hankyoreh

On Oct. 31, 2018, South Korean Minister of Defense Jeong Kyeong-doo and US Defense Secretary James Mattis hold up a document titled “Guiding Principles Following the Transition of Wartime Operational Control” adopted at the 50th US ROK Security Consultative Meeting in the US. (courtesy of the Ministry of National Defense)

“Why would North Korea care about a country that doesn’t even have wartime operational control?” President Lee Jae Myung said with a chuckle during a press conference held to commemorate his 100th day in office. “They no doubt think that relations with the US are what’s important.”

“North Korea believes that the most direct threat to its regime is not South Korea, but the US. Therefore, I believe that, to them, relations with the US are a more urgent issue than inter-Korean relations,” he explained. 

The Roh Moo-hyun and Moon Jae-in administrations adopted similar attitudes, believing that we would need to recover wartime operational control, or OPCON, if South Korea were to be the main agent of peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and engage in negotiations with Pyongyang.

While the Lee administration has chosen to serve the role of “pacemaker” for the Korean Peninsula peace process, it also emphasizes the importance of being self-reliant. This stance is demonstrated in how the Presidential Committee on Policy Planning made it a national policy goal to bolster Korea’s key military capabilities so as to regain OPCON before the end of Lee’s term. 

There are, however, two questions we must answer: the first being, is there a close correlation between the fact that South Korea lacks OPCON and the reason that North Korea doesn’t think of us as important, and the second being, would not the attempt to meet the requirements to take back OPCON negatively impact inter-Korea relations? 

As the one who brought these issues up, Lee should take the time to really consider them. Why? So that he can avoid repeating the same mistakes as his predecessors. 

The correlation between North Korea’s disregard of South Korea and South Korea’s lack of OPCON has mostly been made public by former officials who have engaged in dialogue and negotiations with Pyongyang. That said, I cannot help but worry that such a perspective is an overgeneralization based on events during Kim Jong-il’s reign. 

In this context, we ought to remember North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s personal letter to US President Donald Trump that was delivered on Aug. 5, 2019. (The official English letters have yet to be made public, though Korean versions were released in 2022 by the Korus Journal, a quarterly publication by the Korean-American Club, an association of current and former Korean foreign correspondents in the US. The Hankyoreh presents its own translation of this Korean version.)

“The South Korean military is not discussing wartime operational control so that it will be able to engage in combat with tribes on the opposite side of the world or the Iranian army, 70,000 kilometers away. Conceptually or hypothetically, the primary target of these preparations for war is our military,” Kim wrote, emphasizing that this was not “a misunderstanding on our part.”

Such sentiments were written as Kim voiced dissatisfaction over Trump going back on his promise to put an end to South Korea-US joint military exercises.

This leads to the next issue. Kim’s frustration stemmed from the Moon administration’s commitment to fulfilling the conditions for the return of OPCON through an unprecedented military buildup and continuation of joint military exercises with the US. Despite Pyongyang expressing its unhappiness with Seoul’s decision, the Moon administration stayed fully committed to that cause. This led South and North Korea into a vicious cycle of an arms race, the worst that both parties have ever experienced, despite agreeing to work step-by-step toward disarmament at the 2018 inter-Korea summit. The North ultimately severed all ties with South Korea.

This highlights the need to reexamine the root cause of the collapse in inter-Korean relations. Instead of pointing the finger at the failed Hanoi summit as many tend to do, we need to recognize that the Moon administration’s obsession with fulfilling the conditions to regain OPCON and the subsequent backlash from Pyongyang are to blame. The outcome of this obsession is devastating. The process to achieve peace on the Korean Peninsula, which includes thawing inter-Korea relations, and attempts to regain wartime operational control, has all come to nothing.

The Lee Jae Myung administration needs to take its lesson from the Moon administration’s failures. Yet, there are major concerns that he’ll simply make the same mistakes. 

The administration’s stance is that it will draft plans to transfer OPCON based on certain conditions, but this is closely related to the two aforementioned issues: South Korea’s military drills with the US and large-scale arms increases. As the US continues to pressure South Korea to increase its defense spending and the Lee administration indicates that it is amenable to accommodating certain demands, there is a high chance that Lee will commit to increases in defense spending that far exceed those of the Moon administration. If that happens, inter-Korean relations will regress into an arms race and a lack of dialogue.  

Recent moves by North Korea are also highly concerning. Ahead of his visit to China for Xi Jinping’s “Victory Day” parade, Kim visited a weapons research facility in mid-September, where he reportedly declared that “the Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea would put forward the policy of simultaneously pushing forward the building of nuclear forces and conventional armed forces in the field of building up national defense.” 

After declaring in 2013 that it would pursue both economic development and the construction of nuclear weapons simultaneously, North Korea reduced the proportion of conventional weapons in its military, focusing instead on the people’s livelihood and economic development. At the same time, it devoted more military resources to nuclear weapons and missiles. 
 
Now, however, the regime has declared that it will place equal focus on its conventional armed forces. As North Korea accelerates its simultaneous development of nuclear weapons and conventional arms, the “conditions” for an OPCON transfer will need to be modified, once again casting the likelihood of OPCON transfer into doubt. 

In that case, how do you solve the dilemma of OPCON transfer and inter-Korean relations? We can consider the matter irrespective of the conditions for recovering OPCON, or completely rethink the conditions. 

Instead of trying to set the conditions, we can set the timing. During the era of Roh Moo-hyun and George W. Bush, the date for a potential OPCON transfer was April 17, 2012; during the Lee Myung-bak and Barack Obama era, it was Dec. 1, 2015. 

But the Park Geun-hye administration sent a distress beacon to the US, and Washington changed the nature of the agreement from timeline-focused to conditional. The Lee Jae Myung administration can refer to such precedents and opt for negotiations that focus on a timeline. As it happens, the Trump administration is demanding that its allies take responsibility for their own defense. 

With this in mind, the Lee administration can consider trying to negotiate a timeline at the Security Consultative Meeting that will likely take place in November.

This option has the advantage of being flexible when it comes to joint training exercises with the US and to increases in defense spending. Domestically, however, there are concerns about considerable backlash. 

Another option is forgetting about OPCON and focusing on resuming the Korean Peninsula peace process and, importantly, signing a peace treaty. I regard that as the most practical and sensible way of resolving this dilemma. The OPCON handover was a product of the Korean War and the armistice that ended it. As a result, a peace treaty that officially ended that war and kick-started peacebuilding would be the ideal backdrop for regaining OPCON.

There’s a historical argument for such an approach. South Korean President Syngman Rhee gave the US “command authority over all land, sea and air forces of the Republic of Korea during the period of the continuation of the present state of hostilities” in a letter to US Gen. Douglas MacArthur on July 14, 1950, 20 days after the outbreak of the Korean War. Signing a peace treaty would officially represent the end of that “state of hostilities.”

As such, Lee needs to make signing a peace treaty before leaving office a major policy goal. Critics will complain that such a goal is unrealistic, but that is not necessarily true.

The parties to a peace treaty are South Korea, North Korea, the US and China. North Korea and China have consistently spoken of the need for a peace treaty, as have some (but not all) South Korean administrations. As it happens, the current Lee administration emphasizes the need for a peace treaty.

What about the US, which holds the key to peace? Traditionally speaking, US administrations have either been uninterested in a peace treaty or have maintained that such a treaty would only be possible after North Korea’s complete denuclearization.

But Trump has been more proactive about pursuing a peace treaty. Furthermore, a majority of Americans are in favor of the idea. In short, there’s a definite political opportunity to pursue a peace treaty through dialogue between Korea and the US.

In terms of inter-Korean relations, pursuing a peace treaty is the most effective way to counter North Korea’s narrative about the two sides being hostile, belligerent states.

A more pragmatic and flexible position is also being adopted on the North Korean nuclear issue, which is closely linked with the peace treaty. American politicians on both sides of the aisle are redefining denuclearization as a long-term objective and are warming up to an arms control approach that would begin by seeking to freeze and reduce North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. That’s essentially the gradual approach to denuclearization endorsed by the Lee administration, which has called for freezing, reducing and ultimately eliminating North Korea’s nuclear program.

While the gap with North Korea remains wide, there’s clearly more of a chance for dialogue than in the past. As such, one potential approach is to conclude a peace treaty at the “freeze” or “reduction” phase of denuclearization and include language about working together to make the world (including the Korean Peninsula) free of nuclear weapons and the threat of their use.

It’s critical that we initiate those efforts through cooperation with the US. The most effective way would be for the South Korean and American presidents to declare a moratorium on joint military exercises and propose dialogue with North Korea either during the UN General Assembly or the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

By Cheong Wook-Sik, director of the Hankyoreh Peace Institute and director of the Peace Network

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]