End-of-war declaration will lose luster in trilateral FM talks: experts

Noh Kyu-duk, South Korea's special representative for Korean peninsula peace and security affairs, speaks to reporters after arriving at an airport in Honolulu, Wednesday (local time). Yonhap

Seoul, Washington, Tokyo unlikely to come up with effective measures against Pyongyang's saber-rattling

By Kang Seung-woo

The Moon Jae-in administration's last-ditch effort to revive its push for declaring an end to the Korean War on the occasion of upcoming trilateral foreign ministerial talks with the United States and Japan is not likely to be realized due to bad timing and the nature of the meeting, according to diplomatic observers.

Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong is scheduled to hold a meeting with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts Antony Blinken and Yoshimasa Hayashi in Hawaii, Saturday (local time), during which the top diplomats are anticipated to mainly discuss how to effectively deal with North Korea's increased saber-rattling, as illustrated by its seven rounds of missile tests, in total, in January.

However, Noh Kyu-duk, South Korea's top nuclear envoy, implied before his departure for Hawaii, Wednesday, that South Korea may bring up the end-of-war issue again in the three-way talks, describing it as a "useful tool" to bring North Korea back to the dialogue. He, along with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts Sung Kim and Funakoshi Takehiro, will also hold a trilateral meeting, Thursday, to discuss the agenda for the ministers' talks.

Last September, Moon proposed declaring a formal end to the 1950-53 conflict, which ended in a cease-fire, hoping that the signing would be made before he leaves office in May, but North Korea has yet to respond to the overture.

"I'm not sure if the meeting will be an appropriate occasion for Seoul to raise the end-of-war (EOW) declaration, particularly in light of North Korea's most recent IRBM test," said Soo Kim, a policy analyst at the Rand Corporation.

Among the seven rounds of missile launches was a test-firing of an intermediate-range ballistic missile on Jan. 30, the longest-range missile since 2017.

"Pyongyang hasn't exactly been emitting peace vibes, and with protracted concerns about the DPRK missile threat, a discussion about the EOW declaration would not seem appropriate," she added. The DPRK refers to North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Along with the trilateral meeting, Chung is also scheduled to sit down with Blinken, while South Korea and Japan are in talks over a bilateral meeting, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"The end of war declaration absent a comprehensive peace and denuclearization process is just a piece of paper," said Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

"It has been a chimera chased by the Moon administration. It may come up in the bilateral U.S.-ROK part of the consultations, but it is not high on the U.S. agenda, and Japan is not in favor of it."

The ROK stands for the Republic of Korea, South Korea's official name.

Despite negative sentiment toward the end-of-war declaration, fueled by recent North Korean provocations, South Korea still has pinned a gleam of hope on it.

In a TV interview with a local cable channel, Jan. 21, Chung said North Korea will positively respond to the South Korean proposal, adding that Seoul and Washington had been in close talks about the issue.

Given that Japan does not support the end-of-war declaration, it is unlikely that the three countries will mention the issue in a joint statement after the meeting.

"I would think that we would require some intermediate steps from North Korea before locking in an EOW declaration in a statement," Soo Kim said.

"To issue a statement including an EOW declaration would mean skipping over some critical steps to secure North Korea's commitment to the agreement. The Kim regime also has not expressed much interest in the declaration."

Amid widespread negative views on the end-of-war issue, President Moon admitted that it would be difficult to adopt the declaration during his term although South Korea and the U.S. have agreed on a draft of the declaration.

"It would be too physically demanding to reach a declaration to end the Korean War before the end of my term," Moon said in a written interview with Yonhap News Agency and seven other global newswires, released, Thursday. "However, I would at least like to make conditions ripe for an end-of-war declaration and pass that on to the next administration."

The ministerial meeting has been hurriedly arranged in the wake of the unprecedented North Korean show of force in January to seek ways to respond to the increasing threats from Pyongyang and strengthen deterrence.

"North Korean's new round of ballistic and cruise missile tests underscore the growing importance of U.S.-ROK-Japan trilateral defense and intelligence cooperation, and I would expect the focus of the discussions to be on how to enhance that cooperation and other measures needed to bolster deterrence," Manning said.

However, Soo Kim was skeptical of the three parties coming up with any effective measures against North Korea's provocations due to wide differences on how to handle North Korea.

"Effective measures require coordination and the parties being on the same page. The past few years have shown rifts among the parties' policy positions. Whereas the U.S. and Japan have prioritized denuclearization, the current South Korean government has emphasized what seems to have been an unconditional emphasis on inter-Korean engagement," she said.

"The countries will also need a clearly articulated policy position on key issues pertaining to North Korea ― the weapons program of course, but also Kim's human rights violations and the regime's illicit activities. Thus far, we may have given the impression to North Korea that its provocations will continue to be tolerated."