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​North Korea Blows Up Liaison Office Shared With South Korea ​North Korea’s Wrecking of Liaison Office a ‘Death Knell’ for Ties With the South
(about 11 hours later)
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Tuesday blew up a building where its officials and their South Korean counterparts had recently worked side by side, dramatically signaling its displeasure with the South after weeks of threats to end the countries’ recent détente. SEOUL, South Korea — The North Korean warning aimed at South Korea has steadily been escalating in intensity for more than a year: Your matchmaking diplomacy between our leader and President Trump is failing.
South Korean border guards heard an explosion and then saw smoke rising from Kaesong, the North Korean town where the building was located. The building appeared to be blown completely apart in a blast so powerful that windows in nearby buildings were also shattered, according to video footage from a South Korean surveillance camera on the border. On Tuesday, the​ accumulated frustrations of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, who embarrassingly returned home empty-handed from his second summit meeting with Mr. Trump in February 2019, exploded in cathartic fashion. The ​North blew up an inter-Korean joint liaison office created as a sign of good will toward President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, who had brokered and encouraged the meeting.
The South’s Unification Ministry confirmed that North Korea had demolished the four-story glass-and-steel building that housed what had been known as the joint liaison office. Hours later, the North’s official news agency said “the liaison office was tragically ruined with a terrific explosion,” adding that the action reflected “the mind-set of the enraged people” of North Korea. That blast effectively shattered a détente on the Korean Peninsula that​ had​ lasted ​two years. The period had raised hope for diplomacy that would lead to the dismantlement of the North’s nuclear arsenal or even a peace treaty with the United States, which technically remains at war with North Korea after nearly seven decades.
No South Koreans had worked at the office since January, when it was closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. With the blast, Mr. Kim wrecked one of the most concrete legacies of Mr. Moon’s friendly engagement with the autocratic North Korean leader, and signaled his exasperation with Mr. Trump’s approach as well.
The office, staffed by personnel from both sides, was opened in 2018, at a time when the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea had held optimistic meetings and were discussing the possibility of broad economic cooperation. By destroying the building in the North Korean city of Kaesong that housed the liaison office, Mr. Kim also acted on his repeated admonition that he was steering relations on the divided Korean Peninsula to a new phase, treating ​South Korea not as a partner for reconciliation but as an “enemy.”
It was the first channel for full-time, person-to-person contact between the Koreas, which have technically been at war for decades because an armistice, not a peace treaty, halted the Korean War in 1953. South Korea had considered the office an important step toward ending decades of enmity, hoping it would eventually lead to the establishment of diplomatic missions in each other’s capitals. Mr. Moon’s government reacted with an uncharacteristically strong statement that recalled the worst days of North-South confrontation​​.
But relations between the Koreas have soured since then, and this month, North Korea began making the liaison office a rhetorical target. On June 5, it threatened to close it down. Four days later, it cut off all communication lines with the South, including one that went through the liaison office. The North said it was determined to “completely shut down all contact means with South Korea and get rid of unnecessary things.” “We make it clear that the North will be held accountable for all the repercussions of its act,” said Kim You-geun, deputy director of national security at Mr. Moon’s office. “We issue a stern warning that if North Korea continues to aggravate the situation, we will take strong corresponding steps.”
Three days before the demolition, Kim Yo-jong, a sister and prominent adviser to Mr. Kim, had warned that “before long, a tragic scene of the useless North-South joint liaison office completely collapsed would be seen.” On Wednesday, North Korea said it had dismissed Mr. Moon’s recent proposal to send special envoys to Pyongyang as “tactless and sinister.” Also on Wednesday, the North’s military said that it was seeking Mr. Kim’s approval to “resume all kinds of regular military exercises” near the disputed western sea border despite an earlier inter-Korean agreement to ban such drills.
For weeks, the North has been threatening to walk away from the more cordial relationship it established with the South in 2018. It reacted with anger this month to propaganda campaigns carried out by activists in South Korea, who have used balloons to send leaflets over the border denouncing Mr. Kim and his repressive government. South Korea, hoping to keep the peace, has vowed to stop the balloon launches and is planning legislation that would outlaw them. The exchange between Pyongyang and Seoul signaled that the downward spiral in inter-Korean relations had become “irrevocable,” said Lee Byong-chul, a North Korea expert at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul.
Last week, the North referred to the South as an “enemy.” And on Tuesday, hours before the demolition in Kaesong, the North’s military had threatened to send back troops that it had previously withdrawn from areas near the South Korean border. “North Korea has just tolled the death knell ​for its relations with Moon Jae-in’s government,” he said.
The North Korean People’s Army said it had been asked to develop “an action plan” to “turn the front line into a fortress and further heighten the military vigilance against the South,” according to a statement published by the state media. It said the plan would involve returning soldiers to areas that had been demilitarized under past agreements with the South. The demolition of the liaison office was ​only the most dramatic​ in a series of indications of how the triangular relationship among Mr. Kim, Mr. Moon and Mr. Trump has gone askew.
Sending more troops to the border — already the most heavily fortified in the world — would further raise tensions with the South. But in saying that the move was in the planning stages, the North seemed to be leaving room for compromise. Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump spent much of 2017 exchanging personal insults and threats of nuclear war, as the American leader warned of “fire and fury” in the aftermath of North Korea’s nuclear and long-range ballistic missile tests and Mr. Kim called Mr. Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. ​dotard.” Mr. Moon’s work to mediate bore fruit when Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump met in Singapore in 2018 in the first ever summit meeting between the two nations.
The South Korean military warned on Tuesday that it would “respond strongly” to any provocative action by the North along the border. Both Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump relished the intense global attention paid to their extraordinary diplomacy; Mr. Trump appeared so taken with the North Korean leader, who is half his age, that he once said he and Mr. Kim “fell in love.”
The threatened North Korean troop deployment would involve areas near the border that have been demilitarized since 2000, when the two Koreas’ leaders met for the first time. Monday was the 20th anniversary of that summit meeting. Mr. Moon​ was relentless in trying to nurture the relationship, saying the two leaders were a once-in-a-lifetime pair to negotiate a history-making peace deal on the Korean Peninsula, where threats of renewed war and repeated cycles of tensions over the North’s nuclear weapons development make it one of the world’s most enduring flash points.
Under those agreements, the North ​withdrew some of its frontier military units to make way for roads linking South Korea to Diamond Mountain — a resort destination in the North, which became the site of an experiment in inter-Korean tourism — and to Kaesong, where the two Koreas jointly operated an industrial park years before the liaison office opened. But the relationship between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump has soured.
Both projects were part of the South’s “Sunshine Policy” of improving ties through economic cooperation, which led to the 2000 meeting between Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, and then-President Kim Dae-jung of the South. But that good will soured over the years as North Korea continued to develop a nuclear arsenal, and the two projects were eventually shut down. Their second summit, held in Vietnam in February of 2019, collapsed without an agreement on how to eliminate the North’s nuclear arsenal and without a reprieve from international sanctions that Mr. Kim badly needed to rebuild his country’s economy.
The Koreas’ relations warmed again in 2018. Kim Jong-un and Mr. Moon agreed to stop cross-border propaganda, and they set a goal of resuming the Kaesong industrial park and the Diamond Mountain project. ​They also removed more troops from the border area, shutting down some of the guard posts that both Koreas maintain within the so-called Demilitarized Zone that separates them. It was an extraordinary embarrassment for Mr. Kim, whose propagandists had built up expectations at home that he would achieve something monumental with the United States. Instead, he risked looking weak by returning empty-handed.
But acrimony has returned in recent months. Mr. Kim’s diplomacy with President Trump collapsed last year, frustrating his hopes of winning relief from tough international sanctions imposed on the North over its nuclear weapons. He has since stepped up pressure on the South to move ahead with the Kaesong and Diamond Mountain ventures, both of which had brought the North much-needed hard currency. Following that failure, North Korea vented its frustration principally on the matchmaker, Mr. Moon.
Under the 2018 agreements, however, those joint projects were to be resumed only as part of a broader deal to denuclearize the North. The South’s refusal to proceed with them regardless has led to increasingly harsh rhetoric from the North, whose economy, already suffering under the sanctions, has been damaged further by the coronavirus pandemic. The North accused Mr. Moon of having oversold the merits of diplomatic engagement with Mr. Trump. It ​said Mr. Moon had forsaken agreements with Mr. Kim to push for inter-Korean economic ties the North badly wanted. For Mr. Moon, his promises were dependent on progress in negotiations between North Korea and the United States ​to end the North’s nuclear threat.
On Saturday, Ms. Kim, Mr. Kim’s sister, said the North should no longer “trust the trite language​” coming from Mr. Moon’s government. ​In recent months, North Korea has sent numerous warnings to the South to change its tack. In March last year, it dismissed the South’s mediating role, calling Mr. Moon’s government “a player, not an arbiter” because it was an ally of Washington. It then temporarily withdrew its staff from the joint liaison office, which the two Koreas had run together since September 2018. Last March, North Korea went so far as to say Mr. Moon’s office had an “imbecile way of thinking.”
“I feel it is high time to surely break with the South Korean authorities​,” she said, adding that the ​ “next step​”​ would be taken by the North Korean military. ​Behind the North’s deepening contempt toward the South ​was its frustration with the Trump administration, ​and the demolition of the liaison office ​on Tuesday was ​intended as a signal as much for Washington as for Seoul, analysts said.
On Monday, Mr. Moon marked the 20th anniversary of the Koreas’ first summit meeting by saying that the road to peace was​ “slow” and “tortuous.” He urged Mr. Kim “not to reverse the promise of peace he and I made before 80 million Koreans.” Lee Seong-hyon, an analyst at the Sejong Institute, a research organization in South Korea, said the North’s economic frailty had been worsened by the coronavirus pandemic, which paralyzed its foreign trade.
“It had to vent its frustration and domestic discontent, but it feared retaliation if it directly provoked the United States,” Mr. Lee said. “So, as Koreans like to say, ‘If you hate your neighbor, you kick his dog.’”
Mr. Trump’s own domestic troubles, punctuated by the pandemic’s heavy toll on the United States economy and by the civic ​unrest set off by the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, gave North Korea greater room to act as a destabilizer, analysts said.
By raising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, some said, Mr. Kim was building the case for why Mr. Trump needed to provide him with at least a stopgap de-escalation deal — in the form of easing sanctions — if the American leader wished to avoid a total unraveling of his North Korea diplomacy before the November election.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly touted his personal rapport with Mr. Kim as one of his biggest foreign-policy achievements, saying that it ​helped ​avert war with North Korea.
Mr. Kim found a recent justification to highlight ​what he considered ​South Korea’s failure to implement inter-Korean agreements and ​to ​start a new cycle of raising tensions when North Korean defectors in the South launched balloons ​that carried propaganda leaflets attacking Mr. Kim across the​ Demilitarized Zone that separates the Koreas. When Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon met in 2018, they promised to end such cross-border propaganda.
Earlier this month, North Korea cut all communications with the South and warned that more provocative actions loomed.
On Tuesday, hours before the demolition of the liaison office, the North’s military threatened to redeploy troops previously withdrawn from areas near the South Korean border.
Under agreements signed since 2000, when the leaders of both Koreas met for the first time, the North withdrew some frontier military units to make way for roads linking South Korea to Diamond Mountain — a resort destination in the North, which became the site of an experiment in inter-Korean tourism — and to Kaesong, where the two Koreas jointly operated an industrial park years before the liaison office opened. ​
The North Korean military’s threat on Tuesday signaled that the North would start demolishing the South Korean-built facilities in Kaesong and Diamond Mountain and return the demilitarized areas back to its military, said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior North Korea specialist at the Sejong Institute. Both the Kaesong and Diamond Mountain facilities have been idle for years, shut down amid tensions over the North’s nuclear weapons.
“North Korea has concluded that it can no longer expect anything from the Moon Jae-in government,” Mr. Cheong said​, referring to South Korea’s refusal to reopen the Kaesong and Diamond Mountain projects, which had been important sources of cash for Pyongyang.
As the United States election nears, North Korea may ​switch to provocations ​more geared toward threatening Washington, like tests of submarine-launched ballistic missiles or even intercontinental ballistic missiles, said Sin Beom-chul, an analyst at the Korea Research Institute for National Strategy in Seoul.
“Raising tensions with South Korea,” Mr. Shin said, “is part of Kim Jong-un’s bigger strategy​ of pressuring the United States​.”