There is seemingly no limit to North Korea’s capriciousness these days. Until a month or so ago, it was as if the Korean Peninsula was on the brink of a nuclear conflagration, but no sooner did the China-U.S. summit hove into view than Pyongyang was heading for the negotiating table. Now, with the summit a thing of the past, the Kim regime has turned and gone back the other way.
It was if North Korea had suddenly found the will for dialogue. Certainly, its proposal for inter-Korean talks and the immediate reconnection of the Panmunjom channel offered evidence of such. However, just a day before the talks were due to take place, Pyongyang, citing the problem of chief delegate “level,” decided that it would not dispatch a delegation after all.
Then, on the 13th, a spokesperson for the state organization North Korea had intended to lead the talks, the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, attacked the administration of President Park Geun Hye via Chosun Central News Agency. Coarse, aggressive language returned.
“The North-South authorities’ talks could not even start and just got postponed because of the South Korean puppet authorities’ arrogant obstructions and scheme for deliberate disturbance,” it alleged, moving to place the blame squarely on Seoul.
But North Korea doesn’t appear to have planned it this way. Right up until the end of the marathon preliminary working-level talks on Sunday and Monday morning, the North Korean side was moving relatively quickly, did not openly prevaricate, willingly diversified the agenda, and included Mt. Geumgang tourism on it, suggesting that Pyongyang was preparing for a spell of dialogue from which it hoped economic gain might result.
Of course, there was a political reason for proposing dialogue. Among a number of suggestions, the most persuasive is that “China made them do it.” This theory goes that China wanted to put the brakes on the Kim Jong Eun regime’s tension-building strategy, and pressured Pyongyang via the medium of economic sanctions. Shortly thereafter, Kim Jong Eun sent special envoy Choi Ryong Hae to Beijing to politely apologize, and Pyongyang then showed, just before the U.S.-China summit at Sunnylands in California last week, that it was ready to talk.
Since the death of this week’s talks, however, the South Korean government has said that it will not overlook North Korea’s conduct, and this means that unless North Korea changes its approach in short order, a very unlikely event indeed, there will be no further dialogue for the time being.
This is just the latest in a string of foreign policy missteps for North Korea since the ascent of Kim Jong Eun in late 2011. Last year saw the conclusion of another promising deal, the so-called Leap Day Agreement with the United States, but the immediate launching of a long-range rocket ruined that one.
Then, a year later, North Korea started building up tensions following the third nuclear test, but there were hints that China was growing annoyed at the way regional problems were building. North Korea may have adjudged that it could get away with irritating China in the pursuit of its own goals, but got more than it bargained for. Now, this latest false dawn for inter-Korean dialogue has only made the situation worse still, driving the Park government toward a much less pragmatic view of inter-Korean relations than would otherwise have been the case.
Clearly, one must conclude that the greedy young Kim Jong Eun is not ready to take the reins of foreign policy. He lacks strategic insight, and follows his instinct without recourse to analysis, thus leading to error after error. If he were a more astute politician, he would be learning from his mistakes, but there is little sign of that.
North Korea won’t find it easy to change its tune at this point and return to the negotiating table. But it won’t find it easy to pass the buck for this latest debacle to South Korea while ignoring China’s demands for dialogue, either. It goes without saying that the creator of this impossible situation, marked by nothing so much as the irreconcilability of its goals, is none other than Kim Jong Eun. One can only guess at what his subordinate, but far more experienced and professional, colleagues think of it all.
