The Advantages of Sunshine

Last month at the Olympics, 92 nations and 2,922 athletes arrived in Pyeongchang County, South Korea, with the primary aim of taking home gold medals. The host country, however, had an additional goal in mind. President Moon Jae-in of South Korea planned to use the Olympics as “peace games” to encourage both North Korea and the United States to ease off their threats, at least temporarily.

And, to some extent, President Moon achieved his objective. The Winter Olympics began with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sending his sister south to hand-deliver an invitation to Moon to visit Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, for a diplomatic summit. At the Opening Ceremonies, athletes from the two Koreas marched into the stadium under the same unified Korean flag wearing the same white uniform.

But this thawing of relations is hardly unprecedented. During the early 2000s, South Korea adopted a policy of positive diplomatic and economic engagement with North Korea called the Sunshine Policy, which President Moon has announced he is attempting to emulate. During the first years of this century, cooperation between South Korea and North Korea was at its peak. South Korean companies were encouraged to invest in North Korea’s largely undeveloped economy. The policy sparked the creation of the Kaesong Industrial Park, a special economic zone in which South Korea and North Korea worked together to mine North Korea’s $10 trillion in untapped resources, creating countless jobs for otherwise-impoverished North Koreans.

The policy also boosted the South Korean economy, which historically has suffered as a result of North Korean hostility. Choe Sang-Hun writes in The New York Times that the highly globalized South Korean economy declines when North Korea stages military provocations because foreign investors regard South Korean markets as unstable. Sang-Hun continues that “markets hate risk, even if it is just the perception of risk,” and reducing that risk by de-escalating the conflict would attract vastly more foreign direct investment.

The Sunshine Policy did more than just contribute to the economic development of the peninsula; it had concrete social effects on North Korea. The efforts to integrate the two economies led to cultural exchange between the two Koreas. Nathan Park of Foreign Policy finds that during the period from 1998 to 2008, when the Sunshine Policy was at its peak, nearly two million South Korean tourists visited Mount Kumgang in North Korea, and an additional 100,000 visited the historical district in the city of Kaesong. This largely unprecedented cultural exchange spurred dialogue and cooperation between the Koreas. Park continues that the two nations’ leaders permitted and even coordinated regular, twice-yearly meetings of families separated between North and South Korea, reuniting those tragically torn apart by the Korean War.

This cooperation, in turn, thawed military and diplomatic relations. For the first time since the Korean War, South Korean airlines flew over North Korean airspace without the fear of attack. Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, had in-person meetings with both Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, the two South Korean presidents who initiated and facilitated the Sunshine Policy. These have been the only South Korean heads of state ever to meet with a North Korean leader. Most importantly, according to Evans Revere of the Brookings Institute, the 2005-2007 summits with North Korea resulted in measured concessions to halt, freeze, and dismantle North Korea’s nuclear program.

As the South Korean president attempts to revive the Sunshine Policy, many critics point to its demise in 2009 as evidence of its failure and proof that only South Korean military superiority will force the North to cooperate. After the 2009 North Korean nuclear test, the relationship between Seoul and Pyongyang was again strained. However, the policy did not end because of North Korean nuclear proliferation. Joel Wit of the Brookings Institution argues that the biggest threat to the Sunshine Policy was U.S. intervention and efforts to reinforce South Korean President Kim’s policy by making it harsher and more militant. This interference pushed North Korea into a defensive position, forcing it to remilitarize.

At the Olympics, 10 years later, the U.S. has not learned its lesson and is still interfering in South and North Korean relations. In a move sure to provoke Pyongyang, Vice President Mike Pence brought the father of the late Otto Warmbier (an American student who was jailed and tortured in North Korea after attempting to steal a propaganda poster) to the Opening Ceremony. As South Korea delayed military exercises during the Olympics, President Trump announced harsh new sanctions against North Korea. Hours before the opening ceremonies, a spokesman from the North’s Foreign Ministry described the sanctions as an act of war, and the North staged a massive military parade to showcase its 5,000 combat tanks and 20 attack helicopters.

While Americans are legitimately concerned with North Korea’s continuing development of long-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States, and the denuclearization of the North Korean regime is a worthy goal, if the U.S. wants a peaceful North Korea, it should support Moon’s revival of sunshine diplomacy rather than attempting to assert U.S. military dominance in the region. The first move by President Trump should be to signal his willingness to remove the 28,500 American troops in South Korea that do little more than conduct military drills. Trump should let President Moon know that the U.S. would also consider removing THAAD, a U.S. anti-missile system stationed in northern South Korea, to send the message that the U.S. favors a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Only then will Moon be truly free to conduct his sunshine diplomacy and once again thaw relations with the North.

The implementation of the Sunshine Policy need not cast a blind eye on the truly repressive character of the North Korean dictatorship. In the long term, however, introducing North Koreans to South Korea’s culture and economic dynamism through tourism and development projects will give them a taste of the benefits of South Korea’s prosperous Western-style democracy and enable them to see beyond Kim’s heavy propaganda and media censorship. Ultimately, this will create pressure from within on the North Korean regime to loosen the shackles of oppression, in much the same way that Eastern European governments were forced to liberalize in the later part of the 20th century. U.S. military intervention and provocation only pushes Kim into a defensive position in which he feels militarizing is his only way of gaining international diplomatic clout. But if Moon is able to cast a little bit of sunshine on the North, in time, North Koreans may warm to the advantages of a free and peaceful North Korea.