire to overhaul the economic system under which the conglomerates, known as chaebol, control most of the wealth, either directly or indirectly through suppliers and investors.

Yet Moon and other self-styled progressives do not want to recognise that North Korea is far from a progressive state and Kim is the opposite of a progressive leader. Moon and his advisers fail to acknowledge that Kim represents a throwback to the worst days of the Joseon dynasty, when all Korea was ruled by kings with vast unquestioned power.

In his daily lifestyle, in his demand for unquestioned subservience, in the impunity with which his vast security apparatus imprisons and executes those suspected of disloyalty, Kim behaves as a dictator whose values are the mirror opposite of those South Koreans have come to respect since adoption of the democratic constitution in 1987.