Pendulum swings and North to be described as 'enemy' again

North Korea test fires a Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile at Pyongyang International Airport on Nov. 18, Pyongyang’s state media reported on Nov. 19. [YONHAP]

South Korea’s military will once again refer to North Korea’s political leadership and armed forces as “enemies” in the first defense white paper to be published under the conservative administration of President Yoon Suk-yeol, a government officials said Tuesday.

“An expression referring to the North Korean regime and its military as an enemy has been included in the draft of the white paper,” a defense official told the JoongAng Ilbo on condition of anonymity.

South Korean defense white papers are released every two years, with the next one due next month.

The revival of the term comes after a record 62 missile launches by the regime this past year, including what defense officials and experts believe to have been a successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last month.

The shift in policy back to referring to Pyongyang as an “enemy” was announced by Yoon’s transition team prior to his inauguration on May 10.

The description of North Korea as an “enemy” was dropped from official defense policy under former President Moon Jae-in.

The 2018 defense white paper, which was released in January 2019, was the first to remove references to the North Korean regime and military as the “enemy,” instead emphasizing inter-Korean efforts in mutual trust-building, arms control and arms reduction.

The Moon administration’s decision to not designate North Korea an enemy came at a time when hopes ran high for an improvement in inter-Korean relations and a lasting detente in military tensions.

The 2018 defense white paper explained the change by noting that “while inter-Korean relations have swung back and forth between the extremes of military confrontation on one side and reconciliation and cooperation on the other, the three inter-Korean summits and the first U.S.-North Korea summit held in 2018 have created a new security environment aimed at denuclearization and the establishment of peace on the Korean Peninsula.”

But the 2020 defense white paper was considerably less sanguine in its assessment of North Korea’s intentions.

Although it refrained from describing Pyongyang as the “enemy,” it did not shy away from describing an expansion in the number of North Korean ballistic missile units and a marked enhancement of its special forces with modernized equipment and reinforced exercises to attack strategic targets, such as the Blue House.

The 2020 defense white paper also reflected frayed Seoul-Tokyo relations at the time by referring to Japan as only a “neighboring country,” rather than as a partner.

Ties between Seoul and Tokyo at the time were strained due to diplomatic spats stemming from Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea, including South Korean court decisions ordering Japanese companies to compensate Korean forced laborers, which Tokyo used to restrict key exports needed by South Korea’s technology sector.

The Yoon administration says it will seek closer trilateral cooperation with Washington and Tokyo to counter the mounting security threat posed by Pyongyang’s advancing missile program with a high-level meeting of the three countries’ chiefs at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June and a trilateral summit between Yoon, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Cambodia last month.

Since the Shangri-La dialogue, the three countries have conducted several trilateral missile and naval defense exercises to deter North Korea’s ballistic missile threats.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]