Seoul's Dilemma

By Stephen Costello

Stephen Costello is Executive Director of Asia East, a Web and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused on security, development, and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C. and can be contacted at [email protected].

Future prosperity, security, even the realization of its full nationhood all depend on South Korea’s relationship with the isolated, rigid, fellow Korean nation to the north.  North Korea may cooperate with the South for enhanced security and economic and development advances, but it will not accept anything that suggests surrender or the status of a supplicant.  Complicating this is the iron determination of Pyongyang to have its security and access to international finance guaranteed by the U.S., South Korea’s main ally. 

To these realities must be added the impact of the George W. Bush administration’s decision to pull back from diplomacy and deal-making, replacing those with pressure and what presumably looked to the North Koreans like plans for regime-change.  U.S. President Obama and South Korean Presidents Lee and Park followed Bush’s lead.  Realistic diplomacy has been off the table for 15 years.  Today a negotiated way out seems unlikely.

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