TIME Magazine Interviews ROK President Moon Jae-in
TIME Magazine this week has a long profile and interview with the new ROK President Moon Jae-in that is worth reading for those unfamiliar with his background. Here is an excerpt about his views on North Korea:
Moon has seen these kinds of negotiations in action before and believes they can work again. As chief of staff to Roh, he helped engineer the South Korean President’s historic summit with Kim’s father Kim Jong Il in 2007, and the six-party denuclearization talks between North and South Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan, which ran from 2003 to 2009. A satellite launch by Pyongyang ended the talks, and critics say the $4.5 billion of aid funneled to the regime during the “sunshine policy” of engagement actually accelerated the weapons program. Moon, however, points to the Sept. 19, 2005, Joint Declaration — encompassing full dismantlement of North Korean nuclear weapons, a peace treaty and even normalized relations with the U.S. — as evidence the sunshine policy was better than the following decade of isolation and censure. “The North even blew up the cooling tower of its nuclear reactor,” he says. “The same step-by-step approach is still workable.”
Given Trump’s stated disdain for the nuclear deal the U.S. helped fashion with Iran, it’s hard to imagine he would be eager to pursue a similar agreement with the Kim regime, which has a track record of noncompliance. But Moon says he and Trump already agree that the Obama Administration’s approach of “strategic patience” with North Korea was a failure. Surely the U.S. President could be persuaded to take a different tack, he says. “I recall him once saying that he can talk with Kim Jong Un over a hamburger.” Trump, he adds, is above all a pragmatist. “In that sense, I believe we will be able to share more ideas, talk better and reach agreements without difficulty.” Indeed, on May 1, Trump told Bloomberg that he “would be honored” to meet Kim. [TIME]
You can read more at the link, but the destruction of the cooling tower was only in response to the Bush administration freezing millions of dollars of North Korean money in a Macau bank. Kim Jong-il would have never agreed to the deal without the pressure from the asset freezing. They will never agree to a deal today without similar pressure which it appears the Trump administration is trying to do.
At the time I called the 2007 deal a charade because there were no measures in place to ensure verifiable denuclearization and history has proven me right. I guess we will see in the coming months if history repeats itself and the Kim regime signs another deal to receive free aid without verifiably dismantling their nuclear weapons.
