Korea | Seoul's North Korea policy is in shambles

Military personnel in North Korea watch the test firing of an improved 240mm guided missile on a monitor. Photo: AFP/KCNA vis KNS Lee Jae-myung isn't having his easiest days right now. At the beginning of the week, his government in Seoul summoned the ambassador from Ukraine. A few days earlier, Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, had publicly stated that prisoners of war from North Korea who had fought for Russia against Ukraine had been transferred to South Korea. In Seoul they see this as a betrayal of secrets. South Korean President Lee is now demanding an apology. Why?

For hardly any head of government is the involvement in the Ukraine war as delicate as for Lee: Although Seoul feels connected to the liberal world, it also benefits from Europe's armament following the war, as South Korea's arms industry sells to EU states. But Lee is also seeking an exchange with the enemy brother state North Korea, which is on Russia's side in this war. In return, Seoul is not supplying weapons to Ukraine and wants to receive prisoners of war from the north in secret.

When Lee Jae-myung was elected South Korea's president in June 2025, he achieved this with the promise of a new policy of communication with North Korea. Under Lee's predecessor, the right-wing populist Yoon Suk-yeol, North and South exchanged war threats even more often. An outstretched hand policy seemed sensible. But since then, North Korea has shown little interest in shaking any hand from the South. Instead, South Korea was officially designated an “enemy state.”

From Lee's perspective, things have gotten even worse in the past few days: First, he told the New York Times that the approach he had taken so far of insisting on an end to the nuclear program in possible talks with North Korea should be dropped. Instead, we need to work on simply stopping further armaments. Days later, North Korea's deputy foreign minister told the United Nations: "Under no circumstances" would North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. Lee stood there looking stupid.

The Pyongyang regime has repeatedly been declared dead, but it has developed a special type of life insurance: nuclear weapons.

Domestically, this course is gradually putting him in trouble. Lee's liberal and left-wing core voters would like to have exchanges with the north. But since there is no sign of willingness to talk from Pyongyang, Seoul stands almost awkwardly, which in turn turns parts of the center against Lee. His popularity ratings are low; barely 38 percent are satisfied with him. And at least in terms of foreign policy, there is no indication of how Lee is going to get out of this.

For decades there has been a formal state of war on the Korean peninsula - which after the Second World War and the end of Japanese colonial rule was divided into a north supported by the Soviet Union and a south dominated by the USA. In 1950, North Korea attacked the South, resulting in a three-year war that became the first proxy war of the Cold War and resulted in millions of deaths. The 1953 ceasefire still applies today.

In the decades since, North and South Korea have diverged significantly. In the north, the Stalinist influence has never been completely broken; the Kim dynasty rules in a one-party dictatorship, since 2011 in the form of Kim Jong-un. South Korea became a democracy in the late 1980s. There is also an immense difference in terms of prosperity: South Korea is an innovative industrial country, while North Korea continues to struggle with malnutrition despite a recent economic boom.

The Pyongyang regime has repeatedly been declared dead, but it has developed a special type of life insurance: nuclear weapons. Over the decades, nuclear armament has been internationally outlawed. Since 2017, North Korea has been under such severe UN trade sanctions that most exchanges of goods have been banned. The idea behind it: North Korea should be forced to denuclearize.

But so far this has not even begun to succeed. When US President Donald Trump - then in his first term in office - met repeatedly with Kim Jong-un between 2018 and 2019, he believed he could convince the North Korean to give up the nuclear program. But Kim, who had been persuaded to talk not least by South Korea's then liberal President Moon Jae-in, ended the negotiations. Since then there has been radio silence.

And at the same time, from a North Korean perspective, the situation has developed so well that there is simply no need for further contacts with Washington or Seoul. "The chances of reaching a deal have never been as good as they were back then," says Moon Chung-in, professor emeritus of security policy at Yonsei University in Seoul and advisor to Moon Jae-in at the time. But North Korea now has a partner in Russia from whom it receives economic aid in return for weapons and soldiers in the war in Ukraine.

The UN sanctions have also become less important as the US weakens the rules-based global order - so Kim Jong-un does not need to make it a priority to renegotiate with the US at this time. But if there is a summit again, it may even be that Seoul will be excluded: Trump had asked Lee to join in his attack on Iran, to which Lee responded defensively. This was followed by indications from Washington that they were seeking contact with Pyongyang without Seoul.

That's not all: a few days ago there were explosions in the DMZ, the heavily armed zone that separates North and South Korea, which injured three South Korean soldiers. On Tuesday, South Korean Defense Minister Kang Shin-chul said the mines were North Korean. “Appropriate measures” will be taken, said the minister. The Yonhap news agency noted: "Without explaining what this entails." We probably don't know yet.

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