Park Geun-hye promises to reach out to North Korea with more
humanitarian aid and deeper engagement after she moves into South
Korea's presidential Blue House on Feb. 25. Pyongyang, however, may be
in no mood to talk anytime soon.
Park's declarations
ahead of Wednesday's election that she will soften five years of
hard-line policy rang true with voters, even as they rejected her
opponent's calls for a more aggressive pursuit of reconciliation with
the North.
A skeptical North Korea may quickly test
the sincerity of Park's offer to engage — possibly even before she
takes office. She is both a leading member of the conservative ruling
party and the daughter of the late anti-communist dictator Park
Chung-hee, and Pyongyang has repeatedly called her dialogue offers
"tricks."
Outgoing President Lee Myung-bak's tough
approach on North Korea — including his demand that engagement be
accompanied by nuclear disarmament progress — has been deemed a
failure by many South Koreans. During his five years in office, North
Korea has conducted nuclear and rocket tests — including a rocket
launch last week — and it was blamed for two incidents that left 50
South Koreans dead in 2010.
But reaching out to
North Korea's authoritarian government also has failed to pay off.
Before Lee, landmark summits under a decade of liberal governments
resulted in lofty statements and photo ops in Pyongyang between
then-leader Kim Jong Il and South Korean presidents, but the North
continued to develop its nuclear weapons, which it sees as necessary
defense and leverage against Washington and Seoul.
Analysts
said Park's vague promises of aid and engagement are not likely to be
enough to push Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions, which
Washington and Seoul have demanded for true reconciliation to begin. To
reverse the antipathy North Korea has so far shown her, Park may need
to go further than either her deeply conservative supporters and
political allies or a cautious Obama administration will want.
"North
Korea is good at applying pressure during South Korean transitions"
after presidential elections, said Yoo Ho-yeol, a professor at Korea
University in South Korea. "North Korea will do something to try to
test, and tame, Park."
Even the last liberal
president, Roh Moo-hyun, a champion of no-strings-attached aid to
Pyongyang, faced a North Korean short-range missile launch on the eve of
his 2003 inauguration.
North Korea put its first
satellite into space with last week's rocket launch, which the U.N. and
others called a cover for a test of banned ballistic missile technology.
Despite
the launch, Park says humanitarian aid, including food, medicine and
daily goods meant for infants, the sick and other vulnerable people,
will flow. She says none of the aid will be anything that North Korea's
military could use. She's open to conditional talks with North Korean
leader Kim Jong Un.
The aid won't be as much as
North Korea will want, to be sure, and it won't be as much as her
liberal challenger in Wednesday's election, Moon Jae-in, would have
sent. Park's conditions on aid and talks also could doom talks before
they begin.
Pursuing engagement with North Korea
"really would have to be her top priority for her to be a game-changing
kind of leader on the issue," said John Delury, an analyst at Seoul's
Yonsei University. He added that Park is more likely to take a passive,
moderate approach.
"In the inter-Korean context,
there's not a big difference between a passive approach and a hostile
approach," Delury said, "because if you don't take the initiative with
North Korea, they'll take the initiative" in the form of provocations
meant to raise their profile.
North Korea was not a
particularly pressing issue for South Korean voters, who were more
worried about their economic futures and a host of social issues. But it
is of deep interest to Washington, Beijing and Tokyo, which had been
holding off on pursuing their North Korea policies until South Korean
voters chose their new leader.
The next Japanese
prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is a hawk on North Korea matters who has
supported tighter sanctions because of the rocket launch.
The
U.S. had attempted to warm relations with North Korea with an
aid-for-nuclear-freeze deal reached with Pyongyang in February, but that
collapsed in April when the North conducted a failed rocket launch.
Washington
could use a new thaw on the Korean Peninsula as a cover to pursue more
nuclear disarmament talks, analysts say, but the Obama administration
will also likely want a carefully coordinated approach with Seoul toward
Pyongyang.
Park's North Korea policy aims to hold
talks meant to build trust and resolve key issues, like the nuclear
problem and other security challenges. Humanitarian assistance to the
North won't be tied to ongoing political circumstances, though her camp
hasn't settled details, including the amount.
Park
also plans to restart joint economic initiatives that were put on hold
during the Lee administration as progress occurs on the nuclear issue
and after reviewing the projects with lawmakers.
Park's
statement that she's willing to talk with Kim Jong Un "practically
means she's willing to give more money to North Korea," which is
Pyongyang's typical demand for dialogue, said Andrei Lankov, a scholar
on the North at Seoul's Kookmin University.
But the
heart of the matter — North Korea's nuclear program — might be off
limits, no matter how deeply the next Blue House decides to engage.
"North
Korea isn't going to surrender its nukes. They're going to keep them
indefinitely," Lankov said. "No amount of bribing or blackmail or
begging is going to change it. They are a de facto nuclear power,
period, and they are going to stay that way."
