Appeasing North Korea has failed, Korea's Yoon Suk-yeol tells CNN

Politics

Published: 24 May. 2022, 16:46 Updated: 24 May. 2022, 18:01

Appeasing North Korea has failed, Korea's Yoon Suk-yeol tells CNN

Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol sits for an interview with CNN correspondent Paula Hancocks which aired Monday. [NEWS1]

President Yoon Suk-yeol said the time for appeasing North Korea is over in an interview with CNN, and that he expects any new inter-Korean talks to be initiated by leader Kim Jong-un.

"I think the ball is in Chairman Kim's court," Yoon told CNN's Paula Hancocks in an exclusive interview aired Monday. "It is his choice to start a dialogue with us."

The remarks followed Yoon's first summit with U.S. President Joe Biden in Seoul Saturday, an opportunity for the allies to coordinate the policies on Pyongyang amid increased missile threats from the North. Some military analysts believe North Korea could be preparing for a possible seventh nuclear test or an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch.

Yoon said that he is against bending over backwards to please North Korea. "Just to escape North Korean provocation or conflict temporarily is not something that we should do," said Yoon. "Many call it servile diplomacy, but the policy of being over-concerned about the other side's feelings does not work and has proven to be a failure in the past five years."

He was referring to the policy of his predecessor Moon Jae-in, whose emphasis on dialogue and peaceful reconciliation led to the first North-U.S. summit in 2018. Talks collapsed in February 2019 after a second North-U.S. summit in Hanoi. Yoon has taken a more hard-line stance, more in line with the Biden administration's "calibrated and practical" approach to the North.

But Yoon stressed, "I do not want North Korea to collapse. My hope is for North Korea to prosper alongside South Korea."

Yoon said he wants a "shared and common prosperity on the Korean Peninsula" but underscored that enhancing North Korea's nuclear capability is neither helpful nor conducive to "maintaining international peace."

In a joint statement released Saturday, Yoon and Biden emphasized that the path to dialogue remains open toward peaceful and diplomatic resolution with the North. They also condemned Pyongayng's ballistic missile tests, expressed "grave concern" over the human rights situation in the North and called for the "complete denuclearization" of the Korean Peninsula.

In a joint press conference after the summit, Yoon said he was prepared to "present an audacious plan that will vastly strengthen [North Korea's] economy and improve the quality of life" for North Koreans.

Biden said the United States was prepared to offer Covid-19 vaccines to North Korea "immediately," but has not gotten a response from Pyongyang yet.

Biden said in the press conference that any meeting with leader Kim "would be dependent on whether he was sincere."

On Sunday, when asked by a reporter in Seoul whether he has any message for Kim, Biden replied, "Hello. Period."

Yoon and Biden also agreed in their joint statement to expand the scope and scale of combined military exercises and training on the Korean Peninsula and committed to further deployment of U.S. strategic military assets when necessary, issues that Pyongyang had responded sensitively to in the past. Washington also reaffirmed its extended deterrence commitment amid North Korea's "destabilizing activities."

Yoon said in the CNN interview that economic cooperation with China remains important even if South Korea strengthens its "security and technology" alliance with the United States, adding it is not reasonable for China to be "overly sensitive about this matter."

Biden's trip to South Korea and Japan came as the United States tries to reassert its role in the Indo-Pacific region.

On Monday, Biden launched the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), a new economic bloc viewed as a means for members to "decouple" from the Chinese market by finding alternative supply chains. South Korea is included among the 13 inaugural members.

In a joint statement with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Biden "stressed the critical importance of close ties and cooperation among Japan, the United States, and the ROK [Republic of Korea], including security ties." In contrast, the South Korea-U.S. summit called for trilateral cooperation "to effectively address common economic challenges."

On Tuesday, Biden held a meeting in Tokyo of the leaders of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, the U.S.-led cooperative forum with Japan, India and Australia, another group seen as countering China's assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region.

In a press briefing in Beijing Tuesday, Wang Wenbin, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, accused the United States of "politicizing" economic issues and "coercing regional countries to take sides between China and the U.S. by economic means."

He added, "Deliberately creating economic decoupling, technological blockade, or industrial chain breakage, and aggravating the supply chain crisis will only inflict grave consequences on the world, including the U.S. itself."

However, China took a softer tone on relations with South Korea and Wang said Seoul and Beijing "are and will remain close neighbors." and are "inseparable cooperation partners." But he noted that bilateral relations are at a "crucial" stage.

On concerns over joining the IPEF, a Korean Foreign Ministry official told reporters in Seoul Wednesday, "Many countries that will be participating, especially Korea, have an inseparable relationship with China, especially from an economic point of view. Therefore, we will closely communicate with China in the process of forming IPEF rules in the future."

BY SARAH KIM [kim.sarah@joongang.co.kr]