It’s Getting Heated—and Filthy—on the Korean Peninsula | Opinion

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the two Koreas, perhaps the world’s most bitter adversaries, were actually striking deals with each other and giving one another smiles. The high-point came in September 2018, when Moon Jae-in made a trip to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, and became the first South Korean president to address the North Korean public. It was during this visit when North and South Korea signed the Comprehensive Military Agreement (CMA), a series of de-escalatory measures meant to reduce tension between their respective militaries and ensure communication was regularized.

Fast-forward to today and the scene on the Korean Peninsula is far more hostile. Moon, the agreeable, dovish former South Korean president who viewed inter-Korean reconciliation as a personal legacy item, has long since been replaced by the conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, who was never especially thrilled with the rapprochement toward Pyongyang. Ex-President Moon is now on the outside, warning anybody who will listen that “the situation on the Korean Peninsula is currently in a state of crisis,” now that the CMA is on death’s door. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un no longer views South Korea as a state worth talking to and used a speech earlier in the year to blast it as North Korea’s principal foe. Missile tests are now a dime a dozen, with Pyongyang making a concerted effort to mastering the technology needed to introduce military spy satellites into orbit (its last test on May 28, fizzled after the satellite exploded shortly after launch).

The situation got even more intense over the last two weeks when North Korea purposely sent hundreds of balloons into South Korea. We aren’t talking about the kinds of balloons we see at a child’s birthday party. Instead, these were balloons literally full of waste paper, garbage, and even animal excrement. The Kim regime claimed this childish display of pique was in direct retaliation for South Korea-based North Korean defectors scattering anti-regime leaflets into the North.

Although North Korea’s vice defense minister issued a statement on June 2 that Pyongyang would stop the balloon campaign, the damage was already done. A day later, President Yoon organized a national security council meeting and proposed that the entire 2018 CMA be suspended. Sure enough, it was. The No Fly Zone previously established about three miles outside the Demilitarized Zone is no longer in effect, and the South Korean military will now be permitted to conduct military exercises along the inter-Korean border like they did in the past.

This isn’t the first time the two Koreas have spatted with each other over balloons. In 2020, after defectors kept airlifting material into the North, Kim Jong Un ordered the destruction of the inter-Korean liaison office that was opened two years earlier during the spree of inter-Korean summits. If the office was a signal of a cautious new beginning on the Korean Peninsula, its demise was viewed as its symbolic end.

Even so, this round is a bit more serious. It’s one thing to blow up a single structure to register displeasure and quite another to walk away from a military accord whose sole purpose is to keep the two heavily-armed Koreas from shooting at each other—either by choice or miscalculation. While it’s true the North Koreans violated the CMA on countless occasions—in January 2023, North Korean drones breached the No Fly Zone around the DMZ and got close to the South Korean presidential office—and in effect suspended the accord last year, it’s also true that the risk of an accident creeps up marginally now that Seoul has also walked away. Yoon obviously felt he had no choice; what the point of pretending the deal is worth keeping when the other side isn’t living up to its obligations? It’s a fair question to ask, and the United States is unlikely to formally oppose Yoon’s decision to bolt.

But if you asked an administration official privately, it wouldn’t be surprising if they had some reservations about South Korea’s decision—not because it wasn’t justified but rather because it injects more unpredictability into the situation. It goes without saying that the last thing the Biden administration wants during an election year is a major crisis. This is doubly so on the Korean Peninsula, where nearly 29,000 U.S. troops are based and the other side—North Korea—has dozens of nuclear warheads and a growing arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the U.S. mainland.

The Biden administration has had a lackluster policy on North Korea from the get-go. The White House is still wedded to the concept of denuclearization, or the notion that North Korea must eliminate its nuclear weapons stockpile, root to branch, before Washington lifts all the U.S. sanctions or allows diplomatic normalization to occur. Despite multiple attempts at outreach and a newfound willingness by U.S. officials to consider interim steps on the road to denuclearization, Kim Jong Un has been unresponsive. The North Korean dictator is simply not interested in parting ways with his nuclear weapons, the best deterrent a poor, small, and relatively isolated state can have.

With solutions nowhere near the horizon, the name of the game is kicking the North Korea problem for another day and maintaining as much stability as possible. It’s hard to see how the demise of the CMA fits with that goal.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.