Seoul Searching.

• Author: Cha, Victor
• Position: The United States and North and South Korea relations

The two Koreas and the United States appear to be headed, albeit slowly, towards a peace and denuclearization agreement. South Korean president Moon Jae-in has declared his objective of achieving a peace declaration before the end of his presidency (in 2022) and has already held multiple summit meetings with the North Korean leader in 2018 and 2019 for this purpose. President Donald Trump agreed to conclude a peace agreement at the Singapore Summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and sees his remaining time in office as advancing toward this goal.

The move to a peace declaration, while generating temporary political windfalls, may also have the unintended consequence of permanently weakening the U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance. In particular, the whims and impulsive nature of this U.S. president, combined with a deep and abiding skepticism about U.S. overseas military deployments, could result in his abandoning the time-honored United States ground troop commitment to the Korean peninsula. For some Koreans and Americans, a pullout after sixty-five years might be a welcome outcome as South Korea develops more autonomous capabilities to defend itself. But, as Joseph S. Nye, Jr. wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1995, the U.S. presence on the Korean peninsula is like oxygen. You don't notice it when it is there, but once it is gone, there is nothing else you can think about to survive.

The South Korean government has worked feverishly towards achieving a declaration ending the state of hostilities on the peninsula. After a tumultuous 2017 of missile and nuclear tests by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the Moon government utilized the February-March 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympics to facilitate high-level exchanges with North Korean officials, including with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his sister Kim Yo-jong. In March 2018, Moon managed to elicit a commitment from President Trump to meet with the North Korean leader to resolve the nuclear issue. When Trump cancelled the meeting on May 24, Moon stepped in, meeting with the North Korean leader a second time two days later to put the summit back on track. The Singapore Summit in June 2018 was long on ceremony and photos but short on substance, producing a broad statement of principles on denuclearization and reconciliation but no tangible progress. As subsequent U.S.-DPRK negotiations to implement the Singapore declaration appeared to stall at the end of 2018 when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cancelled a trip to Pyongyang, the ROK again intervened with a third summit meeting to avoid a breakdown in diplomatic momentum and to promote a second Trump-Kim summit in Vietnam in February 2019. When that meeting concluded abruptly without an agreement, Moon again stepped in to try to pick up the diplomatic pieces.

The peace declaration sought by the South Koreans lacks clarity as a concept. As offered by Moon in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, it is not akin to a formal peace treaty ending the war, but more of a modest political declaration. While some guard posts and mines along the Demilitarized Zone are being removed and military exercising is suspended, the declaration appears aimed to use such measures to transform the hostile atmosphere surrounding the sixty-six-year ceasefire to a more conciliatory one, but without a formal end to the war. Because the peace declaration does not impact the United Nations Command, the Combined Forces Command, nor the status of U.S., ROK or DPRK military forces on the Korean peninsula, the South Korean government contends, it is a political "trust-building" device that does not threaten the U.S.-ROK alliance nor negotiate the status of U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula.

As limited a measure as this sounds, the peace declaration is being pursued with great intensity by the two Koreas. Moon has declared the objective of achieving it before the end of his presidency, and steps along this path--including the opening of a liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea, and breaking ground on inter-Korean railway projects--have been taken with grudging U.S. consent. The question naturally arises as to why the South Korean government is pursuing this declaration with such vigor, when it is a half-measure that won't fundamentally alter the military balance and will not be accompanied by a final dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons threat.

First, the South Korean government does not want to return to the "Fire and Fury" recriminations of 2017 when Seoul looked like it might become entrapped in a war between the United States and DPRK as President Trump and North Korean leader Kim threatened to attack each other. Kim conducted twenty ballistic missile tests and one hydrogen bomb test during Trump's first twelve months in office. Trump ordered heightened exercising and movement of strategic assets and munitions to the region. During this period, I viewed the danger of miscalculation and escalation as very real, and never heard more talk about war inside the Beltway during my thirty years of policy. For the South Korean government, almost anything is better than another war on the Korean Peninsula; thus, it continues to press hard to prevent the loss of momentum created from the Winter Olympics through the summit meetings in Singapore and Hanoi.

Second, domestic politics drive the Moon administration towards a peace declaration. Upon taking power in a popular referendum after the impeachment of Park Geun-hye in December 2016, the Moon government believes its engagement-oriented policies on North Korea truly represent the will of the people. Moreover, progressives within the Blue House feel as though they are making up for lost time after nine years of conservative governments in South Korea, under Park and her predecessor Lee Myung-bak, and eight years of the Obama administration's "strategic...