In the declaration for her presidential bid in 2012, President Park Geun-hye said: “We should take the first step toward a new Korean peninsula by severing the vicious circle of distrust, confrontation and uncertainties between the two Koreas.” 

This is her approach to inter-Korean relations. Since independence, the Syngman Rhee and the first half of the Park Chung-hee governments took a confrontational policy, while the second half of the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan governments pursued a containment policy. The Roh Tae-woo and Kim Young-sam governments tried a conditional engagement policy.

On the other hand, the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun governments chose an engagement policy. After the Grand National Party took over the government, the Lee Myung-bak government returned to a conditional engagement policy. The Park Geun-hye government seems to be pursuing a more moderate conditional engagement policy than her predecessor.

South Korea’s antagonistic policy is based on the belief that North Korea’s immediate goal is to preserve its absolute monarchical political system by all means and therefore the trust-building approach is meaningless, while its conciliatory approach is based on the belief that peaceful coexistence between the South and the North and the ultimate goal of democratic reunification can be achieved through a trust-building process.

President Park’s proposals on North Korea, including the Seoul Process and the Dresden Declaration, are all based on the assumption that the trust-building approach is the best approach to reunification. All previous engagement and conditional engagement approaches are based on the same assumption.

It is time to critically examine whether this approach is realistic. The trust-building approach is an attempt to eradicate distrust between two antagonistic parties through cooperation in economic, social and cultural and science and technological fields, and ultimately to eradicate political antagonism and achieve political integration. 

This approach can work well if the participating parities have the same political system and agree on the ultimate goal and means to achieve the goal. The EU is a regional organization that aims at creating a single European state through a trust-building approach.

This functional approach has so far been successful because its membership is open to only European countries that are democratic and agree to a functional approach, as well as political integration. In the case of Korea, until the end of the military governments in South Korea, the North Korean regime had been eager to realize national reunification by all means, mainly because the military governments had been developing the South Korean economy very quickly, but they had suffered from questions over their legitimacy and had been heavily dependent on the U.S. militarily.

But since the end of the Cold War the North has become almost paranoid about reunification because it means absorption by South Korea. The North Korean regime has become more and more isolated from its neighboring great powers and has become more and more destitute. When the Rodong Shinmun declared that “the Dresden Plan is a confrontational declaration for reunification by absorption under South Korea’s leadership,” it revealed that now North Korea is more concerned about the preservation of its one-man dictatorship than reunification.

It should also be pointed out that the German unification model is not directly relevant to the Korean case, mainly because East and West Germany officially recognized each other as independent states and agreed not to go to war in 1972. In contrast, South and North Korea have never officially abandoned reunification as their most important national goal. Moreover, The North has never abandoned its strategy for reunification by violent means, while South Korea has abandoned the use of military force as a means for reunification since its inception.

During the Cold War period, North Korea resorted to all kinds of provocative actions, including assassination attempts on presidents, sending espionage agents, agitators or the armed infiltrators through the DMZ and by sea, and attacks on South Korean and American ships.

These acts were mainly to undermine political stability and overthrow the South Korean government through infiltration and subversion. Since the end of the cold war, North Korea has concentrated on attacks on South Korean naval ships and violations of the Northern Limit Line. It should be noted that North Korea usually takes provocative actions before or after ROK-U.S. military exercises and demands the cessation of joint exercises. Such acts aim at denying the legitimacy of the Ceasefire Agreement and the NLL.

Another characteristic of North Korean behavior is that the North Korean leadership has never wavered from the position that tension can be reduced only by removing political and security obstacles, which include U.S. military presence, ROK-U.S. military exercises, the U.S. protection of South Korea by nuclear weapons and the American principle of first use of nuclear weapons and the NLL.

Therefore, it argues, the U.S.-South Korea mutual defense treaty should be replaced by a U.S.-North Korea peace treaty to remove those obstacles, and otherwise confidence-building through cooperation in the nonpolitical and security field is meaningless. North Korea asserts that unless these measures are taken, it will not abandon its nuclear weapons system. This is the reason North Korea becomes infuriated whenever South Korea talks about reunification through confidence-building measures and describes reunification as a bonanza.

Under the circumstances, South Korea should reconsider its traditional confidence-building approach and focus on the political and security issues, particularly the nuclear issue. As long as North Korea maintains its nuclear program, the ROK-U.S. alliance is as important as ever. South Korea’s policies toward its immediate neighbors should be determined by this consideration.

This was the message that Obama gave Park at this year’s summit: Persuade China to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. If you do, we don’t mind your close relationship with China. In a big power-small power alliance, the big power tends to worry about free-riders or buck-passing by the small power, while the small power is concerned about entanglement and abandonment by the big power.

At this moment, South Korea should be more worried about abandonment rather than entanglement. America can afford to lose South Korea, but South Korea can’t afford to lose America. America and China are likely to maintain a disguised peaceful coexistence for some time. The most realistic policy toward North Korea is to treat it as an extremely hostile foreign state.

By Park Sang-seek

Park Sang-seek is a former rector of the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies at Kyung Hee University and the author of “Globalized Korea and Localized Globe.” He can be reached at parksangseek@hotmail.com. –Ed.