Don’t forget the opportunity cost

We must find wise ways to manage the opportunity cost from North Korea, China and Russia. Only then can the path to denuclearization, peace and unification be unblocked.

Wie Sung-rakThe author is a former South Korean representative to the six-party talks and head of the diplomacy and security division of the JoongAng Ilbo’s Reset Korea campaign.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Korea-U.S. alliance and the Korean War Armistice. Put differently, South Korea could achieve political and economic development thanks to the security alliance, yet could not end the war over the past seven decades. Despite the need to reflect on the two incongruous meanings simultaneously, many unfortunately attach more significance to the former rather than the latter.

After 70 years of truce, studded with confrontations, are North Korean nuclear threats at their peak and severed South-North and U.S.-North relations. As the U.S.-China, U.S.-Russia, Korea-China, and Korea-Russia relations hit rock bottom, external conditions to find a way to peace on the Korean Peninsula are also bad. Should we allow the seven decades of not being able to send a postcard to the separated families on both sides continue into the future? Our diplomacy cannot leave the situation unattended.

In retrospect, there were opportunities. The first came when the Roh Tae-woo administration expanded our diplomatic frontiers to the Eastern Bloc in the early stages of the post-Cold War. If pushed more elaborately, the diplomatic initiative could have paved the way for a peace settlement on the peninsula. But his Northern diplomacy stopped at normalizing relations with Russia and China, while relations between North Korea and the U.S. and Japan didn’t improve. As Washington and Seoul were elated by their victories in the Cold War and in the system competition with Pyongyang, they didn’t care about the apparent sense of crisis North Korea would feel soon after. Pyongyang turned to developing nuclear weapons to survive. The rest of the world marched toward reconciliation and cooperation, but the Korean Peninsula was still stuck in confrontation. That led to the recalcitrant state’s nuclear armament. The two allies paid an enormous opportunity cost.

The second chance came in 2018 and 2019 when the Seoul-Pyongyang-Washington summits were held. The first meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un attracted keen attention. If successful, their summit could have helped the denuclearization and the peace settlement. But it ran aground in Hanoi. After refusing to talk with Seoul and Washington, Pyongyang accelerated its nuclear missile development. The truce today is more perilous than ever.

If you look at the trajectory of the 70-year alliance, it certainly contributed to defending South Korea against the threats from North Korea, China and Russia during the Cold War. In the post-Cold War era, China and Russia’s threat to South Korea decreased, but the threat from North Korea increased. The alliance had to deal with it.

With the arrival of the new Cold War from the deepening Sino-U.S. and Russo-U.S. conflict, Washington demanded Seoul play its due role. The conservative Yoon Suk Yeol administration, newly launched at the time, wholeheartedly responded. The clear positioning between the U.S. and China and between the U.S. and Russia could be an appropriate choice, given the deepening nuclear threat from North Korea and the ideological divide of the world.

But that choice inevitably forces South Korea to pay a huge opportunity cost — or the concerted resistance from North Korea, China and Russia. That blurred the prospect for ending the cease-fire even further. Trapped in deep-seated hostilities toward the U.S., China and Russia embraced the North’s missile provocations more, only to darken the future of denuclearization.

If we want to learn lessons from the opportunity cost we had to pay during the Roh administration’s Northern diplomacy, we must not brush off the apparent security concerns of North Korea, China, and Russia to accomplish the goal of denuclearizing the North and settling a peace regime on the peninsula — even while reinforcing the alliance with the U.S.

First, we must avoid the vicious cycle of tit-for-tat and leave room for negotiation even while strengthening deterrence against the North. As deterrence and sanctions alone cannot ensure peace, we must create conditions for diplomacy to work, with future negotiations in mind. Past patterns show the North shifted to dialogue at some point after staging provocations. This time, it will likely do so after the U.S. presidential election next year. Around that time, North Korea will shun South Korea — as it did before — while trying to talk with Uncle Sam. We must be prepared so as not to be excluded from discussions on our own fate.

Second, we must secure diplomatic room not to distance ourselves from China and Russia. You can hardly attain denuclearization, peace and unification if you ignore the two countries. If we want to have productive consultations with them, we must establish an integrated — and well-choreographed — strategy first. In other words, we must fix our own coordinates in the diplomatic space with China and Russia before determining a certain level of coordination with the U.S. In particular, the government must separate the North Korean nuclear issue from the China-U.S. and Russia-U.S. confrontations so that it can emerge as a common issue for the U.S., China and Russia to cooperate on.

Third, we must brace for security risks from our expanded role in the region as demanded by the U.S. For instance, South Korea is required to deal with international disputes over China by consulting with the U.S. and Japan, which suggests the possibility of South Korea being mired in yet another international dispute.

Korea’ diplomacy is at a crossroads. Strengthening the alliance is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. We must find wise ways to manage the opportunity cost from North Korea, China and Russia. Only then can the path to denuclearization, peace and unification be unblocked. Otherwise, we may have to pay the opportunity cost once more.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.