Japan’s relationship with South Korea is not amicable at the best of times. Yet in recent months it has entered a rapidly descending diplomatic spiral of unprecedented depth and scope. Mounting bilateral friction over the intractable ‘history problems’ is steadily bleeding into the economic and security realms of the relationship. The result is a bilateral trade war with potential repercussions for the global supply chain of high-tech devices.

On the surface, it appears that a series of contentious developments in their longstanding history problems drove Tokyo and Seoul to this crisis point. South Korean President Moon Jae-in reneged on a diplomatic accord in 2018 that was purported to ‘irreversibly’ settle the ‘comfort women’ issue. The South Korean judiciary is also growing increasingly incessant in demanding Japanese companies pay damages to the Koreans mobilised for wartime labour.

These bilateral developments are doubtlessly playing a central role in the deterioration of Tokyo–Seoul relations. Yet there are broader strategic parameters to this dispute that have also shaped the contours of diplomatic friction, and these are largely being overlooked.

In short, there has been a major divergence in Seoul’s and Tokyo’s strategic views towards North Korea. This began to develop in January 2018 when Seoul embarked on a rapprochement with Pyongyang, while Tokyo’s policy on North Korea remained fundamentally unchanged. This strategic divergence, which has continued to deepen with time, undermined the ability of Japan and South Korea to cooperate in the security realm. By extension, it also reduced their diplomatic incentives to manage their history problems.

North Korea’s belligerence throughout 2017 encouraged Seoul and Tokyo to contain their diplomatic problems. As North Korean leader Kim Jong-un rapidly advanced his nuclear program, his missiles were frequently traversing Japanese airspace. The continental United States also came under potential threat with Kim’s successful launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. These events provoked a rhetorical war between Kim and US President Donald Trump that threatened to escalate to a de facto war. Indeed, media reports emanating from the US indicated that Trump was seriously considering a preventive attack—a ‘bloody-nose’ strike—against North Korea.

This precarious security environment provided strong incentives for Seoul and Tokyo to cooperate in the defence realm, and their strategic outlooks on North Korea were aligned closely. Both sides were in favour of strong sanctions, intelligence-sharing and trilateral military exercises with the US. Defence cooperation necessitated keeping their ever-present history problems in check, as collaboration in this sphere has always been tenuous. Against this backdrop, Moon expressed opposition to the 2015 comfort women agreement but remained ambiguous as to whether or not he would dissolve it.

Yet when North Korea initiated an about-turn in January last year, the strategic views of Seoul and Tokyo quickly began to diverge. Kim extended an olive branch to Moon in his 2018 New Year’s address, suggesting that the two Koreas jointly compete in the Winter Olympics. Moon seized upon this conciliatory gesture, ushering in an inter-Korean rapprochement and a round of regional summitry. To ensure that the diplomatic door remained open to Kim, Moon was reluctant to provoke him, meaning that trilateral exercises with Japan and the US became problematic.

Yet, from Tokyo’s point of view, little had changed with regard to North Korea. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was not prepared to risk political suicide by following suit with his South Korean and US counterparts. The issue of Japanese abductees takes precedence over the North Korean nuclear threat in Japan, and Abe’s domestic political success is explained in part by his hardline stance towards Pyongyang on that issue. Consequently, Tokyo became sidelined from the regional summitry.

Amid this growing strategic divergence, Moon unilaterally dissolved the comfort women accord in November 2018. In the same month, Tokyo announced that it would appeal to the International Court of Justice over a South Korean court ruling concerning Korean forced labourers. Relations took a further downturn in January, when the two governments disputed whether a South Korean navy destroyer had locked its targeting radar on a Japanese maritime patrol aircraft.

This downward spiral in Tokyo–Seoul relations is being compounded by their mutual US ally taking more of a backseat than usual in the dispute. Normally, Washington would be strongly encouraging its two key Asian allies to maintain their security cooperation despite their diplomatic issues. But this is now complicated by the fact that Trump supports—at least in practice—South Korea’s rapprochement policy towards North Korea and is thereby deepening the Tokyo–Seoul strategic divergence.

Although Pyongyang has now resumed missile testing, it’s doubtful that this development will provide an incentive to Japan and South Korea to repair their relations. Moon is likely to continue pursuing his rapprochement policy with North Korea, and there has already been too much bilateral damage done in the current dispute between Tokyo and Seoul.

There is no clear way out of this diplomatic crisis. But it’s evident that Seoul and Washington are likely to persist in engaging North Korea and working towards denuclearisation—at least for the foreseeable future. If Tokyo and Seoul wish to pave a foundation for mending their ties, they must recalibrate the strategic parameters of their relationship. Their relations will need to be predicated on mutual engagement with North Korea, rather than the mutual isolation of the past. To achieve this strategic convergence, Tokyo will need to try to end its longstanding impasse with Pyongyang.

North Korea set out on its quest to develop a nuclear-weapons capability (reliable nuclear explosive devices and the means to deliver them over medium and long distances) in the mid-1980s. Progress was slow and uneven. The DPRK lacked financial resources and technological capacities. All the countries that possessed the relevant technologies paid at least lip service to nuclear non-proliferation and had export controls on the core technologies, including China, through which the great bulk of North Korea’s trade has transited since the demise of the USSR.

Two major efforts were made to dissuade Pyongyang from proceeding with its nuclear program—a freeze agreed with the US in 1994, which was to be followed by the verified dismantling of the DPRK’s nuclear capabilities, and the six-party talks of 2003–2005, which had the same objective.

North Korea tested its first nuclear device in 2006, and five subsequent tests through 2017 confirmed its competence in making nuclear explosive devices. The testing was accompanied by what a surprisingly rapid mastery of building ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads over distances as far as the west coast of the United States.

The blizzard of missile tests in 2016 and 2017 generated an acute sense of crisis that was abruptly defused at the end of 2017 when the DPRK used the Winter Olympics being hosted by South Korea to revive dormant channels of communication, first with Seoul and Beijing, and then with Washington.

North Korea’s achievement of a genuine nuclear-weapons capability was remarkable but, in a crucially important sense, not surprising. Indeed, it’s consistent with the pronounced belligerence that has characterised the regime since its emergence under the wing of the USSR shortly after World War II ended.

Its first leader, Kim Il-sung, began lobbying the Soviet leader to support the invasion of the South and bring the entire peninsula into the socialist camp. Stalin eventually agreed that it was an attractive idea, but insisted that the People’s Republic of China also agree to support the venture. Mao agreed and North Korean forces struck on 25 June 1950. The war ended more than three years later with an armistice agreement that is still in place.

North Korea, though economically depleted, maintained its aspiration to unite the two Koreas on its terms and set out to steadily increase its armed forces. A quarter of a century later—a period interspersed with acts of extreme belligerence towards the South in particular—they topped 1.1 million personnel, rendering the DPRK the most militarised state in the world but also among the poorest.

The subsequent commitment to nuclear weapons appears to have emerged from the assessment that, despite facing in the US an implacable enemy seeking a second chance to terminate it, the DPRK could not support the continual modernisation of such a massive force. For essentially all of this period, Russia and China have gone along with the DPRK, declining to compel or even encourage it to amend its national story and strive to coexist with its neighbours and the wider world in the normal way.

US President Donald Trump brashly agreed to meet his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-un, in Singapore in June last year and resolved to honour that commitment despite the North’s firmly resisting all efforts to flesh out what was at stake or how the parties might begin to address the issues between them. At the conclusion of the Singapore summit, North Korea raced to occupy the moral high ground, insisting that it had endured decades of US aggression and that the US had a major trust deficit to make up—particularly through easing the sanctions regime and transforming the armistice into a peace treaty—before the DPRK could even begin to consider reciprocal steps. The US went through the motions of asking the DPRK to draw up a baseline inventory of its nuclear assets and facilities as a prelude to joint development of a schedule to eliminate them, but the entire process fell flat very quickly.

A second summit will be held in Hanoi, Vietnam, later this week. There’s still little evidence of new flexibility on either side. Kim and Trump have corresponded since Singapore and the new US special envoy has spent some days in Pyongyang. This may point towards the painstaking incremental, action-for-action approach agreed in broad terms at the six-party talks in September 2005.

In addition, Kim met again with Chinese President Xi Jinping in mid-January 2019—their fourth meeting in less than a year after six years without any meetings. We have no visibility of how North Korea’s objectives and tactics may have been influenced by China. China did at several points lose patience with North Korea, especially when its actions threatened a full-blown crisis that could have spun out of control and prove costly to China’s long-term interests.

Broadly speaking, we can assume that China has reaffirmed its willingness to stand behind the DPRK economically and politically, provided Pyongyang remains receptive to China’s counsel on how best to manage the issue in a way that protects China’s primary interest—a US position in Northeast Asia that has been weakened rather than reinforced. Trump, meanwhile, has been highlighting the economic bonanza that denuking could deliver for the DPRK.

An even more important reason to be skeptical about a breakthrough at the Hanoi summit is that the main players continue to cling to very divergent narratives on how we got to where we are. The background rehearsed so briefly above—a few highlights from the ‘Western’ record—has been completely buried. We cannot expect a shared narrative.

Nor can issues of this kind be resolved through any kind of simple reckoning of past injustices. That said, however, it’s difficult to see how a meeting of the minds sufficiently strong and deep to reach and to implement a denuclearisation agreement can happen if the two principals clash so spectacularly on how and why the situation is in its current shape.

In his annual New Year’s address, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said he is committed to denuclearisation but will change course if the US persists with ‘sanctions and pressures’. The statement confirmed that all steps taken by North Korea to date are fully reversible. Conversely, in the difficult negotiations on denuclearisation, the key principle is ‘irreversibility’. The great wall of distrust built over 68 years’ dealings with one another makes all sides determined to ring-fence the future against the possibility of reversibility by the other side. Without an understanding of all sides’ requirement for irreversibility, progress will remain elusive.

Westerners have difficulty grasping the continuing hold of historical memories in shaping Asians’ current policies. Most also tend not to take North Korea seriously, demonising and caricaturing its young leader as an unserious figure of fun. Few bother trying to understand its security concerns and admit the possibility that its paranoia might be grounded in long experience.

The Korean War began with unprovoked aggression by the North in 1950. Since then, Pyongyang has earned its credentials as one of the world’s worst human rights abusers, as attested in the UN commission of inquiry report and by North Korea’s assassinations of political opponents, terrorist attacks on foreign soil, abductions of Japanese and South Korean citizens, and attacks on targets in South Korea with significant losses of life. It has acquired nuclear weapons in breach of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, made repeated commitments to abandon them in return for security assurances and economic assistance, shelved its nuclear ambitions temporarily, and then broken its promises serially.

The US carried out obliteration bombing of the North during the Korean War, stationed atomic weapons in South Korea in 1958 in breach of the 1953 armistice agreement, and refused to honour commitments under the 1994 agreed framework to provide aid to the North. Many US global actions reinforce the narrative of an America that can’t be trusted. Russia’s actions in Ukraine, China’s defiance of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 South China Sea ruling, and the US’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal confirm the ugly reality that big powers get away with breaking international agreements virtually scot-free.

Nuclear weapons earned Kim a summit with US President Donald Trump as an equal; abandoning the quest for them brought an undignified early death to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and renewed threats against Iran. The reinstatement of US sanctions on Iran, explained President Hassan Rouhani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the North Koreans, proves America’s bad faith and untrustworthiness. Security to Kim might therefore mean agreeing to freeze his nuclear and missile capabilities at existing levels in order to avoid US preemptive military strikes today, but retaining those capabilities in order to deter punitive US strikes tomorrow.

Despite Trump’s declaration that North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat, the evidence shows that North Korea continues to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear materials. The US cannot accept symbolic but inconsequential dismantlement that ‘can be reconstituted within months’ as an adequate basis for full normalisation and a peace treaty. The declaration of an end to war, once issued, cannot be taken back. It would weaken avenues for US pressure on the North like military exercises and sanctions. So the US demands proof of Pyongyang’s sincerity, with an inventory of nuclear material and production facilities verified by international inspectors.

Pyongyang wants the US to abstain from joint military exercises with the South, provide economic assistance and security guarantees, and open up diplomatic relations. All of these can be suspended at any time without notice on a presidential whim. But complete denuclearisation by North Korea cannot be reversed. So, on 20 December, a commentary published by the official North Korean news agency said: ‘When we refer to the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” it means the removal of all sources of nuclear threat not only from the North and the South but also from all neighboring areas targeting the peninsula.’ In other words, removing the US nuclear umbrella from Japan and South Korea is a precondition of North Korea’s denuclearisation.

Hence, too, Pyongyang’s counter-demand that the Korean War be declared over in order to launch the process towards full normalisation. The language and numbered sequencing of the Trump–Kim declaration of 12 June were deliberate. ‘New US–DPRK relations’ and ‘a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula’ came before a commitment to ‘work towards’ denuclearisation of the whole peninsula.

Insisting that it has already made enough concessions, North Korea has become more forceful in demanding reciprocal gestures from Washington. In his address to the UN General Assembly on 29 September, Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho noted that ‘continued sanctions are deepening our mistrust’. ‘Without any trust in the US’, he added, ‘there will be no confidence in our national security and under such circumstances, there is no way we will unilaterally disarm ourselves first’. On 2 November, Pyongyang threatened to resume the build-up of nuclear forces unless US sanctions are lifted and bilateral relations are improved.

A split is evident between Seoul and Washington on the use of sanctions as a tool with which to pressure Pyongyang. Against US opposition, South Korea supports a continued loosening of sanctions, arguing that economic development will give incentives to the North to cooperate on denuclearisation. Once sanctions are lifted, however, efforts to reimpose them will be hostage to Chinese and Russian veto in the UN Security Council.

Calculating that Trump has a greater personal investment in a ‘win’ on North Korea, Pyongyang has also been trying to drive a wedge between the president and his senior advisers. Every new hardline comment from Washington is denounced as a violation of the statement and spirit of the Singapore declaration.

We must avoid a return to the ‘fire and fury’ days of 2017 and the associated risk of a catastrophic war in East Asia. This makes it critical, in South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s words, to find the ‘intersecting point’ between the competing US and North Korean calls for steps towards denuclearisation and an end to US hostility.

Images of the leaders of South and North Korea, Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un, laughing, smiling and even hugging, are incredibly powerful. They represent the hope that the Korean peninsula is actually entering a new era of peace. But turning that hope into a reality will require more than crisis diplomacy.

Crisis diplomacy is interaction between states (and non-state actors) under a heightened threat of systemic change or conflict. There are usually just two sides to crisis diplomacy. The aggressor uses provocation and the threat of expanded conflict to force a partner to back down in order to secure objectives. The respondent manages or resolves potential conflict in order to avoid descent into expanded, unmanageable conflict.

On the Korean peninsula, North Korea has been in the aggressor role, while South Korea has been the respondent. The hallmarks of crisis diplomacy—armed infiltrations, assassination attempts, artillery exchanges and naval skirmishes—are a recurring feature of North–South diplomatic interaction.

Crisis diplomacy is a process. It involves high-level decision-making and close political control over military engagement; close coordination between partners and allies; and clear signalling to avoid miscalculation and inadvertent escalation. Actors must set limited, achievable goals and be prepared to accept compromises.

Since the 1990s, crisis diplomacy on the Korean peninsula has followed a trajectory in which North Korea undertakes limited, often non-directly attributable provocations and South Korea manages, de-escalates and then regroups. South Korea’s initiatives to engage North Korea have been marked by the pursuit of high-level access—often leadership summits or close coordination with the US. These initiatives achieved limited objectives—namely, the cessation of the risk of immediate conflict—and have meant accepting options that were previously considered outside the range of acceptable choices, such as economic inducements and financial rewards.

However, the value of crisis diplomacy, and its marketability to stakeholders, reduces as the threat decreases. This effectively places a time limit on associated diplomatic initiatives. Accordingly, while crisis diplomacy provides a set of tools that work for managing and avoiding conflict (or, for the aggressor, achieving limited gains), it doesn’t provide an appropriate set of tools for transforming the root causes of tension.

The dynamic on the Korean peninsula changed with the decision of the Trump administration to reverse these roles. By increasing tension, and threatening escalation, the US assumed an aggressor role. That left South Korea alone in the crisis diplomacy respondent role—on two fronts.

South Korea’s efforts fitted neatly into the mould of crisis diplomacy. The two North–South leadership summits, close coordination with the US and a North Korea – US leadership summit reduced the threat of immediate conflict. Further leadership summits may provide a rationale for economic inducements and financial rewards—in this case, the cessation of sanctions and the opening of joint economic projects.

Crisis diplomacy is limited, regardless of whether we assess the root causes of tension to be North Korea’s nuclear forces and missile programs; conventional forces and intermittent provocations; or political system and insecurity. Leadership summits may provide the confidence and political push to start or finalise negotiations, but they inevitably tempt cynicism.

More innovative, creative diplomacy and coalition-building is required to overcome deeply entrenched, intractable international problems.

There are examples that demonstrate how combinations of states overcame deeply entrenched international problems. In 1986, Australia, in coordination with a number of agricultural exporting states, formed the Cairns Group, and overcame major-power opposition to multilateral trade liberalisation in agriculture. In the early 1990s, Australia, Canada and Japan led efforts towards the Paris peace accords and the securing of a lasting Cambodian peace settlement. In the early 2000s, Canada led an international effort to reassess and reinterpret sovereignty and intervention.

The lull in security tension on the Korean peninsula provides an opportunity to make a similarly lasting change. But the Moon administration must act now.

Five-year presidential terms, a combination of a strong executive and weaker legislative and administrative arms, a weak party system, and a strong preference for differentiation between administrations limit South Korea’s foreign policy continuity, which in turn limits its capacity to sustain initiatives between administrations. Without a diplomatic process that strengthens domestic support, or provides a degree of shelf life, successes achieved through crisis diplomacy will disappear. A crowded global diplomatic agenda further restricts the time available.

There are diplomatic processes available to secure a more durable, longer-lasting process. But the Moon administration must seek them out. At the moment, however, there are no signs that it plans to move beyond the unimaginative, often tried but ultimately fruitless, confines of crisis diplomacy.

In the wake of the recent North Korea – South Korea summit, it has become clearer than ever how Kim Jong-un defines ‘denuclearisation’: it’s a series of limited unilateral declarations which constrain the North’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs in the order and to the degree that best suit Pyongyang’s strategic interests, and from which he might escape at a time of his own choosing. In going down that path, Kim is playing from an old song book—Asian nuclear arms control has typically relied much more heavily than its Western counterpart on the concept of voluntary self-restraint.

A recent article in the New York Times argued that Kim has figured out he can keep his nuclear program going, just as long as he does it quietly—following in the footsteps of India, Pakistan and Israel. There’s a large element of truth in that. But Kim’s not just trying to make North Korea look like the other non-P5 nuclear-weapon states. By accepting a series of self-imposed limitations and (conditional) obligations—in relation to nuclear and ballistic-missile testing, missile-engine test stands, and some parts of the ageing infrastructure at Yongbyon—Kim’s trying to make North Korea look like the other Asian nuclear-weapon states (China, India and Pakistan), none of which has a particularly strong record of formal, legalistic nuclear arms control of the type most favoured in Washington.

Western arms control—and Russian, for that matter—turns upon exactly that legalistic, exegetical approach, in which constraints are specifically defined. Think of the SALT and START agreements, for example. They wrestled English and Russian adjectives to the floor to define the specific obligations of their signatories. What counts as a strategic nuclear delivery vehicle? How many manoeuvrable, independent re-entry vehicles are allowed, and on which missiles? What do verification measures look like? When do obligations start and finish? What are the provisions for extending the treaties?

Interestingly, the P5+1 ‘sold’ that model of arms control to Iran with the negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action: anyone who cares to browse the agreement will find a dense thicket of regulation, touching even Iranian enrichment research and development efforts in relation to specific centrifuge models. (True, some thought the agreement didn’t regulate the right things, but that’s another matter.)

Kim’s not interested in going down that route. The North Koreans have been suspicious of detailed verification regimes involving international experts ever since the International Atomic Energy Agency picked apart their initial statements about plutonium reprocessing in 1992—back in those heady days when North Korea was a party to the non-proliferation treaty. For obvious reasons, Kim’s in no hurry now to clarify North Korea’s existing capabilities. He hopes to keep as much of his arsenal as he can—and the easiest way to do that is to conceal the dimensions of that arsenal.

Nor does he believe that he has to accede to the Western model of arms control. A distinctive Asian model has emerged over the decades—one which helps offset the portrayal of Asian nuclear-weapon states as more worrying than their first-world counterparts. True, Asian nuclear powers are less attracted than their Western counterparts to formalised game theory as a guide to effective deterrence—but that doesn’t mean their decision-making is emotive or irrational. Their command and control structures are typically less well resourced than those run by the US and Russia—but it’s probably wrong to think of those structures as inherently fragile. And Asian nuclear-weapon states are less driven by ideology than were the dominant nuclear players of the Cold War—but they’re not rabid nationalists automatically driven towards ready use of nuclear weapons.

Kim’s principal challenge, of course, is going to be convincing the Americans that he’s done enough to be given a pass mark on denuclearisation. That’s going to be hard, for three reasons. First, the pace of North Korean development in 2017 was so frantic—and so astonishing—that what might easily have qualified as a pass mark at the beginning of January almost certainly wouldn’t have done so by the end of December.

Second, the perceived value of voluntary self-restraint isn’t fixed—it varies from country to country and from time to time, in relation to the nature of both the leadership in the self-restraining state and the intelligence about the probable existence of covert programs that undermine the validity of the original commitment. Both the Kim family’s long history of aggressive behaviour and Kim Jong-un’s more recent efforts to conceal key elements of his program surely dilute the value of any pledge of self-restraint.

And finally, in the months since the Trump–Kim summit in Singapore, it’s become apparent that Kim has no intention of throwing away a capability which has seen him feted at diplomatic summits, redefined the relationship between the two Koreas, and helped to break the back of the previously worrying sanctions regime.

Sadly, North Korea doesn’t look self-restrained. Nuclear weapons sit in the foreground of its military capabilities, not in the background. Developments in its nuclear program aren’t slow and predictable, but volatile and unpredictable.

Of course, Kim has two things counting in his favour. The international community is fearful that true denuclearisation might come only with a high price tag. And the current US president seems more willing than the broader US national security community to tolerate a degree of smudging of the definition of success—in part to keep alive the notion that the Singapore summit was instrumental in managing the North Korean nuclear threat.