South Korean President Moon Jae-in is on a four-day visit to the U.S. from May 19, and the three focal points of the trip are North Korea policy, China, and cooperation on vaccines and semiconductors. Analysis suggests that the U.S. wants South Korea to strengthen its cooperation with China, but the Moon administration remains ambiguous about this, preferring to seek the Biden administration’s prioritization of North Korea policy.
Biden’s diplomatic refocus
On Friday, the White House red carpet will be rolled out to welcome South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Moon becomes the second foreign leader, after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, to be received by President Joe Biden at the White House.
The US National Security Council coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs, Kurt Campbell, stressed in an exclusive interview with Yonhap News Agency on the 19th that this arrangement highlights the importance of Indo-Pacific alliances and South Korea-US relations. In contrast to the Trump era, the first foreign leaders received by the White House were the British Prime Minister and the King of Jordan.
The official invitation to South Korea to join the quadrilateral talks?
Moon’s visit to the U.S. began on the afternoon of 19th local time and lasted for four days. In addition to the White House summit with Biden, he will meet with Vice President Kamala Harris and congressional leaders. In a press conference before the visit, Moon stressed that vaccine cooperation will be the main topic of the summit. At the same time, a number of executives from South Korea’s semiconductor and battery industry giants will also accompany the visit to the United States.
The media predicted that the three key issues of Moon’s visit to the U.S. are China, North Korea policy, and cooperation on vaccines and semiconductors.
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported on May 18 that the U.S. and South Korea may start consultations on establishing cooperation between South Korea and the U.S.-Japan-India-Australia “quadripartite talks mechanism”. The U.S. has asked South Korea to strengthen cooperation in its policy toward China, but the South Korean side only wants to maintain cooperation at a level that will not attract strong resentment from China.
The “quadripartite mechanism” is aimed at countering China’s gradual rise in the military and economic spheres. In March, Biden decided to set up three working groups on vaccines, cutting-edge technologies and addressing climate change at the first-ever online summit of the four leaders at the White House.
South Korea has been deliberately distancing itself from the “quadrilateral talks. Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong responded at a press conference in March that South Korea intended to join the U.S.-led regional cooperation, but that the areas of cooperation must be “selective,” such as public health, climate change, and green energy, deliberately avoiding issues related to China.
Later in March, Secretary of State Blinken chose Japan and South Korea for his first visit after taking office, which was interpreted as a strategic adjustment by Biden to unite with allies against China. However, unlike the U.S.-Japanese statement, which condemned China’s arbitrary expansion and human rights abuses, the U.S.-South Korean statement made no mention of China, stressing only that it was “committed to opposing all actions that undermine and weaken the rules-based international order.”
Campbell also seemed to leave some room for South Korea’s options in an exclusive interview with Yonhap News Agency on the 19th. “At this time, the United States has no plans to expand the Quadripartite talks mechanism (Quad) …… The shared value of a free and prosperous Indo-Pacific region has been accepted by many partners in the region, and we believe there are ways to continue to expand regional cooperation, including with other partners in the region, such as South Korea and ASEAN “.
South Korea’s U.S.-China Choices
Within South Korea, there is still debate over how to find a niche in the U.S.-China rivalry. in 2017, South Korea was hit with trade sanctions from China for promising to let the U.S. deploy its Saad missile defense system in South Korea, and China now accounts for about a quarter of South Korea’s exports, while the U.S. accounts for about an eighth. Some observers believe the Moon administration wants to avoid angering Beijing; however, another school of thought points out that Biden’s diplomatic layout to unite allies is becoming clearer, and the South Korean government can hardly be more ambiguous.
“What surprises me is that the South Korean government has not yet figured out where it wants to stand. They have so far tried to insist that they are ‘neutral,’ which instead looks like they belong to the anti-US coalition …… This could create a more complicated situation for South Korea.” Dukgeun Ahn, a professor at the Department of International Policy and Law at Seoul National University’s Institute of International Studies, expressed concern.
Taeyong Cho, a former South Korean vice foreign minister and current member of the National Power Party, said bluntly at a seminar at Stanford University last week that South Korea should start joining the quadripartite talks from “non-military cooperation. “I think that given China’s arbitrary actions around the Korean Peninsula today, South Korea should move forward in this direction (to join the Quartet) even though there are risks involved. The China of today is very different from the China of the past, and South Korea must seriously look for a solution.”
Moon Jae-in’s expectations
For Moon, who will leave office next year, scholars believe that the North Korea issue is an area where he is eager to seek a breakthrough and leave a political legacy.
In recent months, Moon has replaced three key team members, including Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong, National Security Office chief Seo Hun, and National Intelligence Agency chief Park Ji-won, all three of whom have been deeply involved in the inter-Korean summit talks since the Kim Dae-jung administration.
“Moon hopes that the Biden administration will acknowledge the spirit of the 2018 Singapore meeting, which Biden may do, and this is largely just a symbolic gesture.” Seong-Hyon Lee analyzed the agreement between Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore as setting a broad goal for denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and Moon wants to build on that down the road and fast-track it ahead of South Korea’s election season.
The Biden administration recently announced it has completed a review of its policy toward North Korea. Campbell, for his part, made clear in an interview with Yonhap News Agency that the U.S. goal remains the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and that “we are prepared to engage diplomatically with North Korea to ultimately achieve that goal, but we are also prepared to take substantive steps to reap results as we move toward that goal.”
Also on the question of whether Washington is considering easing sanctions against the DPRK, Campbell said, “UN sanctions against the DPRK will remain in place and the United States will continue to implement them through diplomatic efforts with the UN and countries surrounding the DPRK. It is premature to speculate on that at this stage, and we have more to do.”
Taeyong Cho, a former South Korean deputy foreign minister who served as a nuclear negotiator, assessed that “North Korea will try to show a tough stance, even rejecting several requests from the Biden administration to meet, but I believe that eventually North Korea will still sit down and talk. Kim Jong-un has no other options, he is under pressure, the treasury may have been emptied, and he is actually a reluctant risk-taker.”
Taeyong Cho also said that in the process of advancing the U.S.-North Korea dialogue, “China’s help will be needed.
Beijing’s wait-and-see
The Chinese Communist Party has not recently spoken out on Moon’s visit to the U.S. or on North Korea policy. However, the Shanghai Institute of International Studies, a think tank with close ties to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, recently released a report titled “A Look at the Biden Administration’s Korean Peninsula Policy.
In the report, Chinese diplomacy scholars assess that the Biden administration is most likely to use the “stable management of the DPRK’s nuclear program” because mainstream foreign policy experts in the Biden camp believe that Pyongyang is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons in the near term and cannot remove them through military action. Such a formula would mean taking measures and negotiating if North Korea makes positive moves toward denuclearization, punishing North Korea if it “provokes,” and responding with “brutal neglect” if it chooses to maintain the status quo.
Official Communist Party scholars believe that Biden would partially revise Trump’s policy toward North Korea. First, it would change Trump’s summit diplomacy and top-down approach; second, Biden would change the “Libya model,” which former national security adviser Bolton proposed as a “package of nuclear abandonment,” to one that is unsustainable in the face of North Korea’s explicit rejection. “Third, the U.S. may loosen the ties for South Korea and Japan to enhance their deterrence capabilities, i.e., loosen restrictions on South Korea and Japan to develop offensive capabilities in the field of conventional weapons to deter North Korean military forces.
Seong-Hyon Lee, director of the Center for China Studies at the Sejong Institute in South Korea, told the station that Beijing is still watching and will carefully evaluate the outcome of the Moon and Biden summit to assess whether to move forward with Xi’s visit to South Korea this year. “The fact that anti-China sentiment is unusually high in South Korea and this is Moon’s last year in power will both cause China to remeasure what the benefits of sitting down with Moon are.”
Lee Sung-hyun analyzed that whether Xi Jinping visits South Korea could be the next move in a multi-party political and diplomatic game.
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