Opinion | South Korea’s Moon Jae-in may be the biggest loser of the Trump-Kim summit flop

With opposition mounting at home and sanctions still blocking inter-Korean cooperation, the relative calm on the peninsula may be small consolation for Moon Jae-in

Reading Time:4 minutes

Protesters wave South Korean and US flags during a rally denouncing South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Seoul in November 2018. Moon’s once sky-high approval ratings have fallen to earth over the country’s economic performance, and his support for negotiations between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have not paid off so far. Photo: AP

Published: 12:41pm, 1 Mar 2019Updated: 10:38pm, 1 Mar 2019

The collapse of the second summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un throws into doubt and turmoil the already difficult path to reconciliation between the US and North Korea.

After all the speculation about trade-offs and concessions, Trump and Kim wound up in the same disagreement that has bedevilled dialogue for years. North Korea insists the US – and United Nations – give up many of the sanctions they have imposed as punishment for the North’s tests of nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles needed to carry them to distant targets; the US wants to see substantive steps towards denuclearisation.

The negotiating process is never over, but the fact remains that Kim does not think he can afford to abandon a programme initiated by his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, and perpetuated by his father, Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011. He’s staked his power and prestige on North Korea’s emergence as the world’s ninth nuclear power, and he’s going to cling to it no matter what enticement is offered. The American president, recognising North Korea’s “potential” as an economic force, believed, wrongly, that constant praise, plus the prospect of vast amounts of aid and investment, would compel Kim to see the light and yield on his nuclear programme.

The failure to draw Kim into an agreement predicated on economic blessings comes as a special disappointment to South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in, who had counted on the summit as a pivotal step towards North-South rapprochement. Moon has already met Kim three times, most recently in September in Pyongyang, and still hopes to persuade him to pay a return visit to Seoul. That’s not going to be easy in view of the impasse between Trump and Kim, especially if US and South Korean forces engage in military exercises.

Trump cancelled the joint war games that were scheduled after the summit in Singapore in June but has yet to do so this year, while complaining about their enormous expense. He also said nothing about an end-of-war declaration – a joint statement that many analysts had expected him to sign with Kim declaring the Korean war, which ended in a truce in 1953, was conclusively and definitively over.

US officials are deeply suspicious of such a statement, which they believe would provide the basis for a “peace treaty” that China, as the North’s Korean war ally and signatory to the 1953 armistice, would also have to sign. Such a treaty, they believe, would provide the rationale for North Korea to demand not only withdrawal of America’s 28,500 troops from South Korea but also dissolution of the UN Command under which US and South Korean troops, joined by forces from 15 other nations, fought the Korean war.