South Korea wants Trump’s focus on North Korea as an attempt to reconcile with Pyongyang

Joe Biden ‘s unwillingness to negotiate with North Korea has caused some South Koreans to miss the Donald Trump convention.

The Biden government has adopted a “legal, effective” approach to North Korea, and maintained that it was willing to participate in negotiations without conditions before Pyongyang was ready to do so.

But observers in Seoul and Washington say the reluctance to express their views and the lack of interest shown to them is a sign of ambition rather than a solution to the North Korean crisis, as Kim Jong Un advocates. programs for weapons and nuclear weapons.

“The government may not say so, but their North Korean policies are ignored,” said Sue Mi Terry, director of the Center for Korean History and Public Policy at Wilson Center in Washington and a former CIA. expert.

“They seem to have lost all hope, and for good reason,” he added, adding that officials are focused on China.

When North Korea in 2017 tested an intercontinental missile capable of hitting the US, Trump said he would drop “fire and fury” into East Asia.

After a period of heated debates and bellicose rhetoric that lawmakers in Seoul and Washington feared could provoke a war, the two leaders met in Singapore in 2018 and Hanoi in 2019. The summits strengthened American culture on the Korean peninsula.

Their meetings coincided with a major Korean conference in 2018 that shook hands between Kim and Moon Jae-in, the President of South Korea, on the dividing line between the two Koreans.

“There was a real possibility, even excitement in Seoul at the time,” said Ankit Panda, a North Korean weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Everyone thought Kim Jong Un was coming to town. It was clear that South Korea was at the forefront of history.”

But the process fell to Hanoi amid tensions over sanctions and the end of North Korea’s nuclear program. Kim has not participated in the discussions since then, her isolation has been magnified by the closure she has established in her country in the fight against the coronavirus.

For Biden officials, the failure of Trump’s gambit in North Korea confirms their downfall.

“We have no intention of hating it [North Korea] I feel free to meet them without culture, ”said a spokesman for the government department.

“We believe in the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] they will respond well to our arrival. However, so far, we have not received any response from DPRK to meet our demands. ”

A senior Western official stated: “Much of the criticism of Americans comes from those who believe that the key to solving North Korea’s problem is to find a magical solution that will instantly satisfy the North Korean people.

“Not all of us will evict the North Korean people, especially if they have not given a signal that they want to come to the table – we are not in a game just to please Kim Jong Un.”

But the US insistence that the ball is in Kim’s court has angered members of the Moon organization. It has repeatedly tried to persuade the US to provide relief and to announce the end of the Korean War in order for Pyongyang to return to the negotiating table.

“American leadership is one of the driving forces, and the Korean government is losing hope,” said Moon Chung-in, chairman of the Sejong Institute think-tank and former adviser to President Moon. “We have been urging the American government to send positive signals; it is only natural for North Korea to respond to negative comments. ”

The president of South Korea’s presidency told the Financial Times: “The Biden government pretends to care about what we want, but to no avail.”

In September, the chairman of the ruling Democratic Republic of South Korea said “although the Trump administration had many problems, the Biden government should continue with the previous leadership plan, which sought to address the problems with North Korea through negotiations”.

Pew Global Indicators data show that support among South Koreans on Trump’s policies in North Korea reached 78 percent in 2019.

“Despite doubts about Trump himself, there was strong bipartisan support for his North Korean policy,” said Steven Denney, of the University of Vienna, who analyzed the data.

“There is another wish in South Korea about Trump’s approach: caretakers miss out on his ‘high pressure’ strategy for 2017, while developers miss out on the 2018-2019 conference,” said Terry of the Wilson Center.

“There are very few people who like President Trump personally, and they are disappointed with the way he treats the alliance with South Korea. But there is a perception that he has tried.”

Investigators say Trump’s hopes of a successful run may have been false, but Biden’s superiors would not want the issue to go away.

Victor Cha, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, stated: “They can not say ‘we are not Trump, we are not Obama, we will meet anytime, anywhere’. That is not a plan, it is a big sticker. ”

Additional reports by Kang Buseong