A scene from ROK-U.S. Foal Eagle exercise 2017

By Stephen Costello

WASHINGTON ― After Kim Jong-un's two messages were delivered in his New Year's Day speech, one thing was predictable: U.S. President Donald Trump could be expected to reply quickly with just the sort of rhetoric we saw in his tweet about having a "bigger button."

And because this administration has abandoned many long-recognized standards of conduct and behavior, various government officials, Republican members of Congress and outside experts supported his sandbox-style conduct.


Kim's claim that the DPRK now has a reliable nuclear arsenal is important, but his offer to begin positive exchanges with South Korea, beginning with the PyeongChang Olympics, is far more important. That new initiative is the most interesting and diplomatically meaningful element among all the players in this new year. The best assessment of it so far, "Nine Reasons Why Kim Jong-un's South Korea Initiative is More Than Just a Tactic," can be found at www.38north.org.

The initiative exposes Trump and President Moon Jae-in to make decisions they have so far avoided. This is not only a clever maneuver by Kim; the choices he has forced upon Trump and Moon are choices each had to make in any case. Moon in particular could have called for, and even insisted on, a suspension of joint military exercises at any time in the past eight months. And Trump could have offered to support North-South engagement during that time as well. But neither did.

Now Moon has made the "request" and Trump has responded. After mocking and dismissing Moon since he was elected, Trump is now behind him "100 percent." Welcome to the Trump years. The new agreement to postpone military exercises opens a small window for North-South interaction. But this is only the beginning. The real invitation by Kim ― one that has been requested of Moon repeatedly since he was elected by the policy elite and much of the public in South Korea ― is to take leadership of the North Korea issues.

That will mean Moon could commit to delivering several elements that are meaningful to the DPRK. That means he will have to confront, and begin to roll back, the doomed and unworkable global pressure, isolation and starvation program spearheaded by the U.S. It would be possible for him to do this. In exchange, he will have to carefully make sure the North will respond in concrete ways to both South Korean needs and joint ROK-U.S. needs. This will be complex, but it is exactly what the North and South should have been doing for the past 10 years.

The Kim New Year initiative takes pressure off the U.S., whether they know it or not. The strategic underpinnings of U.S. policy ― which has been mostly consistent since 2001 ? were fatally flawed. Now there is a chance for South Korea to lead the way back to productive progress on the important issues. From the beginning, Moon's leverage with the North depended on his ability to deliver economic and security goods to them. Now he has, with a small step. The job now will be to carefully make sure that each player "wins" as different items are agreed to and implemented.

Stephen Costello (scost55@gmail.com) is a producer of AsiaEast, a web and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C.