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Without Centrist Support, Moon‘s D¤tente with North Korea will Not Survive the Next Conservative ROK Presidency

This month, South Korean President Moon Jae In is scheduled to visit Pyongyang. The Moon government is marketing the trip as a ’bold move‘ toward formally ending the Korean War. US advisors to President Donald Trump are arguing against a peace treaty. The feeling broadly in Washington is that North Korea has not conceded enough to earn the treaty. South Korean hawks are similarly uncomfortable, and Moon’s approval rating is now at its lowest, around 55%.

Moon will need more centrist and, ideally, conservative support if his d¤tente policy is to survive his presidency. The last time a left-wing president, Roh Moo Hyun, engaged North Korea, he did not find enough support outside his liberal base for detente to survive his departure. Conservatives damned the Sunshine Policy as appeasement, and when Lee Myung-Bak took over, he rolled back most of it. Moon faces similar problems: he needs centrist and, ideally, conservative support for ‘Moonshine’ to survive. So far, he is not finding it.

There is sharp disagreement over a peace treaty between hawks and doves, and now between Seoul and Washington. Hawks believe a war-ending statement is a concession to the North. The deterrence and containment of North Korea has worked for seventy years. The peninsula is peaceful without a treaty. Indeed, it is North Korea, not the US or South Korea, which routinely violates the current peace. So a peace treaty is not about peace. Instead, it is really about recognition. A treaty would recognize the North Korean state as a legitimate outcome of the Korean civil war. A treaty would require the North‘s assent alongside the South’s to end the war (along with China and the US). To do so would place the South and North next to each other as sovereign equals.

This is a huge step ¤ which is why the North wants it. It makes North and South Korea equal to each other, when the reality of course is that the North is vastly worse-off than the South. A treaty-certified equality between North and South would delegitimize the South‘s constitutional claim to govern all of the peninsula. North Korea too makes such a claim of course, but it can barely govern itself without shortages and failures of all sorts. It is the South’s claim to govern the North which is the real threat of change to the status quo. If the North gets a peace treaty, that threat is significantly reduced. Indeed, given that South Korea‘s constitution claims the North, Moon may need to alter the constitution to pursue a war-termination resolution. Finally, a peace treaty undercuts the rationale of the US and United Nations presence in Korea. If the war is over and the two Koreas are two recognized, independent states living side-by-side, why would there be foreign observers or military forces here?

The South Korean left may be comfortable with this ’one nation, two states‘ outcome and a reduced US role, but the right here is not, nor, I believe, is the South Korean center. And the Americans are pretty uncomfortable with it too. South Korean conservatives, of course, have long worried that the Southern left would make too many concessions, and that anxiety is clear in the editorial pages of South Koreas largest papers this year. The Americans too dislike the idea of a final status deal in Korea that leaves orwellian North Korea intact and unchanged. But critically, I do not believe Moon has enough centrist support to pull off something this revolutionary.

Moon supporters will respond, correctly, that the South Korean right has a long history of mccarthyism and red-baiting. These conservatives, they say, have nothing to offer on North Korea except more confrontation, and they were decisively defeated in this year’s local elections, which were in part a referendum on Moon‘s d¤tente effort. The left’s inclination will be to ignore the right‘s anxieties.

Leftists will also suggest that the Americans should not have a role in an inter-Korean deal. This is a Korean affair. That is less true insofar as South Korea enjoys a US defense guarantee. If South Korea wants to retain that guarantee, then it must also pursue a foreign policy broadly tolerable to Washington. But the left’s inclination will also be to ignore US anxieties and forge ahead.

But Moon‘s centrist support in the Korean electorate, beyond his left-wing, pro-engagement base, is very soft. And here is the problem. I doubt that Moon actually has the popular support for something as dramatic as a peace treaty which equalizes the two Koreas and undercuts the rationale for the still-popular US alliance.

Recall that Moon only won the presidency with 41% of the vote. Even with the Justice Party votes of 6% in last year’s presidential election, the combined left only scored 47% in 2017. That is 1% less than Moon‘s showing in 2012, which is fairly astonishing given that 2017 should have been a ’wave election‘ for the left. Park Geun Hye had discredited the right, and her successor, Hong Jun-Pyo, clownishly called himself the ’Donald Trump of Korea.‘ Against such a pathetic right-wing showing, Moon and the left should have had a great year. Instead the left did not expand its 2012 vote into the center all. This is fairly amazing. Instead it lost those voters to another weak candidate, Ahn Cheol-Soo with 21%.

In short, Moon is running a near-revolutionary outreach policy toward North Korea based heavily on the political left, with thin support in the center and none of the right. Moon’s approval rating did indeed hit 80+%, but it increasingly looks like he misread that as broad-based support for detente rather than anxiety over Trump‘s war threats of 2017. Now that ’fire and fury‘ is fading and Moon is no longer a national bulwark against a massive regional war and the much-loathed Donald Trump, his approval ratings are coming back down. His current 55% is just 8% above the left’s 2017 presidential showing. It is of course a majority, so supporters can still claim public support for d¤tente. But it is a small majority for a change so dramatic. Unless Moon can get those numbers up into the 60s% for a final, war-ending deal, conservatives will almost certainly run against Moon‘s d¤tente in the future.

Here is the importance of Moon’s Pyongyang trip. The US-North Korean process is now stale-mated. Moon‘s popularity is down as Ahn Cheol-Soo centrist voters drift away from Moon due to anxiety over too many concessions to the North. Moon now needs to demonstrate that d¤tente is a two-way street ¤ that North Korea will give up major concessions in exchange for something as significant as a peace treaty. If Pyongyang does not do so, then d¤tente will look like appeasement to the South center and right, and 2007 will repeat itself: the next time the right takes the ROK presidency it will unravel d¤tente for a second time. After eight months of pageantry and symbolism with little real movement on the big issues (nuclear weapons and missiles), only a major Northern concession will calm centrist and conservative voters ¤ and the Americans ¤ and really lock-in this d¤tente as a national, rather than just leftist, policy.
Robert E Kelly (@Robert_E_Kelly) is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University. More of his work may be found at his website,AsianSecurityBlog.wordpress.com.