Moon Jae-in just put Seoul on a collision course with U.S. & U.N. sanctions (updated)

THE ONE INVIOLABLE RULE OF INTER-KOREAN SUMMITS IS THAT THERE IS ALWAYS A SCANDAL sooner or later. Kim Dae-jung’s summit with Kim Jong-il in 2000 resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize, eight indictments, six convictions, and a bunch of suspended prison sentences for an illegal payment of $500 million to North Korea. Otherwise, it did not disarm North Korea and did not produce a lasting reduction of tensions.((Previously said $500,000. Since corrected.))

Roh Moo-hyun’s 2007 summit with Kim Jong-il also failed to disarm or pacify North Korea, but resulted in the criminal indictment and subsequent acquittal ((Correction: In a previous version of this post, since corrected, I remembered this incorrectly. Cho was indicted, but acquitted. Unlike in the U.S. legal system, Korea affords fewer protections against double jeopardy, and the prosecution can appeal acquittals. As of June 2017, the acquittal was pending appeal. I apologize for the error.)) of Cho Myoung-gun, who is now the Unification Minister, for destroying the transcript of the meeting. The opposition that the agreements reached there would have ceded the South’s Yellow Sea waters to a jointly controlled “peace zone,” shared some of the South’s most valuable fishing waters, allowed the North to enter the sea lane that serves the Port of Incheon, and left the islands of Baekryeong and Yeonpyeong potentially besieged. One useful clarification from this week’s North-South agreement is the resolution of that old argument.

2. South and North Korea agreed to devise a practical scheme to turn the areas around the Northern Limit Line in the West Sea into a maritime peace zone in order to prevent accidental military clashes and guarantee safe fishing activities.

This is also an uncharacteristically clever sanctions dodge, because it does not directly violate the letter of the sanctions, but does violate their spirit. By sharing fishing waters, Seoul would undermine U.N. sanctions (paragraph 10) that prohibit Bureau 39, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, and other North Korean government agencies from exporting fish and seafood for cash while the North Korean people suffer from a protein deficient diet, and while desperate North Korean fisherman drift out to their deaths to get beyond the North’s overfished coasts.((Section 311 of the CAATSA also makes the purchase of food and fishing rights from North Korea sanctionable, but for humanitarian reasons, did not prohibit the transfer of food to North Korea.)) I explained it all in this detailed post.

There are other sanctions lifelines in the agreement that promise to undercut the economic pressure at the center of our policy to disarm the North of its nuclear weapons.

6. South and North Korea agreed to actively implement the projects previously agreed in the 2007 October 4 Declaration, in order to promote balanced economic growth and co-prosperity of the nation. As a first step, the two sides agreed to adopt practical steps towards the connection and modernization of the railways and roads on the eastern transportation corridor as well as between Seoul and Sinuiju for their utilization.

[….]

3. South and North Korea agreed to establish a joint liaison office with resident representatives of both sides in the Gaeseong region in order to facilitate close consultation between the authorities as well as smooth exchanges and cooperation between the peoples.

I won’t repeat why reopening Kaesong would violate U.N. sanctions, why the subsidies on which Kaesong depends would require approval from a U.N. Committee that the U.S. can and should block, or how Kaesong failed to pacify or liberalize North Korea. If you want an idea of the sort of brilliant legal scholarship that the Blue House is hiding behind, I’d recommend this by former Unification Ministry administration advisor Kim Yeon-chul, whose argument that Kaesong would not violate U.N. sanctions was at least two resolutions out of date by the time he published it (see paragraph 32).

If any of these benefits are contingent on the North’s disarmament, it sure doesn’t look that way from the agreement’s vague terms, which sound fully consistent with Pyongyang’s you-disarm-first formulation.

2. South and North Korea agreed to carry out disarmament in a phased manner, as military tension is alleviated and substantial progress is made in military confidence-building.

[….]

4. South and North Korea confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. South and North Korea shared the view that the measures being initiated by North Korea are very meaningful and crucial for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and agreed to carry out their respective roles and responsibilities in this regard. South and North Korea agreed to actively seek the support and cooperation of the international community for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

With North Korea now directly threatening the U.S. with nuclear attack, an agreement to defer North Korea’s disarmament–and Moon’s deal looks like exactly that–puts South Korea’s interests in direct conflict with ours. On Fox News Sunday, John Bolton said that North Korea must disarm before it gets sanctions relief, and that Moon’s promises to His Porcine Majesty do not bind the United States. Of course, left-of-center scholars will insist that the U.S. can’t possibly oppose its ally, which is something you’ll never hear them say about South Korea unilaterally promising to violate U.N. sanctions and undermining the policy of its security guarantor. Our message to Moon Jae-in ought to be emphatic and public: nations have permanent interests, not permanent alliances. We are approaching the point at which Seoul is becoming a national security liability to the United States.

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Update: In this ebullient atmosphere, where liberals want to credit Moon Jae-in’s wizardry and conservatives want to credit Trump’s wizardry for bringing peace to Korea, there isn’t much of a constituency for pessimism. I suppose I should explain why, once again, I’m the jaded, cynical contrarian who’s harshing everyone’s mellow. I am putting a pessimistic spin on the text.

First, the very vagueness of the agreement, particularly on the all-important issue of denuclearization–and within that, the critical issue of its sequencing–fits Pyongyang’s long-standing pattern of writing vague deals that let everyone adopt whatever interpretation he or she prefers, right up until Pyongyang asserts some outrageous interpretation (see, e.g., a satellite launch is not a missile launch).

This vagueness is too critical to be accidental. You’d think that with all the pre-summit consultations that must have happened between Seoul and Washington by now, Moon would know that a deal to lift sanctions first and disarm someday would be unacceptable to us. We’ve repeatedly said so publicly, so I assume we’ve said it privately, too. By signing off on a deal that Pyongyang can reasonably interpret as promising just that–front-loaded sanctions relief–Moon has picked his team. One doesn’t have to look hard to find statements by officials in the current South Korean government calling on the U.S. to soften its demands that Pyongyang commit to denuclearize before it gets benefits that would make denuclearization impossible:

“Recently, North Korea has shown it is open to actively engaging the United States in talks and the United States is talking about the importance of dialogue,” Moon said during a meeting in Seoul with Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong.

“There is a need for the United States to lower the threshold for talks with North Korea and North Korea should show it is willing to denuclearize. It’s important the United States and North Korea sit down together quickly,” he said, according to a statement from his office. [Reuters]

See also Moon Chung-in’s proposal for “[p]arallel pursuit of denuclearization and establishment of a peace system … because again, it is important to show a flexible attitude.” Of course, none of this alliance-splitting talk was lost on Pyongyang, either. Its effect was to signal to the North that if it held firm and refused meaningful denuclearization, help would soon be on the way. But as I’ve said again and again, if we throw away our last, best (economic and political) leverage over North Korea, we’ve thrown away denuclearization, humanitarian reforms, the withdrawal of North Korean artillery that’s aimed at Seoul, any lasting reduction of tensions, and any lasting peace. Maybe Seoul is already scared into submission. Maybe it’s hopelessly naive. Maybe it just doesn’t care anymore. And if not, why should we?

In the end, I’m a pessimist because I know the movie I’m watching is a sequel. Way back in 2004, I predicted that the Sunshine Policy would fail, and I was right. I’ve predicted the failure of every engagement program, and I was right. I predicted that the 2007 agreed framework would fail, and I was eerily right. I predicted that the 2007 Roh-Kim summit would fail to reform or pacify North Korea, and I was right. I predicted that the 2012 Leap Day Agreement would fail, and I was hilariously right. I’ve been observing the North’s playbook since I checked into the Dragon Hill Lodge as a young Army officer in 1998, and I’ve never lost a cent betting on the worst interpretation of Pyongyang’s intentions or Seoul’s credulity. If I’d had the foresight in 2004 to create an index fund to take short positions on everything the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the U.S. State Department have predicted about North Korea ever since, I’d be Steve Eisman. But I didn’t, so I’m just a smug blogger writing from a Metro car. Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.

This is why I continue to believe that the North Korea crisis will have to get much worse before it can get better. Kim Jong-un still believes that he has the option of keeping both his nukes and his life. Moon Jae-in has just offered him a porcine portion of encouragement for that belief.