South Korea and the US yesterday urged North Korea to implement the disarmament pledges it made in past talks, saying that the allies would keep pushing for diplomacy aimed at achieving the North’s complete denuclearization.
A joint statement, issued by South Korean Minister of Defense Jeong Kyeong-doo and US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, came a day after North Korea announced that it would suspend steps that would have nullified 2018 tension-reduction deals and further raised animosities on the Korean Peninsula.
In a statement primarily marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, the allies’ defense chiefs said that they “remain firmly committed to defending the hard-fought peace on the Korean Peninsula, to include supporting ongoing diplomatic efforts for the complete denuclearization of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” using the North’s official name.
Jeong and Esper also said that they call the North to “meet its commitments in alignment with” the joint statements issued after US-North Korea summit talks in Singapore in June 2018 and inter-Korean talks in September 2018.
In a joint statement issued after the Singapore summit with US President Donald Trump, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said that his country “commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” without specifying how and when disarmament steps would take place.
The North used similar language previously when it demanded that the US withdraw its 28,500 troops from South Korea and end regular military drills as a precondition for its nuclear disarmament.
Subsequent US-North Korea talks, including two more Trump-Kim summits, have reported little progress, as North Korea said that it would not unilaterally disarm unless the US lifts sanctions on it and provides security guarantees.
In recent weeks, North Korea turned to provocations targeting South Korea. It cut off all communication lines with the South, blew up a Seoul-built liaison office on its territory and threatened to take steps to nullity the 2018 deals meant to ease tensions at the border.
Experts say that the North is trying to pressure Seoul and Washington over the stalled nuclear diplomacy.
Among the threatened steps were resuming military drills, reinstalling guard posts, sending troops to shuttered inter-Korean cooperation sites along the heavily fortified border with the South, as well as flying propaganda leaflets toward the South.
However, on Wednesday the North said that Kim had put off taking such action after military leaders “took stock of the prevailing situation.”
Experts say that Pyongyang might be trying to leave room for South Korean concessions or might be worried about unexpectedly stronger responses from Seoul, whose help it might need again when it wants to reach out to the US for talks.
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