SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — After winning a bitterly contested presidential election, South Korean conservative Yoon Suk Yeol will enter office facing a quickly growing North Korean nuclear threat — and with few easy choices ahead to deal with it.
A former prosecutor with no foreign policy experience who kickstarted his political career nine months ago, Yoon will face a turbulent moment in global affairs and the decades-old standoff with the North, over which many experts see Seoul as having lost leverage under the policies of outgoing President Moon Jae-in.
It appears Yoon will be tested quickly, possibly even before he starts his presidency in May. North Korea often attempts to rattle new administrations in Washington or Seoul with major weapons demonstrations and has been signaling a resumption of long-range missile testing this year.
Yoon, who narrowly beat out a liberal ruling party rival in last week’s election, has rejected pursuing “talks for talks’ sake” and vowed to be sterner with Pyongyang, as the North’s accelerating weapons tests in 2022 show a renewed strategy of brinkmanship to pressure Washington and Seoul into giving it badly needed relief from economic sanctions.
But despite Yoon’s desire to do something different from the dovish government of Moon, there’s no “silver bullet” policy his administration could adopt for dealing with North Korea, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University.
Improved “inter-Korean relations” will largely depend on the willingness of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to engage with diplomacy and negotiate sanctions relief for denuclearization steps, he said.
“Such willingness is unlikely to materialize until coronavirus risks decrease and domestic economic pressures increase,” he explained.
North Korea has conducted nine rounds of missile launches in 2022 alone, with signs of more to come. State media said Friday that Kim Jong Un instructed officials to expand a satellite launch facility to fire a variety of rockets. His comments followed a pair of missile firings in recent weeks that the U.S. and South Korean militaries linked with the development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile system that could be tested at full range soon.
South Korea’s military has also detected signs that the North is possibly restoring previously detonated tunnels at a nuclear testing ground that was last active in 2017.
North Korea’s stubborn efforts to cement itself as a nuclear power and win economic benefits from a position of strength may present daunting challenges for Yoon. Amid a deepening freeze in nuclear negotiations with Washington and pandemic border closures, North Korea has clearly stated it has no intentions to include Seoul in discussions about its nuclear weapons program, which Kim sees as his strongest guarantee of survival.
Although Yoon plans to restore South Korea’s leverage by bolstering its alliance with the U.S., North Korea seems further down the priority list for Washington, which is preoccupied with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an intensifying rivalry with China.
Yoon, surrounded by foreign policy advisers who have served under Seoul’s previous conservative governments, has called for maintaining sanctions and pressure until the North takes meaningful steps to wind down its weapons program.
He has vowed the resumption of major U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which were suspended or significantly downsized in recent years to make room for diplomacy with North Korea.
He also wants an additional deployment of an advanced U.S. anti-missile system, called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, to better protect the capital Seoul from North Korean missile threats, a move that would infuriate both Pyongyang and Beijing. He plans to further bolster South Korea’s defense by pursuing pre-emptive strike capabilities to deter North Korean attacks.
However, the Biden…
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