News from 1992, 2000, 2007 … Peace overtures from North Korea are nothing new—and they are always fake. Pyongyang, writes Nicholas Eberstadt, is hardwired to pursue unification of the peninsula under its rule:
A peace treaty between two countries is a legal document that requires one sovereign state to recognize the other sovereign state’s right to exist. (Think Camp David accords of 1978, when Egypt agreed to recognize Israel.) Yet North Korea cannot commit to any such thing with South Korea, not least because the existential objective of its ruling family, the Kims, has been to wipe the state of South Korea off the face of the earth.
That goal was the reason for the North’s surprise attack against the South in June 1950 that triggered the Korean War. And it has been the main focus of North Korea’s external policy since the 1953 cease-fire in that still-unfinished conflict. It is a central duty, fused into the very identity of the state, indelibly registered in Pyongyang’s institutions and ideology. […]
And so the North, rather than committing to a legally binding (and potentially destabilizing) peace treaty, is likely to do again what it has gotten away with in previous meetings with the South: dangle aspirational goals in jointly signed, but totally unenforceable, official statements.
Seoul and Pyongyang have a long history of this. In 1992, there were the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression and Exchanges and Cooperation between the South and the North and the Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. At the historic 2000 summit, there was the South-North Joint Declaration, after which President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea famously declared: “There is no longer going to be any war. The North will no longer attempt unification by force, and at the same time we will not do any harm to the North.” […]
The problem is that North Korea can walk away from its peace promises at any time. And when it eventually does, it will be able to blame whomever it wishes for this tragic result — potentially polarizing politics in South Korea, igniting tensions in Seoul’s alliance with Washington or fracturing the loose coalition of governments that rallied around sanctions against it. In the meantime, Pyongyang will hold the other parties hostage to the fear that if any of its new demands aren’t met, it will quit the peace process.
[Nicholas Eberstadt, “North Korea’s Phony Peace Ploy,” American Enterprise Institute, April 25]
