Seoul: South Korea and the United States have made dialogue overtures toward North Korea, from Seoul’s suspension of its anti-Pyongyang loudspeaker campaign to U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to send a letter to leader Kim Jong-un, drawing attention to how North Korea will respond.
According to Yonhap News Agency, departing from the previous administration’s hands-off stance on activists sending propaganda leaflets to North Korea, the new Lee Jae-myung government on Monday issued a call to halt leaflet campaigns and signaled plans to curb them. On Wednesday, the South Korean military also suspended loudspeaker broadcasts of propaganda messages and music along the inter-Korean border toward the North, followed by Lee’s pledge on Thursday to swiftly restore dialogue channels with North Korea.
“(South Korea) will make efforts to quickly restore the suspended inter-Korean communication channels,” “stop the exhausting hostilities” with North Korea and resume inter-Korean dialogue and cooperation, Lee said in a speech marking the 25th anniversary of the 2000 inter-Korean summit.
Concurrently, a recent news report revealed Trump, who has voiced interest in dialogue with North’s leader Kim, attempted to deliver a letter to Kim, although North Korean diplomats in New York reportedly refused to accept it. A White House spokesperson later reaffirmed Trump’s interest in dialogue, saying, “The president remains receptive to correspondence with Kim Jong-un, and he’d like to see the progress that was made at that summit in Singapore.”
The dialogue overtures by both Seoul and Washington coincidentally came ahead of the seventh anniversary of the first Trump-Kim summit, held in Singapore on June 12, 2018. Whether such overtures could lead to dialogue with North Korea and help ease military tensions ultimately depend on how Pyongyang responds, following the yearslong absence of talks since the 2019 Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi collapsed without a tangible deal, experts said.
North Korea immediately responded to South Korea’s suspension of loudspeaker broadcasts by halting its own broadcasts of shrieking and screeching sounds toward the South as of early Thursday. However, many experts agree that no immediate change in North Korea’s stance should be expected. Many widely interpret North Korean diplomats’ recent rejection of the letter from Trump as a sign that the regime intends to leave no room for dialogue with Washington at least for now.
North Korea would first seek to ensure its demands are met before deciding whether to come to the table for dialogue, Park Won-gon, a professor at Ewha Womans University, said. “As North Korea has repeatedly called for the suspension of combined South Korea-U.S. military exercises and the deployment of U.S. strategic assets on the Korean Peninsula on various occasions, including at the time of Trump’s inauguration, (the North) is expected to bring up these issues before any dialogue,” Park noted.
Experts also warned the North’s suspension of loudspeaker broadcasts should not be hastily interpreted as a sign of its willingness to improve ties with Seoul, adding that it may be nothing more than a reciprocal action. In a major step to distance North Korea from the South, Kim defined the two Koreas as separate, “hostile” countries in 2023. Since then, Pyongyang has blown up railways and roads connected to South Korea and has also eschewed relations with Seoul.
The primary reason for North Korea’s lack of interest in talks with Seoul and Washington appears to be its newfound military alignment with Russia, with which it signed a mutual defense agreement in June last year. Amid stringent international sanctions, North Korea has turned to Russia for resources and cooperation, and is reported to have received substantial aid and military technology in return for deploying troops on the Russian side in the war against Ukraine.
How Russia’s negotiations with the United States and other parties on ending the war unfold is expected to influence North Korea’s reaction to dialogue with Seoul or Washington, as improved Russia-West relations would likely prompt changes in Pyongyang’s stance. Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said a window of opportunity for dialogue could open around the end of the year, when progress in ending the Russia-Ukraine war is expected and North Korea’s five-year defense development plan comes to completion.
“If Kim issues a message calling for economic development and attention to external cooperation (during a key party congress next year), it could possibly open a window of opportunity for dialogue with the U.S. or South Korea,” Yang said.