内容摘要：North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands at the Great Hall of th

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Wednesday. / Yonhap

By Yang Sung-chul

Yang Sung-chul

At this moment, the Korean Peninsula confronts two strategic issues of tectonic scale requiring solutions. One is the urgent denuclearization of North Korea's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The other is finding common ground for peace among global powers. Specifically, turning the tide of the emerging rivalry between the United States and the NATO member states and China and Russia into detente mode is the key question.

Let me deal with North Korea's denuclearization first.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's secret visit to China by train from March 25 to 28 and meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping may complicate the slated summits strategically. Kim-Xi summit is not a "total surprise" since Xi is the last reed that Kim can grab onto at the 11th hour.

If the inter-Korean summit takes place in April between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim, it will be a game-changer. So will be the subsequent summit in May between U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim. President Moon also hinted at a tripartite summit between Moon, Trump and Kim after the bilateral summits. This would be a giant leap in denuclearizing North Korea and ushering in an eventual peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula.

If these two summits are successful, they may lead to a new tripartite detente, a positive step in ridding the threat of WMD from the Korean Peninsula. They may also expedite the inter-Korean peaceful reunification process. But their failure may accelerate the ongoing maximum pressure against North Korea, including a military option.

First and foremost the agenda for these summits is to find a mutually beneficial resolution for North Korea's denuclearization. There may be two ways to approach North Korea's WMD issue. The following formulae are my personal policy suggestions.

One is the top-to-bottom fast-track format. This is to dismantle North Korean WMD at the earliest possible date. Through these summits, and possibly a subsequent three-way summit among Moon, Trump and Kim, they reach an agreement to immediately dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons, facilities, and programs. Next, North Korea must allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors in cooperation with South Korea, the U.S., and other nuclear engineers and specialists to remove them.

At the same time, non-military humanitarian aids such as food, medicines, medical equipment and the like must follow from the South, the U.S. and other U.N. member states to under-fed North Korean people. Thorough monitoring is a "must" by workers and officials of the Food and Agriculture Organization and donor nations.

This approach allows neither time to waste on talk-for-talk sake nor room for North Korea to engage in its same old scams. For example, at the present nearly three quarters of U.N. member states are complying with the Security Council's numerous sanctions against North Korea. The U.S. and other U.N. member states are also putting up their own sanctions against North Korea. They are: intervening in North Korea's illegal trade; money laundering; and surreptitious midnight ship-to-ship bartering of coal, oil, iron ore and luxury goods on the open sea.

From the outset, this formula seeks to provide the means to preempt North Korea's stratagem. They are North Korea's attempts: to blunt the ongoing UNSC and other individual nation's sanctions; to create cracks in the South Korea-U.S. military alliance; to buy time for completing its WMD programs; to divert the attention of increasingly malcontented and undernourished North Korean masses with fake news; and to seek financial compensations and/or economic aids. Put bluntly, the current maximum pressure against North Korea should not be relaxed until its compliance is verified.

Two, the formula for the complete verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of WMD should be reactivated without delay. It differs from the previous six-party talks in speed and number. After the two Koreas and the U.S. reach an agreement on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, then cooperation and support for it will be sought from Japan, China and Russia.

Concurrently, North Korea should rejoin the IAEA, its Safeguards Agreement and Non-Proliferation Treaty at the earliest possible date. It must allow IAEA inspectors to check the nuclear facilities, including random scrutiny in suspected areas and/or facilities.

Finally, on a global front, finding the common ground among the U.S. and NATO member states vis-a-vis China and Russia for denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula is a Herculean task.

Under the Trump administration, the U.S. now sees the world fundamentally different from its previous administrations. For example, in the National Security Strategy (NSS), released last December, China and Russia are designated as "rival states" and Iran and North Korea as "rogue states." In it these countries are perceived to "challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode… those who value human dignity and freedom… while they oppress individuals and enforce uniformity."

It was pointed out in the NSS that for decades the U.S. policy was rooted in the belief that support for China's rise and its integration into the post-Cold War international order would liberalize China. To the contrary, China and Russia began to reassert their influence regionally and globally by challenging the U.S. geopolitical advantages and trying to change the world order in their favor. The most recent incident involves the poisoning of a former double agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in Great Britain. This rekindled the escalation of "diplomatic war" between the NATO member states and others vis-a-vis Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Such schism notwithstanding, the Cold War era and our world today differ fundamentally in several ways. Then, Stalin and his Soviet successors led the socialist camp with Mao Zedong and his Chinese successors. Now China's Xi and Russia's Putin try to expand their influence around the globe. Back then, there was no cyber warfare, which is now expanding at a rapid pace.

Most importantly, the socialist camp then had little or no economic transactions with the U.S.-led "free world." Japan was an exception in the name of the policy of "separation of politics and economy," and also Switzerland under the umbrella of "ideological neutrality." But the two camps are now interdependent except in the military domain. So the "trade war" comes first, if it has not already, before Armageddon, and not the reverse. To repeat, mutually assured economic destruction precedes mutually assured destruction.

The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula seems impossible, perplexing, and complicated. And yet, these scheduled bilateral and possibly trilateral summits provide a rare momentum for cutting the Gordian knot on the peninsula.

Wonders in Korea like the economic miracle of the Han River from above and the political miracle of democracy from below can happen. The miracle of "peace diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula" too can happen.

Politics, including diplomacy, is the art of making the seemingly impossible possible. Skepticism, pessimism, defeatism, and fatalism abound. But they are only an expression of one's state of mind. They are neither a policy nor a strategy. Simply put, a policy or a strategy is an action plan to achieve a specific goal.

The author was responsible for coordinating South Korea's engagement policy toward North Korea with the United States as the country's ambassador to Washington from 2000 to 2003. He is currently a senior adviser for the Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation.