New S.Korean leader sets course in stormy diplomacy

By Alex Jensen

SEOUL

Newly elected South Korean President Moon Jae-in held phone talks with his Chinese and Japanese counterparts Thursday after speaking with U.S. President Donald Trump the night before.

Just a day after taking office, there was already a different tone from Moon towards Japan compared with his impeached predecessor Park Geun-hye.

Moon told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe most South Koreans rejected Tokyo’s agreement to compensate victims of sexual slavery during the 1910-45 colonial era, implying he could scrap the contentious deal reached with Park’s government at the end of 2015.

Japan has repeatedly insisted the agreement is irreversible despite the protests of now-elderly former ‘comfort women’.

“President Moon noted the reality was that most of his people could not accept the agreement over the sexual slavery issue,” his chief press secretary Yoon Young-chan revealed, according to local news agency Yonhap.

Yoon added, however, that Moon asserted the “need for the two countries to work together and wisely overcome historical disputes”.

The South’s president additionally dove straight into Beijing’s disapproval of Seoul and Washington’s move to deploy an American anti-missile system, THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense), on South Korean soil.

Moon asked President Xi Jinping to “personally look into ways to resolve” China’s unofficial sanctions targeting South Korean trade and tourism over THAAD.

It remains to be seen whether Seoul’s new government might reverse the deployment following a re-think promised by Moon’s Democratic Party. That would risk upsetting President Trump, with whom the South Korean leader spoke late on Wednesday night.

Moon expressed his hope to visit Trump and Xi in the near future, pledging cooperation with both in denuclearizing North Korea.

The South’s president has also several times expressed interest in meeting the North’s ruler Kim Jong-un, and the reclusive state’s ruling party newspaper said Thursday the two Koreas should “seek dialogue and negotiations at various levels”.

Pyongyang is keeping the world guessing on when or if it will carry out a sixth nuclear test. Some analysts believe North Korea refrained from major provocations recently so as to not hurt Moon’s chances in Tuesday’s South Korean election.

Moon was part of the liberal Roh Moo-hyun administration involved in the last inter-Korean summit of 2007, although nearly a decade of conservative rule in Seoul has seen ties sour to the point of zero cooperation amid persistent North Korean nuclear and missile tests.

The new South Korean president faces the daunting task of finding a way to restore relations without upsetting international partners such as the U.S., given Pyongyang’s self-description as a nuclear weapon state.