South Korea ready to get tough

Victorious: Yoon gesturing to his supporters outside the People Power Party headquarters in Seoul. — AFP

Seoul: Threatening a pre-emptive strike, swiftly responding to missile tests, and telling “rude boy” leader Kim Jong-un to behave: South Korea’s next president looks set to get tough on the nuclear-armed North, analysts say.

For the last five years Seoul has pursued a policy of engagement with Pyongyang, brokering high-level summits between Kim and then-US president Donald Trump while reducing joint US military drills the North sees as provocative.

For president-elect Yoon Suk-yeol – who won a close election by a razor-thin margin yesterday – this “subservient” approach has been a manifest failure.

The outgoing administration of President Moon Jae-in “volunteered to play middleman between the US and North Korea but was dumped by both in the end,” Yoon said in a pre-election Facebook post.

Since the start of the year, Pyongyang has conducted a record-breaking nine weapons tests, including of banned hypersonic and medium range ballistic missiles.

After the North test-fired what it claimed was a reconnaissance satellite component on Saturday – Seoul said it was a disguised ballistic missile – Yoon, 61, said the youthful Kim needed to be taken in hand.

“If you give me a chance, I will teach him some manners,” he said.

On the campaign trail, he said Kim was a “rude boy”, and promised that once he was in power, he would make the North Korean leader “snap out of it”.

The former prosecutor has threatened a pre-emptive strike on the North “if necessary” – something analysts say is wildly unrealistic and dangerous.

Even so, Yoon vowed to “sternly deal with the North’s illegal and irrational acts,” in his first comments as president-elect.

“Under Yoon, we’ll probably see efforts to reset inter-Korean relations,” Soo Kim of the RAND Corporation said.

Instead of dialogue and engagement, she said, Yoon will take a harder line, having already called for more joint drills with the US.

“It’s a departure from the Moon administration’s prioritisation of inter-Korean engagement, to say the least,” she added.

The “one-way love” displayed under Moon will come to an end, said Professor Park Won-gon of Ewha Womans University.

“Yoon will certainly want to put the issue of denuclearisation in the agenda,” said Park, in contrast to the more piecemeal diplomacy pursued by his liberal predecessor.

“It’s highly likely that North Korea will say no.”

Yoon has even suggested buying an additional THAAD missile system from the US to counter the North – despite risks that it could prompt new economic retaliation from China, Seoul’s biggest trade partner.

“Seoul must also retool its complex relationship with Beijing,” Yoon said in a policy statement in Foreign Affairs last month. — AFP