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Don’t send the North the wrong message

Published: 20 Aug. 2024, 20:07

The Democratic National Convention to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party started in Chicago on Monday. The Democratic Party has released its party platform defining the direction of its future policy. The 92-page platform stressed the Democratic Party’s will to defend U.S. allies, including South Korea, from North Korea’s military provocations if the party wins the Nov. 5 presidential election. We welcome the Democratic Party’s profession of its determination to augment the decades-old alliance and jointly deal with the North’s deepening nuclear threats.

But we wonder why the Democratic Party excluded sensitive issues like the denuclearization of North Korea and its miserable human rights conditions from the platform. In the 2020 national convention, the party presented denuclearization as a long-term goal and pledged to pursue diplomatic solutions to achieve the goal. But the Democratic Party skipped denuclearization this time following the Republican Party’s omission of the issue in its party platform last month. The surprising developments represent the disappearance of denuclearization in this year’s election. But it’s not clear if this resulted from a lack of interest among U.S. voters or from their fatigue about the nuclear conundrum.

But clearly, the two parties’ avoidance of the thorny issue can send the wrong signal to North Korea. It gets even more serious if such attitudes of the two parties reflect U.S. voters’ acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state. If the North is recognized as a nuclear state, it poses a serious challenge to the national security of the South and other countries in Northeast Asia. In that case, the international community’s persistent efforts to denuclearize North Korea over the past 30 years will go down the drain.

There is no time for our government to naively welcome the Democratic Party’s emphasis on reinforcing the alliance in the platform. The government must find out why the denuclearization issue evaporated ahead of the U.S. election and thoroughly prepare for the reactivation of the denuclearization road map whoever wins the election. The government must first share its strategic goals with the United States instead of resorting to rhetoric.

At the same time, the government must devise effective systems to ensure a joint response to the nuclear threat, as agreed to by South Korea, the United States and Japan earlier. We hope that South Korea will have a bilateral summit with the United States or a trilateral summit with the U.S. and Japan on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September to reaffirm the international community’s determination to deal with the nuclear threat and take follow-up actions.