Category: Inter-Korean Issues

North Korea continues its usual playbook of provocations to influence potential negotiations:

The Moon Jae-in government is making last-ditch efforts for progress on its inter-Korean peace drive before President Moon’s term ends in about five months, but Pyongyang is remaining unresponsive to Seoul’s continued calls for dialogue. 

Rather, North Korea launched a ballistic missile on Wednesday morning, marking this year’s first missile launch. This launch coincided with Moon’s attendance at a groundbreaking ceremony for the railroad construction to connect Gangneung and Jejin of Gangwon Province, a part of the inter-Korean railroad connection project based upon the 2018 Panmunjeom Declaration adopted by Moon and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un.

According to the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), North Korea fired a projectile presumed to be a ballistic missile at around 8:10 a.m. into the sea off its east coast from Jagang Province. The JCS said the South Korean and U.S. militaries are currently analyzing details of the missile launch but are yet to provide further details such as range or speed of the missile.  (……)

Shin Jong-woo, a senior researcher at the Korea Defense and Security Forum, said Pyongyang seemed to be assured that its missile launch would not bring strong opposition from China, while the Olympics event itself has failed to draw big attention internationally amid the COVID-19 pandemic situation.

“The missile launch could also be used as a bargaining chip when the North engages in negotiations with the South’s next government after the South elects a new president in March,” Shin said. “There have been many signs of economic hardships in the North including the news that Kim Jong-un gave fish to Pyongyang residents as presents. In that respect, the missile launch is also aimed at strengthening internal solidarity among the people of North Korea.” 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but with the so called diplomatic boycott going on with the Beijing Olympics the CCP is likely has less reservations with North Korea conducting launches before the Olympics.

You can read more about the KAL 858 bombing from my DMZ Flashpoints article.

I am concerned that with the Biden administration’s falling approval ratings that they would agree to a Korean War Peace Treaty just to get an easy foreign policy victory. The temptation of a Nobel Peace Prize might be enough to get the them to agree to it. The below comments from the Unification Minister has me worried that the Moon administration has been successful in getting the Biden administration to agree to the peace treaty:

 Discussions over an end-of-war declaration with North Korea will soon come to a close, a South Korean government official said.

The country’s Ministry of Unification chief, Lee In-young, made the remarks during an academic conference at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies’ campus in Seoul on Friday.

The Unification Minister said Seoul and Washington, D.C., “have been holding deep discussions very seriously” regarding a declaration to formally end the war, adding that it “is coming to a finish to some degree.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but a peace treaty is a bad idea for a variety of reasons I have explained before.

General Abrams and Admiral Harris are both in line with what I have been saying for years about North Korea and the Moon administration’s attempts to push through a Korean War peace treaty:

The former U.S. ambassador to South Korea and the retired top commander for U.S. forces in the region said they are cautious about a formal declaration to end the Korean War, a plan championed by the South Korean president as his tenure nears its end.

Former ambassador Harry Harris, a retired admiral who once led U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Pacific Fleet, and retired Army Gen. Robert Abrams, the former commander of U.S. Forces Korea, delivered their remarks Wednesday at a panel discussion hosted by The Korea Society in New York.

Harris expressed skepticism over a formal end-of-war declaration and suggested the results may fall short. He urged listeners to ask themselves “what will change the day after that declaration is signed?” (………)

“We must not relax sanctions or reduce joint military exercises just to get North Korea to come to the negotiating table,” he said. “This is a tried and true road to failure.” (…………)

Abrams warned that an end-of-war declaration would be followed by calls to abolish the U.N. Command, the U.S.-led international body that defends South Korea. Such a move, he said, would prompt the dissolution of “the only internationally recognized legal instrument that has prevented the resumption of hostilities.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but Admiral Harris and General Abrams both understands that the North Koreans and the Korean left want this peace treaty in order to question the legitimacy of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea. If there is peace why are U.S. troops and by extension the UN Command needed? If the Kim regimes wants a peace treaty they should agree to actions that actually makes it look like they want peace. For example removing all their artillery off of the DMZ would show the seriousness of their peace overtures. If they want peace why do they need artillery to target Seoul and other metropolitan areas?

I am actually surprised the number is that high:

 Less than half of South Koreans believe it’s necessary to reunify the war-divided peninsula, the lowest percentage in over a decade, according to a recent poll by Seoul National University.

Roughly 44% of respondents to the survey conducted between July and August said it is at least somewhat necessary for North and South Korea to reunify, said the poll released Tuesday by the university’s Institute for Peace and Unification Studies.

The annual in-person poll surveyed 1,200 people between the ages of 20 and 74 and has a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.

The figure represents the lowest number of people who believe reunification is necessary since the poll’s inception in 2007. The number of respondents who think it is not essential has been steadily increasing, from around 16 percent in 2018 to 29 percent this year.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

President Moon needs to be telling the Kim regime there is no need for confrontation and not the rest of us because they are the ones that have shelled a civilian island, sunk the Cheonan with a torpedo, kidnapped Korean citizens, and the list goes on and on:

President Moon Jae-in said that there is “no reason for confrontation” between the two Koreas Tuesday, a day after the restoring of cross-border hotlines, stressing the importance of co-prosperity with the North.    
   
“From the perspective of overseas Koreans, a Korea divided in two, into the South and the North, must be a sad reality,” said Moon, speaking at a ceremony marking 15th World Korean Day. “But we have no reason for confrontation. Competition over political systems and comparison of national power has long since become meaningless.”  
   
The two Koreas restored cross-border communication lines Monday, 55 days after Pyongyang suspended them to protest a military exercise, taken by the South as a positive signal to deescalate tensions and improve inter-Korean relations.    
   
“Now, it is even more important to prosper together,” continued Moon. “Even if unification takes time, the South and North can cooperate and get along well with each other.”   

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but as I have said before with Moon presidency ending soon the Kim regime knows that their window of opportunity to get sanctions dropped is shrinking. Thus they are being nice to President Moon while at the same time trying to pressure the Biden administration to deal with them by executing missile tests. I would expect the provocations to escalate if the Kim regime feels they are not making progress towards an agreement with the Biden administration.

While the ROK was cutting military drills with the U.S., the Kim regime was actually increasing theirs:

Most of North Korea’s naval drills involving submarines in the past seven years took place in 2018, even as the two Koreas held talks three times to defuse tensions, Rep. Han Ki-ho of the opposition People Power Party said Tuesday, citing the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The military found that the North deployed its submarines to rehearse attacks on the South about 150 times in 2018, the highest number since 2014, when such drills took place about 120 times. Excluding 2018 from 2015 to 2019, Pyongyang held the drill 87 times a year on average. 

No drills took place in 2020 because of the pandemic, according to the military.

But the 2018 drills were not made public at the time, and since 2018, South Korea has cut back on its own naval drills with the US to counter North Korean submarines.

The Navy held submarine drills with the US only eight times, spending two weeks in total running them in 2018, while in 2016, the allies spent a little over a month holding them.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

The Kim regime continues their strategy of wooing the Moon administration to pressure the Biden administration into a deal:

 South and North Korea restored their direct communication lines Monday, raising hopes for the resumption of stalled inter-Korean dialogue amid a drawn-out deadlock in denuclearization talks.

The two sides had contact through a military hotline and a separate joint liaison office channel, according to South Korean officials.

Hours earlier, North Korea’s state media announced that the lines would be back to normal operation as of 9 a.m. on the day.

Last year, North Korea blew up a liaison office in its border town of Kaesong and unilaterally cut off all inter-Korean communication lines in anger over anti-Pyongyang leaflets sent from South Korea.

The hotlines were briefly back in operation in late July before being suspended by North Korea in protest of an annual combined military exercise of South Korea and the United States. The North has long denounced the allies’ annual military exercise as a rehearsal for invasion.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.