Lee Jae Myung stresses peace on peninsula ahead of Korean War anniversary
President Lee Jae Myung said Tuesday, the day before the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War, that national security can only be guaranteed when South Korea achieves peace on the peninsula.
"When we think about the concept of national security, people tend to think it's important to achieve it through a victory in battle. But what's more important is that we win without a fight," Lee said at a Cabinet meeting he presided over Tuesday at his office.
"National security will certainly be guaranteed in a situation when there is no need to fight -- in other words, when peace prevails -- and politics has a role to play in building peace," added the liberal president.
Lee's remarks came a day before South Korea was to mark the anniversary of the Korean War, which broke out on June 25, 1950, with North Korea's invasion of South Korea.
The United Nations forces and the communist side signed a ceasefire agreement on July 27, 1953, after about two years of negotiations, meaning the two Koreas remain technically at war to this day. The tragic war resulted in around 1 million South Korean civilian casualties, while over 160,000 South Korean soldiers were either killed or missing.
Lee, who assumed the presidency on June 4, is widely expected to pursue inter-Korean detente and resume Seoul's engagement with Pyongyang, as did his liberal predecessors Kim Dae-jung, Roh Moo-hyun and Moon Jae-in.
Lee's disgraced conservative predecessor Yoon Suk Yeol tended to take a hard-line stance against North Korea's provocations, and accused Pyongyang of heightening tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
During Yoon's presidency, Pyongyang amended its Constitution to refer to South Korea as a "hostile state," suspended an inter-Korean military pact signed in 2018, destroyed inter-Korean roads and railways, and resumed propaganda broadcasts, among other things.
Soon after his inauguration, Lee ordered a halt to the operation of South Korea's propaganda loudspeakers along the inter-Korean border.
"In our reality, national security and the national economy are intertwined," Lee's spokesperson Kang Yu-jung told reporters.
During the Cabinet meeting, Lee also pledged to compensate those who "made extraordinary sacrifices" for their country.
"At a moment when fighting (against enemies) is inevitable, it is mostly helpless ordinary citizens who find themselves on the front line. There are many instances when ordinary people have sacrificed themselves in the fight to defend their communities," Lee said.
He continued, "Come to think of it, I don't believe those who made extraordinary sacrifices for their communities were rewarded correspondingly by the groups they belonged to."
This is aligned with Lee's speech commemorating Memorial Day on June 6. During that speech, delivered to an audience that included the bereaved families of Navy officers and commissioned officers who perished in a maritime patrol aircraft crash in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, in May, and a firefighter who was killed during a massive fire at a tangerine warehouse on Jeju Island in 2023, Lee said, “Extraordinary sacrifices made for the good of all deserve to be met with extraordinary rewards.”
Also at the Cabinet meeting, Lee urged civil servants to shield the marginalized from external crises that stem from the recent conflict in the Middle East.
"The entire world, including South Korea, is now in great trouble," Lee said. "Crises inflict greater pain on the people who are poor and helpless. As we discuss measures to counter the rise in consumer prices and stabilize the cost of living, I hope our meeting can serve as an opportunity to minimize damage to the marginalized with extra care."
The Cabinet later on Tuesday approved presidential decrees extending the temporary tax relief on oil and gas and imposing tariff quotas to lower tariffs on certain goods, including liquefied petroleum gas, mackerel and processed egg products.
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