The Sister by Sung-Yoon Lee

Author:Sung-Yoon Lee [Lee, Sung-Yoon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2023-05-11T17:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Who Trumped Whom?

On Thursday 8 March 2018, some six weeks before the historic inter-Korean meeting in the border village, two very senior South Korean envoys had come to the White House to bring President Trump some uplifting news. Three days earlier, they had been part of a delegation from their country invited by Kim Jong Un to a rare dinner in his main office compound – the first since the North Korean leader had assumed power in 2011.1 There, over the almost four-hour-long meal, Kim Jong Un had told his enthralled guests, among whom were South Korea’s National Security Council Advisor, Chung Eui-Yong, and the head of the National Intelligence Service, Suh Hoon, that the ‘denuclearization of the Korean peninsula was his grandfather’s dying wish and dictum.’

Back in Seoul the next day, the South Korean officials announced the marvellous news to the world – but Chung and Suh didn’t stop there. They went all the way to Washington to stress to their American counterparts that this had come from none other than Kim Jong Un himself, and . . . that Kim wanted to hold a summit with the US president. Of course, in North Korea, the Supreme Leader’s words had to be true and unassailable. In any case, it was hardly likely that Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un would so blatantly defy the founder of their nation’s ‘dying wish’, was it? (More than thirty years of them nuking-up notwithstanding.)

Perhaps it was jetlag that saw the envoys fail to spell out to the ingenuous Americans that Kim Jong Un’s exact words had been ‘denuclearization of the Korean peninsula’, not ‘denuclearization of North Korea’, or what this phrase actually meant, above all, to North Korea. To all of North Korea’s three rulers, Pyongyang’s stock phrase has always meant the complete withdrawal of US nuclear weapons (achieved in 1991), US troops, and all strategic weapons from South Korea and the region, including Japan, and the abrogation of the US–South Korea military alliance treaty. It was Kim Yo Jong herself who made this clear as recently as August 2021: ‘For peace to settle on the Korean peninsula, it is imperative for the US to withdraw its aggression troops and war hardware deployed in South Korea.’

Neither did the South Koreans choose to mention that none other than Kim Jong Un’s own father, Jong Il, had recycled the tired ‘Kim Il Sung’s dying wish’ trope many times already; in 1994, for example, as Pyongyang was gearing up to enrich uranium while temporarily shutting down its main plutonium reactor in Yongbyon in return for over $1.3 billion worth of food and energy aid from the United States alone; in 2005, as the North was preparing to conduct its first nuclear test the following year; in 2009 too, as it was preparing to bolster Kim Jong Un’s credentials by planning to blow up a South Korean navy ship four months later. And in June 2013, by now firmly in the Kim Jong Un era,

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