Winter Olympics could be a first step towards necessary negotiations on North Korea

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s 2018 New Year address, combining a message of defiance towards Washington and conciliation towards Seoul, opened up an opportunity for the Korean peninsula not seen since Kim came to power five years ago. The wisest course for the United States for now is to be seen but not heard and let the Koreas have their moment.

The recent agreement on a new round of military talks between North and South Korea makes good sense, not least because there is already a protocol in place: the 1991 Basic Agreement on Non-Aggression, Reconciliation, Exchange and Cooperation, signed but never implemented, which provides in part for mutual notification and observation of military exercises. This agreement only governs relations between the two Koreas, and for the moment US forces need not be included, as the US-ROK Combined Forces Command is headed by a South Korean general in peacetime.

A second protocol would be trickier: the February 1992 Joint Declaration on the Denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, according to which both Koreas agreed to ban development, testing and deployment of nuclear weapons and whose continued validity was cited by the late Kang Suk-ju, a former North Korean negotiator. Since the South does not possess such weapons and the North claims to target the US mainland and not the South, Washington could justifiably stand in Seoul’s stead as the appropriate interlocutor.