North Korea’s Phony Peace Ploy
By Nicholas Eberstadt
Mr. Eberstadt is a founding director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
April 25, 2018
And so the North, rather than committing to a legally binding (and potentially destabilizing) peace treaty, is likely to do again what it has gotten away with in previous meetings with the South: dangle aspirational goals in jointly signed, but totally unenforceable, official statement
Seoul and Pyongyang have a long history of this. In 1992, there were the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression and Exchanges and Cooperation between the South and the North and the Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. At the historic 2000 summit, there was the South-North Joint Declaration, after which President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea famously declared: “There is no longer going to be any war. The North will no longer attempt unification by force, and at the same time we will not do any harm to the North.”
And in October 2007, there was the so-called “peace declaration” in the eight-point agreement signed by Kim Jong-il and President Roh Moo-hyun. “The South and the North both recognize the need to end the current armistice regime and build a permanent peace regime,” it read.
Not to put too fine a point on it: All of these deals were then trash-canned. The North Korean promises in them were worthless, indeed deceitful. These agreements only seemed to hold force until, well, they no longer did, when Pyongyang unilaterally decided to ignore, violate or repudiate them.
This behavior is wholly of a piece with North Korea’s nuclear discussions with the United States, and with its performance in the Six-Party Talks. In its negotiating playbook, situational ethics rule. Accepting foreign constraints on North Korean power is regarded not only as foolish, but also as positively unpatriotic.
Alas, the South Korean government now seems eager to swallow another order of sucker-bait. Ahead of this week’s planned summit, in return for a peace bridge to nowhere, it has already agreed to leave human rights off the table. (President Trump, for his part, gave his “blessing” to these misbegotten talks.)
Why, given the precedents? Because the Sunshine Policy is something of a secular religion in South Korea — at least among its adherents, who include main players in the current government — and, like all faiths, it is immune to empirical falsification. Sunshiners also seem to be convinced that only they can coax the North onto the path of common sense.
And let’s not underestimate the political psychopathology of appeasement: People grow weary of the prospect of endless conflict with an implacable enemy and want to believe in solutions even if there are none. (Western Europe suffered a similar condition regarding the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s.)
The problem is that North Korea can walk away from its peace promises at any time. And when it eventually does, it will be able to blame whomever it wishes for this tragic result — potentially polarizing politics in South Korea, igniting tensions in Seoul’s alliance with Washington or fracturing the loose coalition of governments that rallied around sanctions against it. In the meantime, Pyongyang will hold the other parties hostage to the fear that if any of its new demands aren’t met, it will quit the peace process.
