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.
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.
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.
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.
By destroying the building in the North Korean city of Kaesong that housed the liaison office, which functioned as a de facto embassy, 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.”
Mr. Moon’s government reacted with an uncharacteristically strong statement that recalled the worst days of North-South confrontation.
“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.”
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.
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.
“North Korea has just tolled the death knell for its relations with Moon Jae-in’s government,” he said.
The liaison office had allowed person-to-person contact between the two Koreas and had raised hopes that it would eventually lead to the establishment of diplomatic missions in each other’s capital. Its demolition 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.
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.
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.”
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.
But the relationship between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump has soured.
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.
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.
Following that failure, North Korea vented its frustration principally on the matchmaker, Mr. Moon.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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