Dialogue with John Dunn on Korean Denuclearization

The following text reflects three dialogues that took place between John Dunn and Han Sang-Jin. The first was in Cambridge on 3 December 2017; the second in Seoul on 31 May 2018; the third in Cambridge on 1 September 2018. Finally, a few observations were added after the summit meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jung-un in Hanoi, Vietnam, on 27–28 February 2019.

Han: I am very pleased to be meeting with you again in your home. On my way to Cambridge, I was thinking of the old phrase ‘Qiong zu Tong’, in the Chinese classic, I Ching. ‘Qiong’can be interpreted as a catastrophe, as being completely closed off and unable to move even an inch. But it also implies a counteractive or proactive energy for change, a cosmological force, the energy for ‘Tong’ (opening). So it captures an internal logic of metamorphosis, directing our attention to the social scientific question of ‘how objective (structural) and subjective (practical) factors are linked in a great historical change’. With this understanding of Qiong zu Tong, I want to explore with you how to best understand the main aspects of the Korean Peninsula’s metamorphosis, which is under way today. ¹ In particular, I want to pay attention to Kim Dae-jung, who initiated the first and the most consequential attempt so far to turn Korea from the prolonged structure of catastrophe to a real metamorphosis through his ‘Sunshine Policy’. As we know, that effort of metamorphosis did not succeed. Shall we begin by reconsidering the Sunshine Policy as we should judge it today?

Dunn: I am very glad to be talking with you again in my home. As to your intriguing initial question, I am well aware of many critiques of the Sunshine Policy. But for me, what determined Kim Dae-jung’s adoption of the Sunshine Policy was his clear perception that acceptable long-term outcomes for Korea could only be accessed and reached by following that line of policy. There was nothing improvisatory or casual about his pursuit of it. Every community is imagined; but political communities especially, to be realized at all, must be so in a terrain fiercely recalcitrant to the imagination. Some communities are sundered politically, others are encompassed or simply suppressed. Many plainly envisage themselves in terms which do not mention politics at all. But sundered political communities that regret their partition face a particularly painful and challenging traverse. Of all the communities across the vast continent of Asia, Koreans have joined together and been torn apart most protractedly, on the largest scale, and with the most brutal consequences. Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy was the acme of his political ambitions and the most profoundly thought through approach to healing Korea’s grievous historical wounds. ²

It offered no airy promise that the wounds would ever heal perfectly. Kim Dae-jung saw very clear-headedly that they were far too deep and festering to heal fast, but he absolutely refused to take the protracted devastation of the savage war which split the peninsula, or its painful aftermath, as a closed book, and he refused to abandon the population of South Korea’s neighbor to the north to permanent and ever more heavily armed tyranny. He saw that the only way in which the wounds could heal was through a slow convergence of life changes and opportunities for the two populations, as well as a steady thickening of communications and exchanges between them. He fully accepted the imperative of continued vigilance, but he rejected out of hand the idea of crushing the northern regime with a sudden military strike or the fantasy that it might just collapse of its own accord. He was an old, battle-scarred political leader and an extremely brave person. He was a little bit more optimistic politically than turned out to be right. But if he hadn’t been so determined, it would not have been possible for him to keep moving himself continually on and on – to be so awesomely persistent. He was a bit over-optimistic when he went to Pyongyang and thought that he had made a major breakthrough. It turned out that he hadn’t.

Han: Why, then, are you saying that the Sunshine Policy is still the right strategy to pursue?

Dunn: I do so because it is the only way South Korea can improve its position by recreating normal and viable relations with the population of North Korea. We can’t think of the North Korean population as citizens, because they aren’t treated as such at all, but there are a very large number of people in North Korea. All the opportunities to extend relations between North and South are good things. I think President Moon Jae-in of the Republic of Korea is also trying to do this now, though without much success so far. The right thing for him to do is to see, as Kim Dae-jung did, if there is not some basis on which there can be mutual advantage between the two states and their inhabitants. I don’t think it’s sensible to trust the government of North Korea a quarter of an inch, but it is very reasonable to think that, in the long run, the only way that the Korean Peninsula can become safe is if some overlapping relations between the populations of the South and the North are recreated. This means that they have a very large shared stake in peace. We have to build a basis on which peace is clearly in the interest of all except a tiny fringe of military adventurers. The whole structure of military confrontation is permanently dangerous. It is possible to subordinate the military forces to the rest of society, to the citizen body as a whole, and I think that has to happen. But it won’t happen fast – it cannot happen fast – because the North Korean regime is such an extraordinary sort of state. The mismatch between its destructive capabilities and its political responsibility is striking and terrible. Nevertheless, it has the power to do appalling harm and obviously that power is increasing.

Han: The Sunshine Policy failed to match its image since it failed to keep North Korea from nuclear bombs and missiles. Its failure has made the Korean Peninsula extremely risky and full of mounting tensions.

Dunn: As I said, the Sunshine Policy sounded quite cheerful in the face of the harsh realities, which were deeply uncheerful. However, we should remember that there has always been a drastic security threat in Korea ever since the end of the Korean War. It has got much worse recently because of the nuclear policies of the North Korean rulers. It remains essential, for Korea, and for East Asia as a whole as well, to recognize the desperately deep need for peace, which is still under very serious threat. It’s essential for the political leadership and the citizens of the Republic of Korea to treat that military risk very seriously and always keep it in their minds. I don’t think it’s a good idea to forget about it, or to pretend that it’s not really there. That would be very unwise.

Han: The Sunshine Policy was shipwrecked by the complete reversal of the United States’ policy toward North Korea from the beginning of the Bush administration. This clearly shows how important the role of the United States is for the metamorphosis of the Korean Peninsula. So, I want to ask you about Donald Trump. In an interview with a Korean newspaper in September 2015, you said, while mentioning his popularity at that time as a presidential candidate, that ‘it is pretty unlikely for him to become the president’. But he did become the president of the United States. What was wrong with your observation?

Dunn: The level of disappointment and anger at professional politicians amongst a lot of American citizens was much higher than I realized. Trump wasn’t elected by a majority of American voters. He lost very substantially, in majority terms. But he was validly elected under the American Constitution. Many of those who were expected to have voted for the Democratic candidate didn’t end up voting for Hillary Clinton. She became an extreme example of the type of professional politician towards whom popular hostility had risen very sharply. It is an effect of the continued aberration of the standard representative democracy, in the face of two conditions. One is the intense media pressure on professional politicians. The more you see of their activities, the harder it is to fail to notice that these politicians are preoccupied predominantly, and often all but exclusively, with their own interests. The other reason is the length of the global economic crisis that followed the 2007–8 crash. A very large percentage of the American population is worse off than they were in 2007. So, it was a great shock for them, and this shock has now become structural.

Han: In early December 2017, when I met with you here at your home, summit talks between the US and North Korea were completely out of sight. On the contrary, Trump and Kim Jung-un were engaged in fierce confrontation and bitter mutual insults. Tensions and fears were leaping towards the sky. In this situation, you somehow foresaw the possibility of the summit meeting and said that the Korean Peninsula would become less dangerous if Trump and Kim met.

Dunn: Yes, I did. Retrospectively, I was thinking of what happened after Reagan met Gorbachev in 1988. The world became less dangerous. I imagined that the Korean conflict might have gone on at an ever-increasing level of danger if no one had tried to do what Kim Dae-jung did in Pyongyang in 2000. In the same way, I imagined that the Korean Peninsula would become less dangerous if Trump met with Kim Jung-un.

Han: As a matter of fact, this summit meeting did suddenly happen in Singapore in June 2018, and in a surprising way. How do you see its consequences? Do you see the Korean Peninsula as much safer today than it was before?

Dunn: No. I’m afraid I don’t think so. Some aspects of it have definitely loosened up, but I think the fundamental problem with the relationship between the US and North Korea is in just as bad a condition as it was before, because what Trump did was simply try to produce a spectacular appearance for his own political advantage, and he didn’t understand the real issues well enough to negotiate seriously with Kim Jung-un. I think that he believed he could reach a real agreement in a direct encounter with Kim, but I don’t think that was a realistic expectation at all, because that agreement would always have required the complete dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear capability, and I don’t think that Kim has ever had the slightest intention of dismantling it completely. On the contrary, he reasonably believes that this nuclear capability offers a security guarantee, and that he will be in danger if he doesn’t have one. He doesn’t know exactly what form the danger will take, but it is always there; and in the end he’s always very cautious. It would be a very extreme act of courage – really – to dismantle the nuclear structure. Now that he’s built it, it’s a better guarantee of security against any foreign threat than anything else he could have.

Han: Compared to Trump, do you then feel more trust in Kim?

Dunn: No, I don’t have any trust at all in Kim Jung-un, but I do think that he definitely has quite an acute sense of his own longer-term interest. For him as well as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [DPRK], the long-term interest is to be able to trade properly with the rest of the world and get out of the economic backwardness that has been forced upon North Korea by the policies, an interest which it has been pursuing for some time. He saw a way out. But that didn’t mean that he could abandon the security guarantee of nuclear force. Perhaps he thought of a sort of agreement with the US that was more like the agreement between the US and the Soviet Union, basically one concerning how the mutual threat structure could be kept safe. There were many chances of making a warmer peace on the Korean Peninsula 20 years ago, but now the DPRK has acquired nuclear weapons. From the point of view of the US, as well as Japan and the Republic of Korea too, the DPRK is more objectively threatening than ever. But that doesn’t mean that the threat will be realized. So, for Kim the whole point is to secure the North Korean regime, not to wage a nuclear war. It’s more like the case of India and Pakistan, except that India does not have a distinct intercontinental missile capability. Quite unlike these cases, the relationship between the US and the DPRK has been deeply hostile historically because of the war which forged both Korean states.

Han: There have been a lot of stereotypes of the North Korean regime. All of a sudden, however, Kim Jung-un emerged as a very interesting and impressive player in world politics.

Dunn: He’s definitely clever. He has had some experience outside the DPRK. This must have made a real difference and led him to the strategic perception that the DPRK had reached a dead end developmentally. He may have been able to see that because he is young and has a lot of time to look forward to. I think his father, Kim Jung-il, lived under the shadow of a very powerful and alarming father of his own, Kim Il-sung, for a long time. But I don’t think Kim Jung-un has thought of his father as a particularly powerful or alarming figure in and of himself. On the contrary, I imagine that he was just acutely aware that it was dangerous belonging to that family. Kim Jung-un represents a key generational shift, since by the time he became leader North Korea was obviously facing a dead end.

Han: I turn now to China as another key stakeholder on the Korean Peninsula. China is important because of its special relationship with North Korea. Also, China’s power to intervene in the Korean Peninsula would be as great as that of the United States. In this regard, you once said that China is less likely to follow a Western idea of democracy than it is to try to invent a future of its own, blending good elements of Western democracy with Chinese political traditions. Now, Xi Jinping has become a Chinese emperor, so to speak. How do you see the future of China?

Dunn: Well, my view isn’t that China is bound to become one thing or another, it is that China has a wide range of political choices open to it, and the choices themselves will actually be made in China and by the Chinese, and can go in very different directions. Obviously, as you said, Xi Jinping is in many ways like a modern version of the emperor. He is very authoritarian, yet also extremely politically effective. We don’t know how capable he will prove to be at producing good effects for his subjects, but he has already shown that he is eminently capable of maintaining his own personal power. Obviously, Xi is using his power in a very different way from Deng Xiaoping: a more adventurous, more aggrandizing, and more dangerous way, not just for the rest of the world, but also for China. It’s not good for any power to become very powerful very fast, because it is very easy to abuse power and extremely difficult to use it well. I don’t think that it’s plausible that China can be governed effectively into the long-term future in the way that it’s governed today. That won’t work. But I don’t think the ways in which it won’t work are guaranteed to move it in a more encouraging direction in the near future. That’s just a mistake. It can go on much in its present form for a long time.

Han: As China has risen to become a G2 power, Trump and Xi Jinping have become involved in serious conflicts in many respects, which make East Asia extremely unstable. Tensions also come from the unresolved transitional justice in East Asia over its colonial past with Japan. In the past, East Asia looked promising in economic development, political democracy, and cultural potentiality, but nowadays global citizens are watching East Asia with increasing anxiety. North Korea’s development of a nuclear bomb and missiles has sharply increased geopolitical tension. In these hostile surroundings, the Korean people are eager to learn what course South Korea should now follow. Kim Dae-jung conceived the Sunshine Policy as an approach to the metamorphosis of the Korean Peninsula, not simply from the viewpoint of Korean nationalism, but in a remarkably open-minded and cosmopolitan spirit. He developed the Sunshine Policy as a framework for peace in East Asia as a whole. This approach is particularly valuable against the background of East Asian politics today, which is increasingly dominated by inter-state conflict. Xi Jinping talks about the Chinese dream just as Abe does about the Japanese dream, but we hear no dream of East Asia. I am curious about what made Kim Dae-jung so instructive and distinctive.

Dunn: Well, that is a very good question. I think the answer to it is that he was a particular kind of Christian. He was a deeply East Asian figure who’d heard another tune, another theme, and it went very deep in him. A lot of his confidence and combat skills as a politician were very Korean. But his imagination wasn’t entirely Korean, it wasn’t exclusively Korean. Kim Dae-jung was a deeply nationalist figure, and in many ways a deep Korean nationalist. He dreamed of and for Korea as a whole, but he didn’t dream merely with Korean resources – he added others to them. Christianity is a conceptually cosmopolitan religion that is predicated upon the entire human race: as John Locke put it, ‘a great and natural community’.

Han: Since you brought out the Christian undercurrent of Kim Dae-jung’s cosmopolitan philosophy, I want to also emphasize a distinctively East Asian way of thinking, the idea of ‘Tianxia’, which also contributed to it. This means ‘all under heaven’, which sounds transnational and universal. Yet, these days, I find many Chinese experts in history and international relations who work on this concept offer a vision for China as a G2 power, as an empire. Kim Dae-jung was different. He was deeply interested in a genuinely cosmopolitan outlook, advocating peace under heaven (Tianxia Taiping). He demanded that China too exemplify this Chinese-born cosmopolitan worldview.

Dunn: I’m sure you’re right that Kim Dae-jung had no difficulty in grasping that conception. However, it is difficult for the Chinese to cultivate it in a cosmopolitan spirit, because China is the political civilization with the longest continuity in the world. One characteristic of Chinese history is an extremely brutal material structure of subjugation of an increasingly larger population over time, a very coercive structure involving a huge number of people over a very long span of time. I don’t know many Chinese very well, but it’s clearly hard for Chinese to experience China itself in a cosmopolitan way. They can experience the rest of the world in a cosmopolitan way if they have specific life experiences that enable them to do so. But it’s hard for them to experience China itself that way, because the conception of Chinese civilization is – and always has been – intimately involved with its current structures of subordination.

Han: One question we face in this regard is how the global context of the conflict for hegemony between the US and China affects the metamorphosis of the Korean Peninsula that is now under way. ³ As we know, the first phase of that metamorphosis was initiated by Kim Dae-jung with the summit meeting between South and North Korea in June 2000. Eighteen years later, a second phase began with the Singapore meeting of Trump and Kim Jung-un in June 2018, and received far greater global media attention than the first. Initially, the second one looked not only more interesting but also more promising because the international dimension was clearer from the beginning, and the intention and purpose of the North Korean policy change was also made clearly visible. Meanwhile, considerable progress has been made in the relations between South and North Korea, as evidenced by the summit meetings and agreements between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jung-un three times within a short period of time, from April to September 2018. How do you see the role of Moon as a mediator?

Dunn: What Moon Jae-in has done makes sense, but it falls within a very restricted range. It doesn’t fundamentally alter the danger. For as long as it can continue as it has been happening, it may lower the fear level and have some good effects. But the range of options Moon can pursue is terribly dependent on what attitude the US government takes. And if Trump switches back to the military threat mode, there will have been no real progress at all. So, the best to hope for in the meantime is to strengthen the confidence of the South Korean president’s approach, and give it a little room just to start trying to extend practical relations with the DPRK. The Korean Peninsula will never escape from its existing shape except that way, but its chance of escaping depends on the US permitting it to do so. It’s just terrible for any state in the world to have to deal with the US at the moment because it is such an erratic regime.

Han: As we know, the second summit meeting between Trump and Kim, held in Hanoi on 27–28 February 2019, ended abruptly without reaching any agreement, despite the reported progress of the working-level negotiations. How do you explain this situation?

Dunn: I think Trump (and, more relevantly, Pompeo) has continually overestimated the strength of America’s negotiating position and underestimated the strength of the DPRK’s. Kim Jung-un will do a lot to get the sanctions lifted, but he will not abandon his sole source of real power in exchange for anything that any American president would explicitly concede to him. There is a fundamental asymmetry between what Trump and Kim Jung-un have at stake in the issue. For Trump it is, by constitutional necessity, a very short-term domestic political gain, heavily dependent on public appearances. For his opponent in the negotiations, it is his own personal survival and the survival of his regime.

Han: Do you think that this asymmetry can reproduce a war-like situation as it did before?

Dunn: It could always revert to one because Trump could always take it back there. What we can see definitely is that Trump’s time horizon is quite short. He was looking above all for an impressive public appearance prior to the congressional elections in November 2018, and after that, the next presidential election in 2020. I think he will try not to do anything very drastic in East Asia strategically. So, the situation will not be very dangerous immediately. What Trump is trying to get Kim Jung-un to do is to surrender his nuclear weapons, but Kim isn’t going to surrender them. Sooner or later, that will become completely clear. In my view, what took place in Hanoi has made it even clearer than it was before. When it has become completely clear, the Trump administration (and any administration that in due course succeeds it) will have to decide what to do next. I think that Trump’s political interest is to distract attention from the Korean Peninsula. He has got what personal benefit he could get out of it already. Even if he is re-elected, he is unlikely to believe that it would really be a good thing to have a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula. The level of military control that the US could exert during the course of any such war could never be enough for it to be safe for any American political leader, nor would it be widely appreciated in the rest of the world. The thing about Trump is that he makes an awful lot of threats and promises. But he carries through far less really consequential action. He started off in relation to the DPRK on a basis of stunning ignorance, personal impulsiveness, and the drive to see what he could cause to happen. And he does believe that he has a persuasive power, and can make personal relations which will be politically consequential, because that’s the way in which he’s lived his business life. But it’s completely unreasonable to suppose that he could do so effectively in a structural situation like the Korean situation, which is just far too complicated (and in some respects much too sharply structured) for that kind of approach.

Han: What kind of future do you expect then? We know what the US wants. We know what North Korea wants. That is, a complete, verifiable, non-reversible, denuclearization of North Korea versus a complete, verifiable, non-reversible guarantee of its regime security, respectively. But it’s really difficult to work out a procedural solution that can satisfy both at the same time.

Dunn: What happens in this context is that in the end people recognize that they just can’t realize their ideal outcomes. So, they look instead for the second best option that they could live with, and that’s the history of nuclear relations. A lot of powers have entered the process of pulling back from the threat of immediate disaster, to a position that is expensive and a bit dangerous and regrettable from both sides’ point of view, but actually very difficult to dismantle. Before Trump became president, my expectation was that unless the US attacked Iran, Iran would eventually get nuclear weapons and the relationship between Iran and Israel would actually be safer and more stable. That’s probably still true now in relations between India and Pakistan. That structure is not very safe because things can always go wrong, but there is probably less danger to peace between the two states now than there was when only India had nuclear weapons. Imran Khan’s response to the Indian air strikes on Pakistan in the aftermath of the terror bombing in Kashmir suggests that he, at least, sees this very clearly. It was, after all, Pakistan’s reason for acquiring the bomb in the first place.

Han: Kim Jung-un wants a guarantee of regime security in exchange for nuclear weapons. Can the United States guarantee any such thing from the outside? In the case of East Germany, despite this sort of security framework built into the Helsinki Agreement, the German Democratic Republic’s [GDR] regime collapsed via implosion.

Dunn: Well, that was a very different structure. Certainly, the North Korean regime is not guaranteed from the outside. It doesn’t have any protection, really, except what it can provide for itself. The Chinese are obviously very nervous at the idea that the regime might collapse. But that does not mean that China is committed to fighting to keep the existing rulers of North Korea in place against their own people. The GDR was a conquest state. It was run by Germans, but it was run on terms set from Moscow. When the terms changed, the East German people could say what they said and do what they did. Nuclear weapons are no protection for the DPRK against its own subjects. If all his subjects rise against him, I don’t think that Kim Jung-un wants a foreign military to intervene on his behalf. It’s not like Yemen. He has the domestic situation reasonably under control. The dangers to his regime basically come from the effects of sanctions from outside the country. He, quite reasonably, thinks that an American president like Trump might try to dispose of him, because that sort of plan has come to the US before with heads of state whom it strongly detests. That’s one reason why Kim Jung-un would not, under any circumstances, give up nuclear weapons under American invigilation. I think it’s out of the question for that to happen. The US did not want Russia to have nuclear weapons. It didn’t want China, India, or any other country to have nuclear weapons. Once they did have nuclear weapons, however, the world had changed. Nuclear proliferation is really very difficult to prevent. Where it occurs, in terms of assessing the balance of the threat, I think it’s not necessarily more dangerous for there to be nuclear weapons at both ends. It could even be safer. Korea knows better than anywhere else in the world that a major war is absolutely appalling. It’s not a risk to deliberately run under any circumstances. So, no power external to the DPRK could sanely make a military attack on the DPRK. I think that’s what Kim Jung-un feels that he’s achieved, and that’s what he won’t let go of, but the US president could also do lots and lots of things which could be good from Kim’s own point of view. For example, the US president could end the Korean War, and it would not be exactly premature to do so. He could permit the DPRK to trade externally as freely as anyone else, and he could do a lot of other things which would be immediately helpful, as his predecessors did in the end in the case of Vietnam. The US fought Vietnam much more recently than it fought the DPRK. So, it’s not true that you can’t create peace based on incorporating a state into normal international relations because of some fear from the past. In the case of Vietnam, the Vietnamese defeated the US, but relations between the US and Vietnam are now quite close.

Han: If no breakthrough can be expected in the near future, it may be useful to examine the underlying assumptions from a new perspective: not least because North Korean nuclear capability might be less threatening than it is conventionally assumed to be if we changed the overall regional security framework.

Dunn: I’m still thinking within that sort of framework. I think Kim Dae-jung himself thought about it in that way. I think what is overwhelmingly in the interest of the young North Korean dictator is to bring North Korea back into the world. The cost of retaining control while re-entering the world can be serious, but the cost of staying outside the world and retaining control can be serious too. That is probably much clearer to Kim Jung-un than it ever was to his father, since starving a large proportion of the population is not only horrible, but it’s also dangerous for the legitimacy of the DPRK. Whatever legitimacy it does have as a regime is obviously based on a sort of imaginative subjugation and closure. Even that legitimacy must have been seriously impaired by the famine. With an education in Switzerland, Kim Jung-un has perhaps been compelled to try to get back into a normal relationship with the world. But he won’t do so by exposing himself to a security risk for his regime as a whole. So, I don’t see him offering up his nuclear weapons. Any verification process on which the US would insist is not compatible with the way the DPRK’s internal security works. I don’t think they would accept foreign inspectors moving around the place at will, going wherever they want to go. That could only come very much later. Concerning the business of dismantling nuclear proliferation, I don’t think there is really any coherent political thinking about that possibility. It’s just not clear how to engage reverse gear with a structure of mutual nuclear threat which has now spread quite widely around the world.

Han: More specifically, in an international conference on the metamorphosis of the Korean Peninsula, held in Gwangju, Korea, in May 2018, you said that we may need a new kind of security framework, because in the future the security threat may not simply come from North Korea. It could come from other countries as well, given the changing reality of East Asia.

Dunn: That is an essential question. It would require a lot of political nerve for China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea to make an effective and thought through agreement with the US about military deployments in East Asia. The issue is: How could everyone’s security be guaranteed, as much as anyone’s security can ever be? The question of how many nuclear powers there are going to be in the area is quite high in the political agenda of any East Asian country. It might not have a bad effect on relations between the US and China to realize that there’s a lot of value for East Asia in having a major external military power inside the local security structure. That is because you could get a safer architecture from an agreement between a small number of people. No one is interested in a nuclear war in East Asia. You can always set out from that simple realization. It isn’t in itself really in the interest of any state, or society, or economy to divert resources into constructing a military nuclear capability. You have to have a special reason for doing that: you have to have a particular kind of priority. The special reason could well be that you personally are much more intensely threatened than anyone else. That is what has caused you to consider nuclear proliferation. When a country decides to develop nuclear weapons, it’s always a decision made from the top of the regime. It decides to do so because the top leaders are frightened. So, if Japan developed nuclear weapons, that would be advantageous for some parts of Japanese industry, but it would be very disadvantageous for the citizenry of Japan and their rather torpid economy. If you run that train of thought around East Asia, you get a lot of convergence of perspective. It’s overwhelmingly in China’s interest to keep their relationship with the US in as salient and unaggressive a form as they can. I don’t think there is any East Asian power that has no interest in this sort of stable, reflective equilibrium. Nevertheless, further nuclear proliferation can readily happen. And if it does happen, it will happen – since that’s the way it always does happen – because of fear.

Han: If the negotiations between the US and the DPRK just drag on with no significant outcome as they have in the past, should we anticipate that the US will accept North Korea as a nuclear power in the end?

Dunn: Well, I don’t think Trump can accept it openly until he’s lost his presidential election. I think a new president would recognize that it had just happened. That’s what does happen with nuclear proliferation: It just happens. You can stop it from happening in the very early stages by destroying the nuclear reactors. That happened with Israel and Syria; but I don’t know of any other examples. The DPRK is obviously much better at its own security arrangements than Syria was. The Republic of Korea and the US tried very hard to follow exactly what was happening in the North, but they didn’t fully understand what was happening. By the time it had actually happened, it was too late to do anything about it. Once nuclear weapons were developed in the North, it was really too late for America to intervene militarily. Nonetheless, it still might do so because Trump can do all sorts of things, but it wouldn’t be a defensible act of state. It’s not really clear what would happen if he gave the order to destroy North Korea’s nuclear capability. I don’t think there is any historical example that has achieved this once a state has acquired deliverable nuclear weapons. Syria, of course, had yet to acquire these at the point that its reactor was destroyed.

Han: You implied that the North Korean nuclear problem could have been solved earlier, if the parties concerned, particularly the US, had made the right decisions at the right time. Can one say that this problem has been left unsolved intentionally?

Dunn: I don’t think it is right to say that the problem was deliberately not solved. The DPRK was a very difficult and untrustworthy negotiator. And America’s diplomats, most notably Christopher Hill, for all their skills, were over-optimistic about the weakness of North Korea’s position and lacked the imagination to offer Kim Jung-il the combination of security and flattery that might have persuaded him to settle for peace. It was a very difficult diplomatic assignment.

Han: Now, everybody knows the intrinsic difficulties between South and North Korea in pushing their relations further constructively. The key point is the US policy, backed up by the UN resolution, to keep all trade with North Korea under strict control. For the Korean metamorphosis to move further based on the summit agreements of South and North Korea, it is necessary to implement concrete polices designed to benefit both, as happened after the summit meeting in June 2000. But Trump keeps all these strictly under a trade embargo in order to force Kim Jung-un to accept his demand for the complete denuclearization of North Korea. So, one may wonder what might happen if Moon Jae-in and his staff decide to run the risk of a conflict with the US?

Dunn: South Korea can’t afford to have too much of a conflict with the US, especially with Trump, because he can react in a way that even he would not wish to have done. He can do very serious damage. The approach of the Korean president is the right sort of approach. But how fast he can move depends upon how much trouble he stirs up with Trump. He has to watch carefully what Trump’s reactions are, and he can’t act decisively against the US at all. Like many other things in the world, time is a very important factor for South Korea in thinking about these things. It will be very difficult to make substantial and institutionally specific progress of an irreversible kind between the ROK and the DPRK while Trump is president. I don’t think there’s any reason to regret anything that President Moon has done so far, but I don’t think he’s going to get very much further. You need space in which to act. If you get blocked, you have to recognize that that’s what has happened. The Republic of Korea cannot remove that block because shifting it is well beyond their own pushing power.

Han: In the beginning of our talk, you underlined the profound significance of the Sunshine Policy against the brutal reality of national division. Metamorphosis means a way out of this prolonged catastrophe. In this regard, what deserves special attention is the preamble to the constitution of the Republic of Korea, which defines the legitimacy of Korea as a nation-state based on the popular will expressed through the March 1st nation-wide independence movement against the Japanese colonial rule in 1919. The key point is that this will articulate national independence, first of all, but within a broader and more comprehensive framework of normative imagination which has been called ‘Kwangbok’. The first character, ‘Kwang’, means light, and ‘Bok’ means restoration. So, it has been an open question of what this light means and where it comes from. The March 1st declaration predicated itself on moving the peace in East Asia forward. However, this norm built into the Korean constitution has faced serious difficulties, as you correctly pointed out, from the legacy of the Cold War tearing the nation apart protractedly. Against this, Kim Dae-jung attempted to incorporate this normative goal of the Korean metamorphosis in his Sunshine Policy.

Dunn: You can judge better than I could how effective this cultural motif is likely to prove in winning, directing, and compelling people imaginatively. Its key distinctive elements are focused on peace, not on establishing the effective authority and control of a single political center. Gwangbok is not an ideology of the state. It’s the ideology of the people. It’s not an ideology of one people against another; it’s an ideology of one people for themselves and for all other peoples. It sounds like an eminently cosmopolitan idea.

Han: That is why I bring up this issue here. I wonder whether a country like South Korea, with the enforced experience of great pain and sacrifice, can initiate a new vision for cosmopolitan development on the basis of its own history and imagination.

Dunn: The spread of cosmopolitan imaginations must always start somewhere. If you looked at Palestine immediately before the Christian era, you would find there a lot of conflicts – one particular ethnic population suffers a loss, or inflicts a lot of suffering on other people. And you might think that these people can’t possibly generate an idea of a cosmopolitan kind that can travel the world. But just such an imaginative shift did occur in Palestine at that time, even if it was spread especially by someone who happened to have a Greek education. It was a sort of marriage with aspects of Greek intellectual culture, and was then inserted into the political culture of the Roman Empire. That process took a lot of time. It didn’t occur in ten years, or anything close to that. But it is an example which shows how an imaginative way of thinking happens to take a particular form in one particular place at one particular time, but also has the capacity to unfold in a way which can incorporate a huge range of people later and elsewhere. That was a story about Palestine at that time. The story traveled from Palestine to various Greek cities and then traveled on into the Roman world. Then it traveled across Europe and the world. It was a migration of imaginative materials, not only a migration of people.

Han: The normative goal of South Korea’s metamorphosis towards peace in East Asia can be derived from the constitution itself since it asserts that the central purpose of the Republic of Korea as a state is to realize this as a yet all too incomplete vision. It also provides an effective strategy for communicating between North and South, since both can make common cause on the values of Kwangbok and peace.

Dunn: Yes, indeed. Finding a common basis is a good communicative strategy. Despite the fact that the North Korean leaders are enemies of the Republic of Korea, it is still a good political principle to find a common basis for communication. It is important to recognize that they have lives to live, too. They have their own way of imagining. They have their own way of experiencing, and if you are dealing with them you need to recognize that’s what they are, and you need to speak to them accordingly.

Han: The political philosophy of Kim Dae-jung is centered on reciprocal communication. He always advised us to pay full attention to what our counterparts say, and interpret what they say from their own perspective. He applied this consistently whether he dealt with domestic politics, foreign diplomacy, or North Korea. Usually, communication has great difficulty in addressing the radical other with whom one feels it’s very hard to coexist. North Korea’s leaders have frequently violated global norms. But however badly they act from our point of view, Kim Dae-jung argued that we should keep communication open. So, his critics reproached him: ‘Are you working for South Korea or North Korea?’ But he was consistent in keeping the cosmopolitan principle he set before himself.

Dunn: Well, I agree very much with the way you put it. He was obviously very much a political leader who tried to work through persuasion. When you are trying to persuade people, you can try to persuade them either by confusing them or by showing them. He believed that the right way to do it was by showing people. That requires a sense of the viewpoints of other people: of how things appear not to you but to them. It requires you to communicate with something more than just yourself. The picture of a bad leader is a picture of someone standing up and speaking to a mirror. Kim Dae-jung was always speaking to other people. You could scarcely have a sharper contrast than President Trump.

Han: In this respect, I feel that Moon Jae-in has learned a lot from Kim Dae-jung about how to communicate with North Korea. The idea of seeing the world through the eyes of your counterpart has turned out to be useful. With this mindset, Moon Jae-in met with Kim Jung-un and had considerable success, for instance, in reaching an agreement on ending military hostility between the two countries. In this way, Moon has tried to mediate between Kim Jung-un and Trump.

Dunn: There may well be such a meeting and it may produce some real progress in freezing the level and character of the DPRK’s nuclear arsenal. Trump is adept at changing his purposes to fit his outcomes (‘The Art of the Deal’ in a nutshell). Nevertheless, he is overwhelmingly preoccupied with his immediate personal appearance. In this instance, I confidently predict that his outcome will not prove to be the freely inspected and comprehensive destruction of the nuclear weaponry and delivery vehicles of the DPRK.

Han: What, then, could Moon Jae-in do as a mediator?

Dunn: Well, what he could do is to persist in doing what he has already been doing. He could try to extend relations with the DPRK and retain some degree of attention from Washington while doing so. But I don’t think he can persuade Washington. He can’t persuade Trump to be a different person or to have a less frivolous political agenda. There isn’t anything much he can do about that. What President Moon can do is not going to be transformative. I mean he can’t transform the situation because the Republic of Korea does not have the power to transform it. It needs American military protection and it can’t really threaten the American government to any significant degree. So, all he can do is to try to persuade the American government to behave sensibly, not to do things which are dangerous, and to start thinking a little bit harder about goals that make sense for all relevant parties to reach.

Han: You said that Kim Dae-jung’s vision was sound and far-reaching, but he trusted the North Korean leader more than necessary. What about Moon Jae-in? Some might say that he trusts Kim Jung-un too much.

Dunn: I think there is a structural propensity to do that, because it is hard to avoid it in politics. You have a goal and you see yourself as moving towards the goal. It’s difficult to keep on reminding yourself of the innumerable ways in which you might be prevented from reaching it. The outcome can result either from an interaction between two people, or as a sort of game-theoretic equilibrium. It is just obviously better for both of these states to lower the threat level drastically in both directions. The big problem for the South Korean president is that there isn’t that kind of reflective equilibrium at the moment, because the US’s interest and the DPRK’s interest really are very sharply opposed. Kim Jung-un has an interest that can be interpreted as an interest in the developmental future of the DPRK. Trump’s interest in the Korean Peninsula isn’t of that kind at all. It’s not that sort of stabilizing and constructive idea. It’s a very short-term political interest in a space where he doesn’t really understand things. The picture of what goes on in the Trump administration is a picture of real chaos in some ways. Trump has directions he wants to move in, and he has impressions he wants to make, but he does not have a serious picture of the world.

Han: What advice, if any, would you like to give to President Moon in this context of structural difficulties?

Dunn: Kim Dae-jung was well aware of the fundamental predicament of Korea. When he became president, he had already worked for a long time to escape from it. It is sensible to assume that a great deal of time is still going to be needed for any such escape. So, President Moon needs to think about how to act effectively over a long stretch of time. As far as he can, he has to take the whole issue of relations with the DPRK out of competitive electoral politics, because that keeps forcing people’s attention onto the very short term. That is a very formidable challenge in the Republic of Korea, but again I think it is what Kim Dae-jung struggled to do. That is the baton President Moon has to take up and, if he possibly can, hand on to his successors, whichever parties they prove to belong to.

Han: Returning to the point from which we started our talk, Qiong zu Tong requires a consistent pattern of communication to open a way out of catastrophe, and to create and expand understanding and support for historical transformation. This is indeed a formidable task on dual fronts: a vigorous confrontation, on one hand, and a heart-felt devotion towards a consensual politics, on the other. Kim Dae-jung was well aware of these dual imperatives. He tried hard to accomplish both, but he was less successful concerning the latter. In the case of Moon Jae-in, however, domestic politics at present are far more preoccupied with retributive justice over the wrongs committed by past governments. Consequently, the ideological and emotional cleavages still remain as sharp as, or even sharper than, in the past. This tends to jeopardize social sympathy and support for his policy towards the metamorphosis of the Korean Peninsula.

Dunn: I’m afraid that is politics in South Korea. There are two different questions. One is how badly someone acted and the other is related to the will to cause them to suffer because they acted badly. I think there is value in the first, because it is important for people to see how bad things have been. Justice is a directive ideal, if it’s a matter of recognizing what has happened. It’s not a directive ideal if it’s a question of what to do about its having happened. The key point is that what to do on the basis of recognition is a question about how to make the future better, not a question about how bad the past was. The recognition of how bad the past was is very fundamental to human need. Nevertheless, it is not prudent to act in a way that makes the future worse. If you look at real politics, there is a great deal of incitement to harm political opponents whose interest conflicts with yours. There’s an enormous amount of spite, and indeed aggression, in politics. Good political leadership always needs to try to persuade people not to inflict punishment on just anyone merely because it is easy and gratifying. That is how I see the implications of political cosmopolitanism. I think this is perhaps what South Korean politics most needs today if it is to sustain and expand a basis for the metamorphosis of the Korean Peninsula: to transform it into a space in which all Koreans can live with one another, and with the world beyond their borders, in peace, amity, and mutual well-being.