Twice last month, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea asked the United States of America to begin discussions on a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. The problem, as Korea watcher Andrei Lankov has noted, is that Pyongyang does not want to include South Korea in the talks to end the war.
The Koreans know war, and they know tragedy. Last century, their country was colonized, annexed, and divided. Then, in June 1950, it became a battleground in a war that, despite an armistice, continues to this day.
South Korea did not sign the July 1953 armistice with North Korea and its ally China, and the peace today on the Korean peninsula is tenuous. In 2010, for instance, the North in two horrible incidents killed 50 South Koreans, two of them civilians. Beijing did not condemn Pyongyang for its murderous acts.
The Kim family, which has ruled North Korea since its inception, wants a peace deal with the United States because that would pave the way for the removal of the 28,500 American servicemen and women from South Korean soil. The withdrawal of U.S. forces would make it easier for Kim Jong Un, the current despot, to intimidate the South and eventually absorb it.
The Kims may rule a decrepit state, but that does not mean they have abandoned their hope of gobbling up their prosperous neighbor. In fact, that goal is at the basis of their legitimacy. So a peace treaty, promoted as a pathway to peace, is a tactic, and a cynical one at that.
Park Geun-hye, the president of South Korea, has a more ambitious objective: putting her country back together. So far, her Dresden Initiative, announced in the German city in March of last year, has not yet succeeded in reuniting the two Koreas, but she has reoriented Seoul’s foreign policy to that end.
Most notably, she has courted China’s President Xi Jinping, and she has let down America where it counts. She has not, for example, been willing to host the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), an American missile-defense system, on South Korean soil because of Beijing’s objections. China is concerned that the U.S. could use THAAD to shoot down Chinese missiles heading to America. Moreover, Seoul is hesitant to speak out against provocative Chinese behavior in the region, something President Obama publicly chided Park for during her visit to Washington last month.
Park’s calculation, evidently, is that unification of Korea cannot proceed unless it has Beijing’s consent. And as she courts China, she is taking America for granted. She can do that for a while—Washington’s policy toward Korea remains indulgent—but ultimately she depends on American troops to prevent the North Koreans from invading. Their 1950 invasion would have succeeded but for U.S. military intervention.
These days, the Korean People’s Army has deployed about 70 percent of its ground forces along the Demilitarized Zone, which separates the two Korean states. Only an aggressor would do that. And only an aggressor would stockpile chemical and biological agents to use in an assault on a neighbor.
Ms. Park, to her credit, understands the only way to eliminate the North Korean threat is to eliminate North Korea.
And that brings us back to Dresden. In the first half of the 1980s, many thought the two Koreas would unify before the two Germanies because it looked as if North Korea was fragile and East Germany durable. History rendered those judgments wrong, and now President Park hopes she can merge her country peacefully, German-style.
Yet as she tries to do so, it might not hurt her to remember which nations fought against South Korea in the Korean War—and which one has committed its forces to defend her homeland.
