JAPAN FORWARD

APLN Vice Chair Chung-in Moon explains what is behind the rocky regional geopolitics and what to expect on the Korean Peninsula.

There has been speculation that if Donald Trump retakes the White House, he may acknowledge North Korea as a nuclear-armed state while incentivizing them to downsize their nuclear and missile capacities. What are your thoughts? 

I think the idea of negotiating with the North as a nuclear-armed state is becoming more widely accepted as a realistic approach in the US.

The international community will certainly not recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, abiding by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Reducing their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capacities in the short term while searching for ways of complete denuclearization in the medium and long term seems a more practical strategy than demanding Complete, Verifiable, and Irreversible Denuclearization from the get-go.

Thus, it seems essential for the US and South Korea to provide the DPRK with tangible incentives. For example, sanction relief and even diplomatic normalization with the US in the negotiation process.

But this sort of approach might bode ill with people in my country and create a political quandary. Most South Koreans will not want to recognize the North as a nuclear weapons state. They will oppose any diplomatic negotiation with a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Image: Professor Moon Chung-in attending the CogitASIA conference in 2015 (Crawford Forum. Public Domain)

The original article can be accessed here.