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Open Questions | Why North Korea is starting to become a ‘forgotten’ space for China and the US
Political scientist Kim Heung-kyu on the state of play on the Korean peninsula and how Seoul can benefit from Beijing-Washington rivalry
Reading Time:11 minutes
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Kim Heung-kyu is a professor of political science and diplomacy and director of the US-China Policy Institute at Ajou University in Suwon, South Korea. He is also founder and president of the Plaza Project, a bipartisan think tank affiliated with the Korean National Assembly, and was a policy adviser for the South Korean presidential office. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.
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How do you assess the Korean peninsula situation as North Korea continues to advance its nuclear and missile programme, with no denuclearisation negotiations either with the United States or South Korea for more than five years?
North Korea had tried to improve its relationship with the United States through [former US President Donald] Trump in order to resolve its security issues, but this ended in failure. With the Hanoi summit [in 2019] as a starting point, Kim Jong-un seems to have completely made up his mind that it is impossible to solve North Korea’s security problem through negotiations or any improvement in relations with the US.
The only thing that can be done is self-help. To ensure that none of the great powers can harm North Korea’s sovereignty and interests, it needs a certain means – nuclear missiles. Thus it succeeded by pouring all of North Korea’s power and energy into it.
I think North Korea is a country that early on defined the strategic competition between the US and China as a new cold war and, in a way, welcomed the advent of US-China strategic competition. If it becomes a new cold war, there will be no choice but to decide whether you are an ally or an enemy, and if that happens, North Korea will benefit from the South Korea-US-Japan versus North Korea-China-Russia structure.
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Who would even dare to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons and missiles? The US does not want that, and South Korea cannot do it either. From a security point of view, North Korea is completely safe now.
The great powers that can support the energy and economic aid that Pyongyang needs or contain any abuse of sanctions on North Korea are either Russia or China. Pyongyang has been quite successful in that the structure of the new cold war has become fairly comfortable for itself. The only problem is that the relationship with China is not as smooth as expected, and there is a contradicting aspect of China’s interest with North Korea.
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