 Helo, gweithio'r ffordd. Gweithio'r ffordd, ac yn fawr i gwybod gyda'r Cwrian Pynninslau P� Forum 2023. Mae'r gweithredu cohoeddiadol ar gyfer y Rhyf, ac y Lundin Asia Pacific Centre yw Soas ac King's College. Mae'r Cat Yan Cong, panerau ymdrygiadau ar gyfer y Plynyddiaeth, a'r co-chair y Lundin Asia Pacific Centre. Many thanks for attending on the busy Wednesday afternoon. This event is being recorded and streamed via Zoom. And the recording will then be posted onto YouTube. So don't be surprised if you, you know, your image or your voice ends up on YouTube. So this forum started as an initiative of the Korean Embassy in 2018. It's a regular event held at different venues bydw i'r Chatham House, King's, with the generous support of the Embassy of the Republic of Korea. As the title states, the aim of this forum is to discuss the latest developments affecting the stability on the Korean Peninsula and to explore the potential paths towards peace. To discuss these issues and the deeper roots, we have distinguished panelists with experience from the worlds of academia, diplomacy, and policy analysis. And to introduce this event, we have two distinguished speakers. His Excellency, Mr Yor Chol Yun, is the Republic of Korea's Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He spent 39 years in the diplomatic service. Before coming to the United Kingdom last year, he was the ambassador for international relations for Gwangju Metropolitan City in the southwestern part of Korea. For those who know Korea, you know that Gwangju has a very significant place in the history of Korean democratisation. Prior to that, he served as Korea's ambassador to Egypt. And Ambassador Yun has held other important posts, including the Chief of Presidential Protocol, Deputy Minister of Protocol and Special Assistant to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, a role which he served for eight years. And our other distinguished keynote speaker is Professor Joanna Newman. Professor Newman is the Provost and Deputy Director of SOAS prior to joining SOAS this year. She spent six years as the Secretary General of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the first female Secretary General of the ACU. Prior to joining the ACU, Professor Newman was the Vice-Principal International at King's College London. Alongside her senior managerial roles, she remains academically active as a senior research fellow in history at King's. Her most recent publication is Nearly the New World, The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism 1933 to 45. In 2014, Professor Newman was awarded an MBE in recognition of her work in promoting British higher education internationally. So please give a warm welcome for our distinguished keynote speakers. Okay, Provost Professor Joanna Newman, MBE, and Professor Tat Yang Kong, Professor. You insisted, Mr, but Professor Aiden Foster-Cata, Ambassador Jim Hall, and Professor Chris Hughes and distinguished scholars and students at SOAS. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. It is my great pleasure to welcome you all to the Korean Peninsula Peace Forum, an annual event hosted by the Korean Embassy in London in collaboration with the London Asia Pacific Centre for Social Science. Please let me begin by thanking all of you for kindly attending today's forum. The Korean Peninsula Peace Forum has consistently been a valuable platform through which the most eminent and experienced scholars in the field of inter-Korean relations gather to offer their valuable expertise in order to achieve greater peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to SOAS University London for jointly hosting this year's forum with King's College London. Personally, I find it very meaningful that this year's forum is being held at a time when there is such important issues regarding the situation on the Korean Peninsula. The first point I would like to make is that the international community's interest in the human rights situation in North Korea is stronger than ever. Recently, more than 600 defectors were repatriated to North Korea against their will by the Chinese authorities and we unfortunately still see many human rights abuse cases in North Korea. Some North Koreans have been publicly executed simply for distributing South Korean dramas to other North Koreans and forced abortions have been performed on pregnant women because they had been repatriated. Even 10 years on from the landmark report released in 2014 by the Commission of Inquiry, COI, on human rights in the DPRK, the human rights situation in North Korea has not improved at all. We can still see that systematic widespread and gross human rights violations are being committed by the DPRK and we have a very long way to go when it comes to human rights in North Korea. Aspiring to make Korea a global pivotal state or GPS in short, the Korean government led by my president Yoon Seok-yul is striving to actively contribute to the promotion of universal values such as freedom, democracy and human rights. We can no longer sit idle and watch what is happening in North Korea. Since its inauguration, my government has been implementing a wide range of policies to improve the human rights situation in North Korea. For example, we appointed an ambassador for international cooperation on North Korean human rights, a position that had been vacant for five years despite the legislation that required the government to do so. And we reactivated the North Korean Human Rights Policy Council. And the first ever North Korean Human Rights Report was released this year by the Korean government. Moreover, we should not forget that the abysmal human rights situation in North Korea is closely related to the advancement of North Korea's nuclear and missile capabilities. North Korea continues to squander its scarce resources on developing its weapon of mass destruction programmes at the expense of its own people. It has launched record numbers of missiles and so-called satellites while its people are starving and suffering from repression. North Korean workers overseas make earnings which are only to be exploited by the regime to finance its nuclear and missile programme. The workers themselves face growing working conditions with no holidays and minimal compensation. If the tens of millions of dollars squandered on every missile launched had instead been spent on improving people's lives, it would have substantially eased their hardship. The second point I would like to highlight is the importance of cooperation among like-minded countries to tackle North Korea's WMD programmes. While the whole world knows that the seventh nuclear test may take place at any moment, North Korea's WMD programme developments and ongoing missile launches continue to pose significant threats to peace and security on the Korean Peninsula, the Indo-Pacific and beyond. However, due to the Ukraine war and geopolitical tensions between the United States and China, it has become difficult to tackle North Korea's violations of UN Security Council resolutions properly. Moreover, North Korea is taking advantage of this situation as we have seen through its recent military cooperation with Russia. North Korea's WMD programme development and continuous missile launches constitute clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions. If North Korea is allowed to avoid sanctions and raise illegal funds for its WMD programmes, the threat will never be addressed. We certainly warn that all forms of arms trade and related cooperation with North Korea also directly infringe multiple Security Council resolutions and that any attempts to assist North Korea's unlawful programmes or to engage in arms trade with North Korea must stop. So this is where we need all our allies and like-minded partners. My government's audacious initiative, or AI, focuses on fostering a strategic environment where North Korea is dissuaded from developing WMD programmes by depriving it of its various sources of illicit revenue, including cryptocurrency. We have already imposed our own sanctions on the North Korean regime, but this is not enough. Title cooperation is needed to ensure that North Korea shall not be able to raise funds and realise that there's no point in its efforts to develop WMD programmes. The History Camp David Trilateral Summit last August is a good example of the benefits of cooperation. President Yoon announced with President Biden and Prime Minister Kishita the establishment of a new trilateral working group to drive cooperation to combat North Korea's cyber threats and block its cyber-enabled sanctions evasion. At the same time, I wish to mention the UK government's close cooperation with Korea. The UK has always been a most reliable partner in dealing with North Korea. The UK government has not hesitated to release statements condemning North Korea's recent ballistic missile tests and reaffirming UK's commitment to sanctions targeting the DPRK's unlawful weapons development programme. As Korea is going to join the United Nations Security Council as non-permanent member from next year, the cooperation and coordination between our two nations will be further enhanced. Given the strong foundation of shared values which has been confirmed by the invitation from His Majesty King Charles III for President Yoon to make a state visit to the United Kingdom, the first one after his coronation in May. To conclude, I would like to thank you all for kindly attending and participating in today's forum. Yes, the Republic of Korea is the main stakeholder in this process, but we will also need the kind support of the UK and other like-minded nations to create the genuine, sustainable peace and security on the Korean Peninsula. I look forward to fruitful discussions pointing to specific ideas and effective measures that bring us closer to realising our aspiration. Thank you. Damosamnida. Thank you so much, Your Excellency, for giving us such a wonderful introduction to this symposium. Dear friends, colleagues, Your Excellency, it gives me great pleasure to be opening this event and before moving on to the details of the forum for today, I want to briefly outline so as is historical interest in the Korean Peninsula and its centrality to our intellectual mission. Our mandate, as is clear in our plan, it's to interrogate and understand the global challenges of our time through the perspective of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In other words, Asia, Africa and the Middle East aren't areas of study, at so as, but rather the prism through which we study and understand the world. And so the purpose of the forum is not to study the Korean Peninsula, but to provide a platform for the perspective of the Korean Peninsula in addressing the challenges of our time. The Korean Peninsula Peace Forum uniquely brings together leading authorities from the academic and practitioner communities in the UK and Europe to discuss the sources of tension on the Korean Peninsula and explore the pathways to the easing of tension and the establishment of permanent peace. We have historically had a diverse audience ranging from students, academics, practitioners from the worlds of diplomacy, advocacy and business, as well as members of the public with an interest in the Korean Peninsula. These events rotate between my old University of King's College London and SOAS. The first forum was held here at SOAS in 2018, then at King's in 2021, where our director Adam Habib, who gives his very best wishes to this forum, gave a keynote speech in 2022. And so we're delighted to be hosting it here again at SOAS this year. On the structure and themes of the forum, this year's will focus on two themes relating to recent developments. First, it will discuss the strategy of the Republic of Korea under the current administration. In its dealings with North Korea, the UN administration has strongly emphasised the simultaneous promotion of human rights and denuclearisation. This represents a departure from the previous administration, which envisaged the improvement of human rights as the culmination of a long process of engagement, economic cooperation and peace building, including denuclearisation. It brings us back to the perennial issue of how best to influence North Korea for the better by engagement to the previous administration or by stronger deterrence with political pressure, the current administration. Second, the forum will turn to the broader international context and assess the implications of the recent diplomatic developments for security and cooperation. It will focus on the results of the recent ROK US Japan summit, which was held in August 23, that held much closer military cooperation between the three countries. A sign of that closer cooperation is the official visit of nuclear missile arms at US submarines to the Republic of Korea and the UN administration's efforts to improve diplomatic relations with Japan that were strained by long-term historical disputes. The forum will consider the likelihood of closer military cooperation between the Republic of Korea and Japan considering historical difficulties, and it will also consider whether this mini-lateralism represents the emergence of a new Cold War in North East Asia. The recent DPRK Russia summit held in September 23 has been interpreted as the beginning of such a trend. So I wish you all the very best in your deliberations for what sounds like an absolutely fascinating day and I want to thank all of you for taking the time to attend. I also want to thank deeply the Korean Embassy for working with us and bringing together this forum and to Kings for co-hosting it with us. Thank you very much. This is work. Our first session, the theme of our first session is the inseparable connection between North Korean nuclear issue and North Korean human rights. That was something that was emphasised by the ambassadors in the ambassador's speech The current ROK, Republic of Korea Administration of President Yoon Seok-yul, has emphasised the simultaneous promotion of human rights and denuclearisation. The previous administration envisaged the improvement of human rights as the culmination of a longer process, cooperation, engagement, peace building. The promotion of human rights a stronger emphasis on human rights alongside denuclearisation actually also has advocates, especially in the United States, amongst diplomats who previously dealt with North Korea. Their view is that after 30 years of nuclear diplomacy with North Korea, no denuclearisation has actually been achieved. So, for example, Joseph Te Trani, a former special envoy to the Six-Party denuclearisation talks is one of an example of American diplomats in the American diplomatic community putting more emphasis on using human rights in order to pressure the North Korean regime. This has echoes of the Reagan Administration in the United States placing greater emphasis on human rights promotion in the 1980s, following the disappointments of detente with the Soviet Union. To discuss these issues, we're joined by two excellent panellists. On my left is Dr Marion Mesmer, a senior research fellow in the International Security Program at Chatham House. She works on arms control, nuclear weapons, policy issues and Russia-NATO relations. Before joining Chatham House, Marion was a co-director of the British American Security Information Council where she led the organization's nuclear risk reduction and disarmament work. Marion is an N2 innovation fellow and also she was a fellow of the Arms Control Negotiation Academy. She holds a PhD in security studies from King's College and to my right is Dr James Hall, Jim Hall, a he has a PhD in Japanese History from the University of London and was from SOAS in fact. For University of London in those days, I think they didn't distinguish so sharply between colleges. He was a research analyst in the British Diplomatic Service and the head of the North Asia Research Section at the Foreign Office. He served in Seoul and Beijing and was Britain's first representative in Pyongyang. Since retirement, he's taught at SOAS from time to time, establishing a course on North Korea, which he ran for five years. He's also an honorary research associate in the Centre of Korean Studies of SOAS. He's written widely on East Asia, most recently the historical dictionaries on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. His selected writings on Asia for Amsterdam University Press is in press. So when somebody publishes your selected writings, I think it means you've got some kind of status. It means you've all you've finally retired. In 2021, he received the Udang Prize from the Udang Foundation for Education and Culture in the Republic of Korea. So please give a warm welcome for our two panellists. So I shall begin with Marion. Marion will talk for about 10 minutes. Then Jim will talk for about 10 minutes. Then we will have questions and answers. So Marion, over to you. Thank you very much. Hello everyone. Thank you very much to SOAS for the kind invitation. It's a pleasure to be here. We already heard in the keynote speeches some of the challenges that is essentially going to face the South Korean government's attempts at pushing ahead with making progress in denuclearisation. We already heard that this is something that has been attempted again and again for decades. Given the wider tensions in the international security environment, which also means that many of the partners that the Republic of Korea will need to engage in order to make progress on this, under a lot of other pressures, it means that it's basically going to be very difficult and take a lot of effort. So what I wanted to do in my remarks is essentially map out a few of the challenges that are going to stand in the way of making progress on denuclearisation. Wherever possible, point out how progress could be made and also talk a little bit about what some of the shifting alliances and allegiances between North Korea and other countries might mean for this progress. So there's essentially a lot that has changed for, it's probably fair to say, the worst in the last few years, not just in terms of the wider security environment, but also the situation on the Korean Peninsula, which is also going to be part of what's going to make it more difficult. So I think one of the questions we have to ask ourselves when we talk about denuclearisation is why North Korea wanted to acquire nuclear weapons in the first place and what their impetus is for continuing to develop and invest in both their missile programme and their nuclear programme, because that is intrinsically linked with what's going to stand in the way of them agreeing to give up their nuclear weapons. So we know that the regime sees nuclear weapons and especially its intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities as the ultimate grantor of the regime. They are very worried about the possibility of regime change and so they invest further in their nuclear capabilities, making the assumption that that is going to prevent predominantly the United States, but also the Republic of Korea from doing anything that could lead to regime change. So the second assumption that goes along with that is that over time North Korea is going to be accepted as a nuclear power because other states essentially don't have any other opportunity or any other possibility other than to accept the reality of nuclear weapons in North Korea and the power that that confers on the regime. That's the fundamental challenge. So what does that mean for denuclearisation? It means that in order to agree to denuclearisation, I think the North Korean regime will have to believe that there are credible security guarantees in place that mean that it will be able to continue on without nuclear weapons. And that essentially is more and more difficult, the more hostile the diplomatic environment is overall. We've seen that the nuclear programme has grown and expanded quite significantly over the last few years. We heard from our keynote speakers that we can expect another nuclear test soon. We've been trying to track any movements towards that. So I don't know any more than the rest of you, I suppose, as to when that might be. But it is unfortunately something that seems to be on the cards. We have seen throughout 2022 that a lot of different missile types have been tested and there has been an astonishing number of nearly 70 missile tests throughout the year, which was a huge ramping up to what we had previously seen. And during those tests, we've also seen new missile capabilities that we hadn't previously seen, which also suggests that actually the strategic significance of nuclear weapons is changing for the North Korean government away from just providing protection for the regime to potentially also being usable in conflict or being something that plays a more active deterrence role. So essentially it seems as if the North Korean regime is trying to expand its capabilities to have robust second strike capabilities, which plays a really important role in being able to assure deterrence, while also actually investing in shorter range and lower yield nuclear weapons, which could also be used in a battlefield scenario. So that's a shift from, I suppose, the last decade or so, where we have seen essentially them just trying to acquire nuclear capabilities in the first place, trying to make sure that the missile capabilities that they have were actually operational towards a nuclear program that could become slightly more sophisticated and slightly more established. Something else that that means for the region is that nuclear risks actually increase quite significantly. And what we have also seen in line with that is that the North Korean People's Assembly adopted a new law in September 2022, which changed the circumstances under which North Korea would consider using nuclear weapons first. So previously North Korea had considered nuclear weapons as a deterrence capability, so they were considering using them if they were under attack. But the legislative change in September 2022 expanded that declaratory policy to also include a first launch if there were any concerns about the viability of the North Korean regime. So that's not necessarily unheard of when it comes to nuclear possessor states. The Russian government has a very similar clause, but it does increase nuclear risks, especially if you are in situations of conflict. And of course, especially for an autocracy, it's very subjective whether the regime's survivability is assured or not. So it essentially provides a very difficult and risky justification for using nuclear weapons, which plays into the overall assessment of North Korea wanting to be seen as invincible and basically wanting to use nuclear weapons for deterrence purposes. So I think for denuclearisation that essentially means that it's going to be very difficult because if that is how the North Korean regime assesses its security environment, a very hostile security environment where you need to expand your nuclear arsenal in order to assure your protection, where you need to expand your declaratory policy principles in order to make sure that your regime can survive, then that makes it very unlikely that you would agree to any negotiations about nuclear capabilities. And the other aspect that I think has significantly changed for the worse, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is that the geopolitical relationships have changed for the worse. So for example, in 2017 we had a really unique situation in the UN Security Council in so far as that the permanent five were able to agree on a joint resolution when it came to North Korea. Normally both China and Russia can be spoilers in that regard, but I think especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Russian government's attempts to strengthen alliances wherever it can and also the strengthened cooperation that we have seen between Russia and North Korea, I would find it pretty implausible that the Russian government would agree to any additional pressure on North Korea, and in fact I wouldn't be surprised if the Russian government helped the North Korean government to evade any sanctions or get around any additional pressure. The relationship with China is similarly complicated and especially at the moment where China is trying to sort of play a careful balance between its support for Russia and its own role as a growing nuclear power, it seems unlikely that China would support additional pressure on North Korea as well. And then if we talk about this attempt to link addressing human rights and denuclearisation, I think one aspect where it could become pretty tricky is when we think about this clause about regime survival. So I think that the North Korean regime is really unlikely to engage with anything that could undermine its regime stability and we know that historically it has seen both attempts to address human rights and attempts to address denuclearisation as potential destabilising factors. So in that regard there is a clear similarity between the issues and so far as that the North Korean regime really does not like to talk about them or address them. And I don't think that it's going to go against its policy preferences in that regard. Something we have already seen in past diplomatic attempts is that North Korea might insist on stopping any discussion of human rights if it was to make progress on denuclearisation. So we might end up in a tricky situation by actually insisting on progress on one issue might make progress on the other issue more difficult which then leaves states and especially the Republic of Korea with the really difficult assessment of how to prioritise those two really important priorities and how to play a strategy where it can hopefully make progress on both. So I think I will leave it at that and hopefully that has given some food for thought for discussion. Thank you. OK, thanks very much, Marion. A lot of interesting points there. I will move on to Jim now for your perspectives. Jim? Is this on? Yes, it's on. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm not quite sure I'm the right person to be talking on this subject. It's never stopped me before, of course, but that's a different matter. I've worked both in Seoul and in Pyongyang. I have much liking for the Korean peoples, North and South. I like to think I have some understanding of them, North and South. What I think one should start off with is that abandoning any view that North Korea is somehow unique in the world. North Korea is a very isolated country. It is a very tough and in many ways unpleasant regime, but it is not unique in either of those characteristics. And it's not unique over human rights abuses. There are many other countries that are engaging human rights abuses, including our country, Britain, including the United States, and indeed in the past, certainly, and I wouldn't profess to know about the present, in the Republic of Korea as well. I still remember being sent by my ambassador in place of him to a meeting where the decision by President Chyntaewan to establish what amounted essentially to concentration camps for delinquents, beggars, such like people, was announced by the foreign ministry to the consternation of most of the diplomats present. But that's in the past. Linking human rights with other issues I think is fraught with a lot of danger. It is absolutely true that if North Korea were to abandon its nuclear weapons, it might have funds and the means of buying food to replace its own lack of food. If Britain gave up nuclear weapons, we too could make a big difference to the poverty that now appears to exist in our country. If the United States did, they could make an even greater difference to their country. But I think that with the young government's decision to emphasise human rights in the context of denuclearisation, that you end up with the inability to make progress on either front. I believe strongly that the way to deal with North Korea is to abandon the policy of isolating it, but to engage it. Now, that is not the policy of the current government in ROK. It has been the policy of most governments in the past, even if the degree of engagement was always perhaps limited. But the idea was that here we are Koreans. We occupy the same peninsula. We have to work together. And to abandon that would be a big mistake. I think it's always a mistake just to criticise who puts the North Koreans or anybody else in such a position on the back foot. They will be defending themselves, defending their position. And I think to be honest, the overemphasis on the use of sanctions in the case of North Korea has, to my mind, been a complete failure. Young people may not realise that North Korea has been under sanctions of one sort and another, bilateral sanctions, but from the United States since July 1950. The sanctions regime has intensified in recent years in attempts to get North Korea to denuclearise. But North Korea has managed to evade those sanctions. There are plenty of people in the world, both governments and organisations, that if they can make a quick buck, will do so. The reason North Korea has... Oh, gosh, what are they called? Hovercraft, sorry. Hovercraft is a British company was willing to broker the sale of such equipment banned under arms control rules to North Korea. Chinese vessels call it North Korean ports, Russian vessels call it North Korean ports. Ships anchor off North Korea and North Korean vessels come out to them. There's a whole international system of sanctions evasion. Even when I was in Pyongyang, we were even shown overcoats being made for sale through Sears and Roebuck in America. They didn't have Pyongyang on the label, they had China on the label and we were told there was another factory up the road that made the labels to put in these garments in Pyongyang. Sanctions evasion again. So think away from sanctions for a bit. My own belief is engagement is the way forward with North Korea. Taekwng has mentioned the US report that Joe Trinie was one of the contributors to it and that I read it with great interest but as soon as I got to the end and saw that the advisers included a certain John Bolton and Victor Charr, I thought, oh well yes. Both of them are very hawkish on the whole Korean issue and Bolton, you can say, is the man who could be most accredited with the massacre of the agreed framework, the 1994 limitation on North Korea's nuclear programme which despite all the propaganda did actually work at the time, it limited or it stopped the development of North Korea's nuclear weapons programme at the time. It didn't end it because it was mothballed but it did work. Bolton killed it. Once the George W. Bush administration came in Bolton's philosophy was I want to put a stake through the heart of the agreed framework and he succeeded. So what happened instead of a nuclear cap being in place, it was removed and North Korea continued then to develop what is now their current programme. Much, much different from what it was when I went to Pyongyang in 2001. Similarly, I think that there was great hope at the time of the Trump Summit. Now I have not much time for Mr Trump personally but he had at least on the North Korean issue a certain amount of imagination similar to what President Nixon had done towards China perhaps back in the 70s. An agreement could have been reached with I think minimal concessions to the North Koreans that according to the story put out by some including the same John Bolton the North Koreans demanded the lifting of all sanctions. The North Koreans said they didn't demand the lifting of all sanctions they wanted some evidence of sanction relief but it was enough to break up the meeting and to end that opportunity. And that of course has sent the North Koreans on to a rather more, as outlined previously a rather more determined track in developing their nuclear programme. But I would still argue that the way to deal with North Korea is not to always be hostile towards them to take any opportunity you have of broadening the minds of people in North Korea of showing them that there are alternative ways of doing things. Engagement bringing people out of North Korea whether those are officials or students or what have you show them the outside world show them a different set of values show them different things. Now they go back, they go back into the same system but minds are changed. One of the few things, effective things that we did when I was in Pyongyong was to have two, some of you may have heard this story before we had two people come to London from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to take part in a programme of human rights training ran by the University of Essex. I thought they wouldn't come. Instead the foreign ministry wanted to send ten the two who came, which was all the foreign officers willing to support the two who came were middle ranking officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and they came and they were told that they would have to follow the course as set out, which included visits to Amnesty International a dirty word in North Korea since a report in the 1990s and they would have to visit other human rights related organisations. They said they wouldn't do that and they were told they had to, so they did. And they went back and they didn't disappear into the camps as some suspected might happen. They went back to work in the foreign ministry I met them both. One of them eventually came to London to work in the Embassy in London. We also supplied a mass of textbooks on human rights 200 volumes on human rights. Again my thought was well they'll just disappear. But you know for weeks and months afterwards at various receptions people I didn't know from the foreign ministry would come up to me and said we read those books you gave us they were very interesting and of course it turned out that they were looking for let outs but they were still learning. The first thing they turned to was the record of the United States on Human Rights which was a tactical move perhaps but they would have learnt and the same was true of students who came to study various other subjects in the UK. Over a time University of Warwick had courses in business methods for North Korean students arranged by Professor Hazel Smith. Other universities there were some came to London for language training some went to Cambridge for other forms of training. You broaden their minds and that gets fed back into the system. I think that there is a danger in lumping all issues with North Korea together rather distinguishing what you can do in one area you may make advances if North Koreans are feeling confident I don't think that's going to be for a long time yet but at times when they could see opportunities in the world whether it was during the sunshine policy period of President Kim Dae Jong or whether it was under Moon Jae In but always at the background was the concern about the United States and I think the fear of United States power which is an echo of the Korean War but still kept alive by teaching in the schools and in the universities about the awfulness of that war and it was an awful war with a small country pounded into the Stone Age by the admission of the American Air Force Commander-in-Chief Curtis LeMay by April 1951 and the bombing went on for two years more. So there is real fear I think implanted in the North Korean psyche of the power of the United States and what they do about it. They've seen under the more conservative governments in the United States a hostile approach and so they have developed their nuclear program to counter that. For 30 years they tried to engage with the United States and I think with the failure of the Trump Summit they gave up but that's no reason to not try again. Sorry that's a bit rambling. I'm grateful to be invited but I'm not sure quite why I was asked to talk on this subject but I'm quite willing to try and answer questions afterwards. So now I'd like to take questions maybe to begin with. I have a couple of questions. One for Marion. Regarding the North Korean build-up of its nuclear weapons program its weapons of mass destruction especially over the last couple of years we see the phenomenal increase in the number of tests of various types of systems. How much nuclear deterrence is enough for the North Koreans? Because if we compare China at a parallel stage maybe in the 1960s, 1970s the deterrence that they developed was actually relatively minimal whereas North Korea seems to be very ambitious on all fronts all kinds of systems and to Jim, there's a view that over the last 30 years all kinds of concessions have been given to the North Koreans especially by various South Korean administrations the three Liberal administrations we've had over the last 30 years Kim Dae Jong, Lo Mo Hyon, Moon Jae in that they've actually tried very hard to engage with North Korea but North Korea simply hasn't reciprocated that the current strategy, some would argue this is actually a response to the failures of the past. So those will be my questions. So Marion, Jim. Thank you. How much nuclear deterrence is enough for North Korea is a really good question and one that's actually really difficult to answer. If you wanted the most accurate assessment of how North Korea is thinking about its deterrence capabilities at the moment you would really need to speak with the people who do the deterrence planning. But I think how we can approach it and trying to understand why the North Korean build-up is looking the way that it is is by essentially considering how North Korea might perceive its security environment. So we heard earlier that the United States is still in the back of North Korean minds when it comes to thinking about who the adversary might be where security threats might come from. And so the important thing is to remember that the nuclear deterrence capabilities that North Korea has built up are not necessarily aimed at South Korea but they are aimed at the United States. If you compare the U.S. arsenal with the North Korean arsenal then they probably aren't going for parity but they are probably going for a second strike capability that would allow them to deter a U.S. first strike. So for those of you who maybe are not as familiar with nuclear deterrence principles a very common principle for how you try to ensure that your nuclear deterrence works is by making sure that you have a second strike capability that would survive if you were to be attacked with nuclear weapons. So that means that you try to have intercontinental ballistic missiles that are hard to find, that are dispersed over territory, perhaps some that are submarine-based, some that are land-based so that you can ensure that at least a certain number of them will survive and you will have those ICBMs targeted at your potential adversary so that even if they launch a surprise attack you will be able to, you know, essentially also send nuclear weapons back and the idea behind that is because no one wants to... Sorry, I think that's better. So I think the principle behind it is that you will not be attacked because of course your adversary doesn't want to risk being at the receiving end of your second strike. So when we saw the test of the new type of intercontinental ballistic missile in 2022, which has solid fuel, which means that it can be launched at much shorter notice and it's much easier to hide because you don't have like a complicated fueling process which would give away that you're getting ready for a strike, that's what makes me think that this is really what they're working towards. The development of the tactical nuclear weapons I think speaks to something else because tactical nuclear weapons are usually not part of a sort of strategic deterrent strategy. They are usually much more about being usable. Some strategists also refer to them as tactical nuclear weapons or battlefield nuclear weapons. I personally wouldn't agree that they're very usable in a battlefield scenario but they are essentially used I suppose as another way of ensuring that perhaps a conventional war isn't started because there's always the risk that it's going to escalate to a nuclear level through that range. But a lot of other larger nuclear powers such as Russia have a lot of tactical nuclear weapons, which might be why North Korea also found it important to invest in that capability. But I think the problem that we're facing with regards to the North Korean build-up is that North Korea is looking to the United States which of course has the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world and if you're trying to have a survivable second strike capability with such a large adversary then that's very tricky to achieve as a small nuclear power. I think the... Is that on? I think that the testing is a reflection of those three areas or sort of the long range yes, the United States, the shorter range ones, Japan possibly and possibly South Korea that's why you have the different types of tests it's to give you as much capability as possible whether you could actually use a tactical nuclear weapon in a conflict on the Korean peninsula without damaging your own side as much as the other I doubt somehow but engagement, why did it fail? Look, every president apart from Sengman Rhee has talked about engaging with North Korea Park Chun-hee engaged or Park Chun-hee administration engaged in such talks in 1970-71 he lasted I think till 73 when they were broken off even Chun-hee engaged in a form of although Chun-hee they tried to kill him in Rangoon and killed many of his ministers or some of his ministers and some of his officials people I knew died in Rangoon when the North Koreans tried to kill Chun-hee but within a few months Chun-hee was willing to accept North Korean offers of aid during heavy flooding in the South in other words he too wished to try and engage nor did he try to engage and so on and so on Trouble is what was the offer of engagement now you're right the so-called progressive presidents have gone much much further and they've also tried through I think particularly Kim Dae-jung but also Moon Jae-in try to indicate to North Korea that they were not threatening North Korea that there was no question of a takeover that there was no that they were going to deal as country, as state to state which made a difference but ultimately South Korea is seen as part for in the North is seen as part of a US complex now particularly reinforced by the Camp David meeting and Japan and North Korea agreeing with the United States to work together but I remember and I've quoted this many times before I remember at a conference in Cambridge some years back the Korean academic Su-daesok talking about this very subject of engagement between North and South and saying the problem is that each side puts forward proposals in the end that it knows the other side isn't going to accept this is particularly true of unification the great goal the supposed goal of the Korean people that North Koreans say unification the South wants unification under our great leader whichever great leader it happens to be at the moment the South sees itself as being the dominant partner in any unification it is very difficult for either side to accept the others and so they don't so it goes on but I think it's it is the only hope but I think it needs acceptance by both sides and I know this is very difficult that there are two separate states on the Korean Peninsula and that means full diplomatic recognition of each other it means accepting that even if the ultimate goal is one day the Korean people should be reunited that day is not going to be to come quickly it's a long way off personally I think one day geography, history, culture may help the peninsula to become unified again but in the past it's been broken up its unification lasted a long time but then so did the German unification if you think about the Holy Roman Empire and how long that lasted a loose federation of the German peoples perhaps but it still lasted and then it broke up and German unification has never been completed subsequently except briefly between 1938 and 1945 when Austria was absorbed into the great of Germany and that ended with the end of the Second World War so although Korea has been united and may one day be united there's no necessarily guarantee that reunification is going to come quickly and I was not surprised to see in that again this American paper with Dutrani and the others that the goal at the end is unification under the ROK so that's not unification that's absorption and that I think is always going to mean that the other side will ultimately be very suspicious and break off engagement if it feels it's not getting anywhere it's sad but I think it's true Questions on the floor Yes, a save Thanks for that question so I was trying to take first so I think one of the ways in which we can see the immediate impact of the nuclear arsenal in North Korea is essentially what we saw come out of South Korea earlier in the year a huge expression of concern about the nuclear weapons that were present there huge expression of concern about tensions in the region generally also with China and essentially a request for additional support from the United States and also a request for a strengthening of the alliance relationship with the United States so the US is currently trying to provide that by sending US nuclear and submarines to the region more frequently I think we've had at least two visits so far and that's of course part of the United States non-proliferation strategy because they want to avoid that there's further damage to the global non-proliferation regime by South Korea and or other states in the region also wanting to acquire nuclear weapons because they feel that it's in their security interest so the big risk that a continued North Korean build-up poses of course is the risk of something going wrong but it's also the risk to the wider environment of nuclear stability that we've had quite successfully for several decades which has unfortunately been weakening for a range of different factors North Korea just being one of them but the cumulative effect of these different impacts on it means that the global non-proliferation regime is currently actually looking a lot weaker than it has done in the past what does that mean for diplomatic relations? so one of the things that I think keeps coming up in that regard is North Korea's insistence that over time it will have to be accepted as a nuclear power it may not be wrong in that regard we're sort of in a similar situation with India and Pakistan who are not officially accepted as nuclear powers but of course everyone knows that they're nuclear possessor states which has a lot of implications for the region in terms of what kind of risk reduction dialogues you want to have in place, what kind of crisis hotlines you want to have in place and so it is very well possible that we're going to get to a point where we have to engage in similar pragmatic conversations with North Korea simply because it's important for the stability of the region and to ensure that there isn't any further escalation or that any crisis escalation potential is contained as much as possible I think that is going to be a really big diplomatic hurdle because it's something that the US is not very likely to do and doesn't want to do that South Korea doesn't really want to do but I think that's going to essentially be a very pragmatic trade-off of how much good can we do through such engagement versus what's the longer term damage by essentially acknowledging that yes, nuclear weapons are in North Korea and they play a really big strategic role so if we sort of took that out of the equation the acknowledgement of the North Korean nuclear status I think having something like confidence building talks which acknowledge the nuclear weapons and sort of talk about their role in North Korean military strategy could be a very traditional way into thinking about arms control denuclearization but that is of course not going to be possible without also acknowledging that North Korea has nuclear weapons even if it's just an implicit acknowledgement and I think that's going to be a barrier to being able to have those kind of talks for the foreseeable future but in a way, the very fact that there have been series of talks with North Korea over its nuclear program is an acceptance that there is something there that concerns us so the next step to actually formally admit that that is the case and the North Koreans do know about India and Pakistan and they will quote that to you in private and they also know about Israel and South Africa in the past and they will now also say well, I'm sure I haven't actually spoken to them recently but look what happens when you give and they certainly said this about Libya and Iraq that if you give up the means of defending yourself look what happens, the Americans invade you and they will have the same argument if you like about Ukraine, that Ukraine had nuclear weapons on its soil it gave them up with a series of international guarantees and what happened, a war between it with Russia so the North Koreans will play all these things back at us and say well why can't we have that sort of the acceptance that we do have these weapons, you talk to us about them what are you talking about if you don't accept they're there so do you expect, Jim, that the North Koreans believe that they believe that the world will have to talk to them will have to engage with them if they build up their weapons of mass destruction that they have a formidable capability that they expect that this will work to their diplomatic advantage in the long term that they would have to be engaged and eventually accepted, you think that is their thinking I think it is probably that if they hang on long enough eventually the reality will have to be that we accept you have nuclear weapons now how can we bring you into a controlling system that the danger of them being used is reduced it's fine saying oh no we don't recognise you've got nuclear weapons but you've still got to deal with the fact that they do have nuclear weapons and that increasingly they have the means of delivering them and what worries me is that all these tests are working towards being able to deliver them accurately I think maybe a few years back they could fire something towards the United States without any guarantee where it would arrive I think increasingly they can now make it actually hit a defined target and if that isn't worrying enough to make you sit down and want to talk with them I don't know what is Questions, the questions from the floor so good we've got a question here how about here first My name is Maya, I'm a postgraduate student at KCL I just have a quick question surrounding the current connection between Russia and North Korea considering the Ukrainian war we've seen an increase in the export of North Korean labour into the Russian country and we've also recently seen North Korea officially declare that they've been exchanging military grade weapons with Russia to help their fight how can countries like the US or the UK now approach diplomatic negotiations with North Korea considering it's become more intertwined with the war and now seemingly has Russia backing it in a way it hasn't previously OK, connection with Russia, North Korea's connection with Russia would either of you want to take that question can we engage with North Korea given that North Korea now seems to be so closely entwined with Russia well, we still have an embassy nominally it's not been able to function for the last three years but I think the intention is that when the North Koreans fully open up but we will reopen in North Korea, other countries will also reopen in North Korea and that will give an opportunity to raise issues that have hitherto not been easy to raise I think that sorry, I've rather lost the thread of the question now I think that North Korea is a great opportunist and here was an opportunity they were being ignored by the one country that really concerns them and Russia has a need they need assistance from Russia or anybody in terms of aid food aid but also infrastructure aid they have in the past obviously been close to Russia they've had periods of alienation as well but I think the inclination is much more towards being friendly with Russia than not being friendly with Russia and the Russians now see North Korea as a possible source of small arms, ammunition, maybe rockets so opportunity makes friends and I think that's what you're seeing you could probably praise it much better than I care I'm not sure if I can phrase it better but I was going to add one or two things so with regards to what the US or the UK can do they essentially face a really tricky calculus because if you want to encourage North Korea not to cooperate with Russia then you have to provide them with incentives we heard earlier that North Korea has been under severe sanctions for a long time it is of course very good at evading sanctions but at the same time talking about unfreezing funds or having similar sanction relief could be one way to provide that incentive but the question is whether the US or the UK see the cooperation between Russia and North Korea as significant enough in order to want to lift any part of the sanctions regime over that we've seen Russia reach out to all sorts of countries my personal assessment is that it actually makes Russia look rather weak obviously they're trying to evade their own sanctions and they are actually also doing a fairly good job at it but if you look at the fact that the Russian government has been trying to portray superpower status on par with how the Soviet Union used to be regarded during the Cold War and it is now essentially reduced to a small number of close allies many of which are actually a lot less powerful and quite marginalised themselves then that's not necessarily portraying the strength that Russia probably wants to portray in that regard so I find that quite interesting just from a diplomatic perspective I think if we are worried about Russian capabilities when it comes to the invasion of Ukraine and being able to keep up pressure I'm much more worried about its collaboration with Iran and the new trade route that is opening up that will likely connect it directly to India which will be another way to avoid sanctions so I'm not sure if I had to make this decision I'm not sure that I would rank the relationship between Russia and North Korea as important enough to lift or change any of the sanctions that North Korea is under just for the pressure of asking North Korea to back away from Russia maybe if it could be tied with a different ask or something like that but then it becomes a different negotiation so I think to answer your question of what to do I think it's something to watch to keep a close eye on to see what exactly they are collaborating on and what course that collaboration takes but it's not the relationship that Russia has that I'm most worried about essentially Thank you. There's a question here with two questions so maybe the lady and then the gentleman behind if you could just say which organisation you're from and your name and your organisation that would be great Hello my name is Euni, I'm a PhD student at SOAS so my question is about the human rights issues so what do you think that the South Korean government can do to resolve or help improve the living conditions of North Koreans that is practical and effective by the South Korean government? I think Jim, this is your question Well, one way is to actually try and start talking to North Korea now that's not going to be easy of course One of the regular recommendations from many sides is that get more information into North Korea so that the North Korean people learn more You can do this by balloons North Koreans just shoot them down or you can do them in other ways I assume Historically barrels have been floated along the rivers that the two countries share things have been sent by balloon they can presumably be dropped by from balloons, high up balloons or something but it is very difficult to know in the absence of engagement what if anything the South Korea can do to actually influence human rights on the ground it's true of every country that might take an interest in North Korean human rights if they won't talk about it if there are no channels to talk about it if they won't act on their obligations under various UN Charters aspects of the UN Charter on human rights then what can you do? Now back in the day when they were more open when the world seemed a better place for them back in the time of Kim Dae Jong or other periods of the progressive engagement there were possibilities of talking about such issues the EU for a time had a human rights dialogue with North Korea Oddly enough what killed that was the nuclear issue the North Koreans withdrew because they were being pilloried as they said or attacked over their nuclear developments We had one or two effects on North Korean human rights issues we impressed them once when they came to London for diplomatic talks by talking not about their human rights problems but our own domestic human rights problems somebody from the Foreign Office's Human Rights Department gave a briefing on the problems we have with our police forces with our prison services but most countries have human rights problems which rather reduces the moral ground on which they can criticise others One problem with the United States is that it has I think it's seven ambassadors for North Korea but has never had an ambassador to North Korea I've always thought that given that the concerns in North Korea about the United States that if the United States actually opened a liaison office as was planned back in 1994 under the agreed framework in Pyongyang that would have actually begun a process of dialogue in less confrontational or less dramatic situations and now you tend to have had dialogue you'd have a regular standard means of communication I don't know whether it would work it was never tried instead we ended up in the offices that have been earmarked for the American delegation but I don't see how South Korea's approach is going to alter the human rights situation one little bit you do have to engage with them to raise these sort of issues and if you don't engage then you don't get anywhere it's sad but I think it's true Marion do you want to add to that in response to that question? No I unfortunately don't have anything useful to say Just on the issue of human rights we should perhaps distinguish between economic human rights and political human rights on the economic front economic engagement will improve the living standards of the North Korean people and if we look at the relationship between human rights and socio-economic development generally the countries which as they become more developed then human rights rules of law checks against arbitrary behaviour that also tends to advance if you look at the history of China for example that with the reform and opening with economic engagement also comes social change and increased expectations higher standards and regarding North Korea in 2019 the North Koreans proposed to the South Korea the reopening of the the diamond mountain tourism project and tourism was one of the areas that was actually not sanctioned not under international sanctions so that was actually a lost opportunity the inability of South Korea to reciprocate on this North Korean proposal meant that the North Koreans actually they lost confidence in what South Korea could do they felt that South Korea was unable to do anything independently of the United States rightly or not but that was their perception anyway so I think there was a question behind you Yes, thank you My name is Nikolai, I'm a doctoral student here at Suwass doing Korean studies so my question overlaps a bit with the first question so maybe just a quick comment that you can skip in the interest of time but anyways, I was curious about the relations between sanctions and the international connections that it makes North Korea create or enforce and with the sanctions now there is a need to evade these sanctions from the North Korean perspective and that makes it very obvious and easy to cooperate with Russia and now that Russia is in an aggressive war against Ukraine it's not a big loss for North Korea to be sort of labelled as an even worse villain from a Western perspective so I'm curious about these sanctions would that give North Korea a reason to try to improve their image so that they might be able to work with Western countries or is there no real belief that even with easing these sanctions would they still be working with countries like Russia and Iran and would they still continue as a sort of villain in the eyes of Western perspective So with easing of sanctions on North Korea's behaviour Jim, Marion? For a brief period again at the time of Kim Dae Jong there were sanctions lifting but the United States lifted a series of sanctions and so North Korea could for example engage in a limited fashion in the international monetary system that the US controlled so it was possible at that point to draw money on a credit card or a debit card from a North Korean bank this I think was part of a process that if it had continued might have brought North Korea much more out of its shell it didn't continue because again it was one of those things that died with the administration and it's more hostile approach to North Korea and eventually all the concessions that had been made at that period roughly between 1994 and 2001 were ended by the United States sanctions have been going on for so long and the North Koreans have become real experts at evading them but they don't invade them for what you might think or I might think should be the priorities they don't invade them to get food for the last majority of people they've used them to increase their military capabilities and no doubt to provide perks for the elite I was last in North Korea in 2018 just and I probably will never go again but at that point the aid agencies that were still operating there UNDP and World Food Program and so on were saying that the sanctions that were in place and had been intensified because of the nuclear program were having a clear effect on their ability to operate amongst the poorer people of the country that material like you could for example import vinyl for tents for agricultural tents but you couldn't import the metal poles to support the vinyl and there were a whole range of things like this apparently so the fact is that while saying we want to improve human rights in North Korea all of us who engage in sanctions against North Korea are actually contributing to the deterioration of human rights in North Korea I don't know how you get around that Any other questions? I think there's one here and then there's one at the back Okay Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the denuclearisation and human rights issue in North Korea I'm a study abroad student at SOAS from County University South Korea, I'm Christine I'm very well aware, my question will be very highly controversial but I'm very critical about the non-proliferation treaty of nuclear weapons and why in every North Korea denuclearisation discussion do we not discuss whether the NPD recognises nuclear weapon states isn't there such a hypocritical issue to say some states get to own such disastrous weapons while some do not if we consider every state as sovereign? I think that's the claim the North Koreans make isn't it? I think that's the claim that the North Koreans make that the NPD and regimes like that hold back the weaker powers of the South, but Mary, would you like to take this? Sure, well I mean as you're probably well aware in the NPD disarmament is enshrined within it so the five recognised nuclear weapon states in the NPD aren't meant to hold on to their nuclear weapons indefinitely they are meant to show credible progress towards disarmament the NPD regime is actually under a huge amount of pressure because they have not really been doing that and in fact pretty much all of them are engaging in some sort of modernisation or nuclear build up at the moment so I think so nuclear weapons while states currently use them as they say to protect their own security I don't think that in the long term they contribute to anyone's security so disarmament ought to be the end goal but getting there is incredibly difficult if there are any states at all that have nuclear weapons which I think is basically why we ended up in the blockage that we're in at the moment so I don't think that it's wrong to work towards North Korean denuclearisation because I also don't think that it's wrong for other states to work towards their disarmament but we've been trying for the last 90 minutes or so to discuss whether it's possible to link something as complex as human rights issues and denuclearisation and I think the more issues you link together in that way the harder it becomes to make progress on all of them so I'm not a person who would advocate for abolishing the NPD or easing the pressure on any of the other nuclear possessors globally when it comes to disarmament but at the same time I don't necessarily see what is gained from connecting the North Korean nuclear question to other disarmament questions if North Korea is particularly worried about the US then maybe there could be a dialogue about what kind of US systems they're worried about similarly to what the Soviet Union and the United States did during the Cold War repeatedly but at the same time that brings us back to the point we were discussing a few minutes ago about needing to acknowledge North Korean nuclear weapons in the first place so we have these various diplomatic loops that end up blocking each other and blocking progress which makes it very difficult to figure out how to find an angle in order to make progress on any of these issues and I think in a way you have to be a little agile when it comes to diplomacy and if you see that there is an opening for talks on any of those issues you kind of have to move quite quickly to put them together but it's going to continue to be very difficult to make progress on any of these issues I suppose Thanks, Jim If you ask the North Koreans, why have you got nuclear weapons? The instant response is, well why have you got nuclear weapons? Fortunately I never had to answer the question but I know the answer it's because it makes us feel powerful at the time we first adopted them but I think, and with you I'm afraid I think the NPT is a classic example of an unequal treaty Either everybody should have the damn things or nobody should have them I would prefer nobody had them but I don't think we're ever going to get to that stage and to pretend that some people have the right to have nuclear weapons because they have certain responsibilities given what's happened in the world seems to me wrong I'm a long time out of the foreign office so I'm not regretting foreign office views The last question at the back please, hello Hello there, my name is Heli I'm an independent researcher of affiliations with SOAS and LSE I agree with the panel in the way they described the issue but I also agree with the student who spoke just now and I think that at an academic level quite aside from the media discourse around the issue we need to be developing protocols which deal with nuclear rationality across the board it's not sufficient just to be focusing on Iran and North Korea as it is within the media we need to be focusing on the nuclear rationality across the board in the UK we have a first strike rationality just like the US and just like all the states and unfortunately when we focus on North Korea and Iran and all the rest of it the public gets a very distorted vision of what's actually at stake very few people know in the UK that we have the highest stockpiles of civil use plutonium in the whole world and we discuss within our mediated academic discourse so my position would be to suggest that we need to be developing protocols for academic understanding within this whole arena if we're to remove the world of nuclear rationality we need to be removing the whole world in our academic understanding Marian, would you like to comment on that comment? So in my work we do look at all nuclear possessor states and essentially cover all nuclear issues so I'm pleased to say that if you want to read more about various nuclear issues in our publications we cover them all Okay, thank you I think we've had a very interesting discussion and thanks very much to our two presenters and thank you for your questions Please show your appreciation for the panellists So now we've got tea and coffee outside so we restart at 4.05 Well hello everyone I'm Dr Nicola Leveringhouse from War Studies Department at King's and I'm going to be moderating what I think is your last session and I'm delighted to moderate today's session on US, South Korea, Japan Minilateralism and the North Korea nuclear issue and we've got two great speakers that complement each other very well I think they bring both expertise but also a rich experience with them on my left, Professor Chris Hughes from the University of Warwick a world-renowned Japan international politics expert and having worked on these issues for decades having lived in Japan and at the University of Warwick he was also the head of department there in politics and international studies so it's a pleasure Chris to have you here Chris will be going first in his comments and then on my right I have Hidden Foster and Carter who I think complements as I say Chris very well he's a senior research fellow at the University of Leeds and he is a world-renowed career expert having spent decades working, studying and engaging with Korea living there engaging with both the North and the South so I think we're going to have a really rich panel and I think we should get started so Chris over to you Thanks very much Nicola for the kind introduction thanks to Soas and Tatyann Gong for inviting me to speak at the Korean Peninsula Peace Forum so as Nicola said the topic that I was asked to talk about and I think Aiden will also probably talk about this as well is Republic of Korea, US, Japan Minilateralism or Trilateralism and the North Korea nuclear issue I'm going to talk about a little bit about what the prospects for Trilateralism are particularly from the Japanese perspective in responding to the North Korean nuclear issue but also a little bit about what some of the risks are and some of the problems that may be ahead on trying to pursue and reboot this this minilateral, trilateral approach to dealing with North Korea so as the ambassador said at the start of his remarks earlier on Ambassador Yoon, there has been a really quite an amazing revival actually of ROK, Japan US Trilateralism, Minilateralism with the Camp David Summit in August 2023 and a variety of documents that came out of that which have been entitled The Spirit of Camp David, a joint statement and other related documents and they should help potentially the three countries to respond to North Korea but also to a range of wider Indo-Pacific issues as well they're quite notable for not just focusing on the Korean Peninsula but wider sets of issues in the region including even China and the kinds of really positive things in those documents you would argue so an agreement to consult on issues of common threat and joint concern that's quite remarkable actually that's the kind of thing that allies would normally have written into their security treaties so quite a big ambition the sharing of real-time intelligence on North Korean missile launches early August of 2023 Trilateral military exercises and in fact if you read the newspapers you'll see that Japan, South Korea and US just finished an aerial exercise around their air defence identification zones involving USB 52 bombers in Japanese and South Korean fighter planes so the promise to have annual trilateral meetings of finance, foreign defence, national security advisers so a plethora of activity and as I said also going wider into questions around supply chain security Indo-Pacific economic framework and so on so these are actually when you look at it if you've been following particularly Japan, South Korea relations and really the difficulties in those relations and how they've related to the United States it's actually pretty impressive achievements because over the last few years you actually saw Japan and South Korea really at loggerheads on a range of issues threatening to sanction each other economically suspension of intelligence and security agreements and the arguments over history issues and so on very impressive turnaround potentially and reboot of trilateralism in amongst these three countries and again you know people have argued for this for a long time it's long been the wish of the United States that it's two key treaty partners security treaty partners in northeast Asia should cooperate more closely with each other and again the arguments have been very powerful to say to liberal democracies, they should have shared political interests they should work more closely together Ambassador Yoon in his introductory remarks again talked about how now South Korea is talking the same language as Japan has been talking for several years around universal values and how that should help to orient the diplomatic behaviour of these two countries and of course they're also successful in the country market economies as well so there should be huge gains potentially from better relationships between Japan and South Korea bilaterally but also embedded within this trilateral context of cooperation with the United States so a couple of areas where I think we're going to see some interesting things potentially from the Japanese perspective within this trilateral, mini-lateral framework there is the potential now to see better alignment between Japan's Korean Peninsula and particularly its North Korea diplomacy and security policy with that of South Korea and the United States I can go into it in more detail if you like but over the last decade or so I think Japan has really drifted apart from South Korea in terms of its alignment broadly it's aligned with South Korea and its closer coordination in how to respond to North Korea I mean Japan has been involved in the sanctions effort and so on and so forth but really Japan has been somewhat isolated in its Korean Peninsula summit tree has been left out of that process and has been somewhat hamstrung by its own domestic problems so potentially there's more leeway now for Japan to re-engage and to work more closely with South Korea and again the spirit of Camp David agreements talk about how the United States and Japan will support South Korea's audacious initiative towards North Korea I think very interestingly and this is something I'm very, very interested in is now we may actually see more alignment of possibly even integration of Japanese military deterrents policy towards North Korea with that of not just United States but also now potentially South Korea I'm sure you're aware the United States has operated the so-called hub and spokes alliance system in North East Asia so it's had strong separate alliances with the ROK and with Japan that of course both of those separate alliances underpin and support the US presence in and around the Korean Peninsula but they are separate alliances and in many ways the coordination between them has been very, very loose in the past and Japan's principal role has really been to what you might kind of rear area support for the United States so to defend and to watch the United States back to provide logistic support so that the United States can project power on to the Korean Peninsula from around the Japanese archipelago but Japan's role has been very indirect and somewhat distant in terms of actual engagement on the Korean Peninsula in terms of its own military capabilities and power but if you have been watching the developments in Japan over the last year or so you'll know that at the end of 2022 Japan released a revised national security strategy a new national defence strategy and a new defence build up plan where Japan made it very clear that it would now exercise its right for what it calls its now calling counter strike so its ability if it is targeted by missiles from North Korea or from China that it will no longer just try and stop those through missile defences but it will shoot back with its own very extensive build up of cruise missiles so really for the first time what Japan is saying is that it will now not just support the United States but it will become directly involved potentially in military conflict on the Korean Peninsula if Japan's own security is threatened so this poses all kinds of really interesting questions for Japan in terms of what it will do in the Korean Peninsula contingency it's very clear now that Japan with counter strike is going to have to coordinate its military strategy its capabilities with those of not just the United States but now with South Korea in order to avoid inadvertently escalating tensions with North Korea or duplicating the effort of the US ROK alliance in dealing with North Korea so really the logic of this the ultimate logic of this is that Japan is going to have to in line with US strategy in the region talking about integrated deterrence it is going to have to forge much closer links between its military and between that of the ROK military and you're going to have to conjoin those two bilateral alliances potentially into one trilateral alliance but it's essentially a massive shift in Japanese security strategy and relationship with South Korea towards the Korean Peninsula what the impact of that will be and how that's going to impact on North Korea's response is something we're going to have to watch the Japanese would argue it's going to enhance deterrence and therefore it will actually mean that North Korea will not provoke its neighbours but of course there is potential for a very serious security dilemma an escalation in a future conflict I won't talk too much about some of the other we can maybe come back to that if you want to because of time I won't talk too much about some of the other benefits of this trilateral cooperation more broadly across security in the region I just want to focus a little bit on some of the risks or some of the vulnerabilities of this trilateral cooperation so I've been working on Japan-North Korea relations for nearly 25-30 years I'm sure Aiden may say something similar because Aiden's also a veteran of looking at these issues we've been here before in terms of trilateral cooperation between Japan, the ROK and the United States particularly many of us may cast our memory back to Jim was talking about earlier on but the KDO initiative and so on and that was also accompanied by what was called the trilateral coordination oversight group TCOG which wasn't an out and out security framework but it was a diplomatic coordination framework which ran for several years but then fell by the wayside and certainly there's a history of attempts to restart and improve Japan-ROK relations often encouraged by the United States in the hope that this will then feed into better trilateral coordination but also a history of really missteps and failures and missed opportunities and the pattern often tends to be that you see leaders from the three countries committing to trying to really improve relations to work more closely together but then it's often foiled by divergent strategic interests and a lack of domestic support or continuity in the leadership in these trilateral efforts so just quickly, maybe they're obvious but a few risks and vulnerabilities that we need to think about in terms of trilateralism or mini-lateralism really taking hold in trying to generate a more effective framework to deal with North Korea I still think we've got a fundamental problem there's a difference in the strategic interests or calculations of South Korea and Japan towards North Korea obviously for South Korea, North Korea is the prime strategic interest, for Japan it's still the secondary one China is the primary interest that Japan is worried about, North Korea is a big problem but it's more of a problem, a secondary security problem it's more of a problem for Japan's relationship with its alliance relationship with the United States so I still think we see some divergence there and we may see some of that in the future Questions around leadership, long-term leadership again, President Biden is very vested in this trilateral framework but he's going to become very quickly immersed in a presidential campaign next year so how much time we will have to spend on this will be interesting, President Yoon again he's very very vested in this but again I'm not an expert on domestic South Korean politics but it doesn't seem to have done his domestic popularity a whole lot of good so he may struggle to keep the momentum up and then Japan Prime Minister Kishita he again he was hoping for some sort of bounce some sort of foreign policy success to improving relations with South Korea through the trilateral framework but that hasn't really happened and he's also in quite deep domestic problems so there may not be the committed leadership that we need over the longer term history is still there underneath the surface there has been some really good attempts to improve relations over history between Japan and South Korea, the latest one over the issue of compensation for conscripted labour I think the problem with that is that the view is I think from South Korea at least is that South Korea has really made all the running and all the concessions here and Japan has really just had to do very very little and again there's not much appetite in Japan for making concessions on history to South Korea so those issues may be sort of somewhat on the back burner for the time being but they always have the capacity to come back and derail Japan South Korea relations and the bigger trilateralism as we've seen in the past I think the other question a lot of people are asking themselves is if you can have trilateralism you can have lots of summits, you can have lots of meetings you can have lots of statements but how do you actually turn that into a sustained framework do you need much deeper kinds of frameworks and connections and is that really enough so we'll have to see how much staying power the trilateralism has and then I think going back to my point about security and military connections, as I said the logic is that if you really want South Korea and Japan are going to have to work much more closely together you may have to have some kind of trilateral security relationship but is Japan is South Korea really ready or the domestic constituencies of both societies really ready for actually this kind of hard military cooperation to deal with North Korea it's going to set up all kinds of really interesting dilemmas for both countries if they really want to pursue as I say the logic of the Cam David statements and the United States will be hoping that its allies don't let it down again but we shall see so I think huge opportunities for the three countries to work together it has to be the right thing to do but I think there are also real deep vulnerabilities many of them haven't changed in that relationship which could yet again mean that history repeats itself and we see a derailment of a promising start in trilateralism and mini-lateralism so those are my remarks, thank you very much hello everyone, good afternoon you all deserve a medal, they built this building with no windows so you couldn't see there is lovely autumn sunshine out there and we are in here it's very dedicated of you, well done some of us have been doing this for a long time this doesn't give, at least I speak for myself this gives us no authority whatsoever if you've been working on North Korea for 55 years as I have all this means is you've had more chance to be more wrong in more different ways I speak with all the authority of someone who supported North Korea for more than 10 years, no excuse for that I was young and who for longer than that was a very keen collapseist a complete U-turn spirit of 1989, communism seemed to be either morthing or collapsing everywhere, how could North Korea possibly survive doubly wrong, I may be wrong this time as well here's what I'm going to do, possibly not exactly what I was asked to do but I've always been a bit spirit of 1968 and all that I nearly addressed you as comrades, how would that go down nowadays anyway, a bit about the Japan question but really Chris has said it all I pretty much agree with him, a bit about a couple of other trilateralisms involving Korea which I think are quite interesting and timely and also if I may just pop out some questions about the approach of the current South Korean Government we do have a short termism problem don't we with both Korea and Japan, Chris has alluded to it we have it for different reasons, South Korea it's structural the framers of the 6th Republic Constitution and their wisdom determine that there should be no more dictators ever again as you know gave the president of the ROK a single 5 year term it's too short, it's too short, no chance of a second term if this excellent annual seminar is still going in 4 years time as I trust it will be it'll be another president, I bet it'll be a different party it may be a different set of policies, a different ambassador telling us different things, it's a problem a real issue for South Korea I think about bipartisanship in foreign policy, obviously we all have disagreements about you know, they may not be one of it and bipartisanship towards North Korea the kind of zigzags that we've seen between the Moon Administration policy which certainly had problems and the policy of President Yoon it's difficult, Japan it's different of course because the party can get rid of the Prime Minister and they did it not long ago, maybe they'll do it again so that's a problem built in, not to repeat on the Japan question except to a sadness, I think it's a minor tragedy that we're nearly 80 years after 1945 and we are where we are with Japan and South Korea the comparison has often been made the contrast between France and Germany 1945 is year zero in each case in 1945 France and Germany had fought three wars in the last 75 years political elites in both countries as they rebuilt that it would be different, obviously a different context the emerging EU and so on and so on, they did it when I first went to South Korea in 1982 the anti-Japanese animus was enormous I thought well it's not surprising it's not long ago I didn't think we'd still be here 40 years after that it's been like a game of snakes and ladders hasn't it and again Chris has alluded to that even on the trilateralism it's been like that but also bilaterally between Japan and South Korea you have the Kim Dae Jong's and others who take it forward after all Kim Dae Jong took refuge in Japan when he was a political exile and then it goes back again it's just a shame and so there is a real question in general and in particular right now as to whether the laudable statements and the more than statements it is the actual beginnings of trilateral military cooperation which I think is clearly needed in the current climate whether that is actually sustainable and there is a problem it's been alluded to again I applaud, I have many other disagreements with President Yoon but his initiative on Japan I therefore think it's entirely right and timely and I wish him luck but he needs to take his people with him he doesn't seem to care much about that he's a president who only became president by a way for thin majority and if the far left justice party would not be so selfish and put a candidate up he wouldn't even be president because E.J. Myeong it would be president whether that would be better or worse is not to me to say so really there's not really a mandate and I think because as Chris again mentioned sadly Japan hasn't conceded much couldn't Japanese companies have put some money into that fund and not leave it just to South Korean companies anyway for all these reasons I hope it works this time I hope it's not just another game of snakes and ladders and that we sort of go up for a bit and we go down for a bit anyway there are two other interesting trilateralisms going on in North East Asia although not one of them is we sometimes forget I don't think it gets the publicity it deserves the TCS, the Trilateral Cooperation have I got that right? I may have got the initials wrong anyway the institution building in North East Asia famously has not got very far but it's got secretariat of course it is there's a little office in Seoul I've never been to it I don't think it's a very big office in which civil servants and diplomats from the three countries Japan, China and South Korea presumably speak English to each other I'm not quite sure what the working language is go on their website and for a moment you can think that the world is not in the terrible state that it is because it's all full of all the lovely things they could do together at a more important, that's not unimportant but at a more important elite level of course there have been summits at various times then because of various rows between the three they haven't been held for a while very interesting question is whether as South Korea's duty to host the next one will it actually come off? might Xi Jinping even come to Seoul he wouldn't come for Moon Jae-in he was desperate to have him come will he come for Moon maybe he'll send the number two as usual but I do think I'm glad that kind of trilateralism exists as well for all sorts of reasons one because Japan, China and Korea have do I have to say it I don't have to spell it out do I especially not at so us huge historical geographical cultural histories and now they are three of the mightiest economies in the world and they are very heavily mutually involved with each other that's becoming a bit awkward for some purposes but I'm in a time when we often seem to be in a rather polarising world and a rather polarising region I am glad of this forum and I hope that it will it will survive the tendencies to to polarisation I'm going to not quite do the other triangle yet because it actually is a happy ending and we don't have a lot of happy endings nowadays do we so I'm going to sort of break up my own order and very quickly throw out some questions for the current South Korean government and its approach in no particular order I'm slightly worrying things we hear talk in soul that from the new defence minister for example that maybe they should ditch the 2018 inter-Korean military accord it hampers intelligence gathering I don't want South Korea to be the a career that breaks agreements please should we leave that to North Korea secondly is it's I don't know whether President Yoon really meant it at the time of the drone remember the drone incursion which was very embarrassing it wasn't very threatening but it was very embarrassing threatening next time three fold retaliation ten fold retaliation please tell me that was just rhetoric because I don't think I'm not a military expert but I don't think that escalation would be a good idea thirdly the whole unification question unification under liberal democracy I would want it in the abstract you're telling North Korea that it shouldn't exist and it can't exist there's no two ways about it if you're serious about that then as far as I can see the audacious offer is baloney I'm sorry but you know you can't the audacious offer is also of course rehashed Park Gunhaith, the resident declaration we know that the North Koreans won't accept it but that's a different point the only unification you really foresee is under liberal democracy then the audacious and the North Koreans know perfectly well that you're not serious about the other or if you appoint as a unification minister a figure who I think would not have been considered under any past regime including conservative ones as a serious candidate for unification minister somebody who has called openly for the overthrow of the GPRK North Korea does take some notice of these things so what signal does that send? Going a little bit deeper what signal does it send also domestically when you put on trial senior figures of the previous ROK administration for operational decisions that they took in two very tough difficult situations North Korea and the fishermen who were sent back we could argue forever about these things but putting people on trial for that prosecuting them, persecuting them perhaps I'm not sure that that's such a great thing so anyway those questions and now I'm coming back to my happy ending and the other triangle that's the one we've been hearing so much about recently because of the Kim and Putin show shall we call it that because I think it was a show basically so for the full scary version there's a new paper from the Rand Corporation a trilateral imperialist alliance you've got Russia which indeed certainly is viciously invading Ukraine, you've got China which has its eyes on Taiwan and you've got Kim Jong-un who can't wait to get his hands on all those goodies in South Korea I don't see this for a start I'm a sociologist and a famous sociologist called Zimol told us that a dyad and a triad are different a two and a three are different can we assume that these three are really I mean there is a very opportunistic alliance of convenience they have certain strategic things in common right now but if you look at the different components of it the Russia-North Korea relationship has been terrible for a long time and it's been insubstantial for a long time it'd be very interesting to see what actually does come of this now I've never weapons North Korea is sending I'm not a weapons expert but I don't know anybody who thinks they will be a game changer in Ukraine I don't for one moment think that the quid pro quo from Putin is going to be anything that helps the WMD programme so I mean he's not that you may think he's evil but he's not that crazy it is not completely meaningless or insignificant that until 2017 China and Russia supported all those resolutions against the various North Korea and WMD and the UN they don't want a burgeoning nuclear North Korea well they've actually got one and if I can just interpolate a thought on this I mean when we were talking about the deterrence of why North Korea has nuclear weapons on America America America I think that one reason why Putin has got nuclear weapons is also to deter China and Russia because look at his foreign policy I don't think this has been noticed enough or else I'm completely mad I told you I've been wrong twice before he what would his father and grandfather think what has happened to Juche what has happened to North Korea being independent in the world balancing between China and Russia or balancing between China and South Korea with Kim Jong-un he's cuddling up to both of them and he needs the money he needs the protection and he can do that because he's got nuclear weapons what are the implications for South Korea South Koreans here you can sleep very easy in your beds and I'll tell you why even though North Korea has got all sorts of weapons which we wish it didn't have which are rapidly dancing under Kim Jong-un because institutional memory in tictatorships like China and Russia is quite good they haven't forgotten 1950 they haven't forgotten when Kim Jong-un's grandfather embroiled both of them in a war which was terrible for both of them Mao had just won, did he want to send more troops to Korea Russia wasn't officially there but we know all the support they have other fish to fry it's a tactical alliance of convenience but as far as the peninsula is concerned I would like to hear from the audience if there is someone who thinks that Kim Jong-un will feel emboldened by this superpower support to try anything in South Korea and Russia have other strategic interests they also have quite strong commercial relationships with South Korea which are not negligible at all so as far as that imperialist alliance aggressive alliance I think that South Koreans should actually be glad that Kim Jong-un is cuddling up to Russia and China and I think that's probably quite enough provocation for one afternoon I'll stop there, thank you My position is moderated to ask a question and then I'll open it out to the floor I understand we have until 15 past so that's just slightly over 30 minutes so I think you both did a really good job of highlighting I think the domestic politics angle the historical rivalry the role of US leadership and how all those things factor in you've made it clear that you've been here before to use Chris's term and I get a sense that expectations are quite low from both of you but I guess I want to push on what's different now one of the things that, unless I misheard you one of the things that wasn't mentioned was AUKUS and of course the fact that the material side of things is different, capabilities wise not just the peninsula but northeast Asia in general as a region is armed up to the teeth in ways it has never been before China North Korea, South Korea, even Japan's defence changes to its defence Australia of course has made massive changes to its defence policy in recent years so I think that's definitely that something is new and AUKUS if it is sustainable and Australia has made a massive gamble to make it a success how would that change northeast Asia particularly because there's been a lot of rumbling about South Korea maybe joining AUKUS at least Pillar 2 which is more about emerging technologies and so forth so I guess that's my question I get a sense based on your years of experience and expertise that your expectations are perhaps low but what's new here for you both Thanks Nicola, great question what's new from the Japanese perspective and I guess what would make this stick what would make Japan hang in there regardless of some of the bumpiness in bilateral relations with South Korea because it's in its bigger strategic interests so I think what's new largely the kinds of things you've alighted upon from the Japanese perspective and again I'd encourage everyone if you've not had a chance read the National Security Strategy revised one in 2022 and compare it with the 2013 Japanese National Security Strategy the Japanese perspective and what is made very clear in that document and in all Japanese rhetoric around it and you know policy development since then is that the Japanese they're arguing this and I think they sincerely believe this is that the international system is now in deep deep crisis the status quo may not hold the Japanese have been worried about China for a long time they've convinced it's no longer it's not a status quo power and they believe it's actually beginning to seriously move on trying to upset the status quo the war in Ukraine and again why the Japanese suddenly have discovered that Russia's a revisionist power is ridiculous Abe spent years trying to negotiate with Putin believing he could engage Russia and get some concessions on Northern Territories issue and a peace treaty and all these kinds of things but now they've said oh yes Russia is also deeply revisionist power and that again has upset the entire international order that's the kind of language they're using it's the deepest crisis in international order that Japan has faced since World War II so that's the kind of language they're using and then North Korea again we talk about Japan and North Korea North Korea has always been a secondary issue an irritant but it's just one more thing and again Putin teaming up with North Korea and so on it's just another example that the international order is at fundamental threat and then of course the thing that really impressive is the retreat of US power so they've known for 20-30 years even as US power has waxed and waned the trajectory has been a sort of a relative decline in US hegemonic power but now I think they believe that US is really again on the brink perhaps of losing its hegemonic status in East Asia as it's pushed out by China and so on and so forth so the Japanese believe that they have to intervene they have to shore up US hegemony and they have to work much closer with US strategy and that means working much more closely with US allies like Australia, like South Korea UK partners like India and so on so I think that is a massively important driver for Japanese perceptions now is that in the past I think they thought well maybe we can sort of you know the US will come in and save our bacon in the end but now I think they believe that if Japan does not front up is not seen as a reliable ally is not capable of taking more responsibility for their own defence is not capable of working as an integrated alliance partner with the United States and with other US allies and partners Japan will be abandoned and it will be left alone so you know we really have to make the best of this relationship with the ROK and I think that has been a kind of a sea change in Japanese thinking so I think that has convinced many Conservatives in Japan but I think they've always wanted a better relationship with South Korea but actually now we really have to come good. You know again whether that's going to be enough I don't know but I think it is quite different in the past where perhaps Japan could sort of have a dalliance with this relationship the ROK but if it didn't work it's fine the US will come and save us but now really the chips are down and this is where Japan really has to come good. I'm glad you asked that question because there's always the risk of you doing stuff for a long time you emphasise continuity more than change it's a very different world in lots of ways so if I can put it like that, picking up Chris' metaphor of course very much arises for South Korea as well as I suppose for all US allies given not just sort of retreat of US power but again conjunctural factors as I would have said in my Marxist days if you can call Trump a conjunctural factor what if that man comes back again with his utter contempt an open contempt for all US allies so yes the question of South Korea going nuclear never forget that parturing he had a programme to do that secretly until the Americans found out and stopped him that was the first career to try to go nuclear there is obviously enormous concern I agree with Chris that this is a factor in that sense and only that sense I'm glad of it driving sort of knocking heads together if you like people in Seoul and Tokyo realising they should talk to each other other changes I didn't mean to make light of Kim Jong-un's arms built up I worry that I might have seemed to it's a huge difference for a long remember the time there was a long period when even when North Korea had begun down the nuclear road and had begun its nuclear tests we're still waiting for that seventh one we'll have it sooner or later we thought oh well they can't deliver it because the missiles failed quite often so it's a big change of capacity to deliver under Kim Jong-un and that is a big difference and yeah everywhere as in Nicola put it very well everyone is armed to the teeth now in ways that just weren't the case chucking in somewhere though maybe it's more of a global thing that South Korea's emergence as a major arms exporter and you've probably seen one of the suggestions sort of the various motives of the Kim-Putin show was what Putin thought about the huge defence contracts that South Korea signed with Poland I mean in some ways for all his talk about universal human rights has continued to navigate with some care around the Russia and the China questions different questions of course yes he has been to Kiev and so on he's still not supplying arms I think I'm right in saying South Korea's still not supplying arms directly to Ukraine and you gave different sort of issue not a war issue but again the huge US pressures on the chip issue and others I mean South Korea has stood up to those quite well but anyway so that's different from the arms exporter I mean what a time to be an arms salesman to Saudi Arabia with the Middle East and the state it is but I don't mean to say to be hypocritical where everybody does it you know South Korea is just joining an industry and one for which is never probably going to abate so yes there are a lot of different and the uncertainty I worry more about I worry a lot about Trump coming back someone American analyst please tell me that I have nothing to worry about and the impact on the region OK thank you very much I mean I just have a quick response but I do want to open it out to the floor I'm not sure how the question and answers were conducted in the previous sessions just you know put your hand up when you have a question I think it's material capabilities aside on the military fund I'd be quite interested to hear more about the economic side of this as well the economic coercive capabilities the sad incident in South Korea and how that affected so very badly the relationship with China and how much that had an impact in sort of this thinking of we need to diversify and deepen our relationship and related to that I think is that in general it's become harder to deter and harder to do diplomacy in the region given these changes OK I'm going to open the floor so I'm scanning the room for arms up yes please Hello I am a first year student at SOAS my name is Noah so I personally am very concerned about the increasing tendency or even reliance towards military power in the trilateral relationship so South Korea, Japan and the States is this the consequence of this stagnant process or rising urgency or something else and is there any other possible approaches hopefully something that looks more like a soft power any other we can group them together any other questions yes please at the back Hello my name is Adiosge I study international relations at UCL I'm first year as well I was wondering how Taiwan factored into all of this I've heard some analysis about how Korea contingency could be a sort of diversion when China does its own contingency in Taiwan so I was wondering how much of a possibility that sort of scenario was thank you I'm going to take one more question it's in the middle there Hi my name is Sam I study at UCL I'm wondering what the whether the repeal of article 9 of the Japanese constitution is a realistic possibility because I've heard rumblings about it in some American media outlets and how South Korea would respond to such a development All good questions some of them I think are in a very high grade which is my fault Nicholas commented about economic coercion and that that was really important I think that just in case anybody doesn't know but I'm sure you'll do that when the Park and Hay Administration installed this particular US missile defence system China was very cross about it because China says I believe this is technically true but I'm not an expert that it can also enable you can sort of see what China is up to as well and they reacted in a way which was really rather unsuttle although they never admitted it much less they were major boycotts selective boycotts of the China South Korea economic relationship tourism in particular and so on this performed a wonderful service in my view of disabusing the South Korean public of some of their illusions about China I think there had been some of the enthusiasm of the restoration of diplomatic relations 30 years ago and China was seen quite positively China is being positive, see it positively but it's like the whole wolf warrior diplomacy which puzzles me so much because subtle it ain't is it it's just China saying it's not even trying soft power it's just saying we are big you will obey and so you now get public opinion surveys in South Korea which suggests that China is disliked and distrusted even more than Japan so I think that was probably a plus on the second question I'm not aware that the Japan-US South Korea cooperation is purely military certainly as far as the bilateral Japan South Korea end is I am hoping that an improved relationship would also involve more people studying each others languages more exchanges all of that I don't think these are exclusive the trouble is in each case it needs a sustained effort by governments and by leaders who may not be in power for very long on the Taiwan question I don't feel I have the proper expertise but there's always been sort of complications about how we talk about the forced dispositions and how everybody knows things really are I know it's been a concern in South Korea at a time that 28,500 US troops are not just there to guard against a potential North Korean invasion I think Donald Rumsfeld to remember him known unknowns said it openly let the cat out of the bag if there were a contingency on the Taiwan strait some of those would go somewhere else in terms of the politics of it it's much more complicated you may think me complacent about this but I'll reiterate what I ended with I don't think anyone is going to try anything on the Korean Peninsula I wish I could be so confident that nothing is going to happen in Taiwan either yeah thanks for the questions so as Aiden said I don't think the trilateral is all about military power again if you read the statements there's all the things that Aiden talked about this kind of soft power societal to societal exchanges so it is trying to sort of try and build a little bit more from bottom up a kind of more robust set of relationships between Japan and South Korea and the United States and there is more there is a certain amount in there around economics and so on I think the problem is that again I'm not an expert on policy but I think a lot of people would say that the US is a little bit short on what it can offer economically at the moment so because it's reluctance to trade deals it only has the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework which is again around supply chains and digital transactions it's all very very important but it doesn't have many material incentives to offer partners at the moment in terms of trade so perhaps it's somewhat left the field to others to be more influential in that it's a soft power but certainly a sort of non-military side of things Taiwan again it's very interesting that I think the if I recall the Cam David statements do actually refer to Taiwan again it's a familiar trope around all sides I want to see peace and stability and status across straits and so on but I think that might have been the first time that traditionally I think South Korea has been quite reluctant to actually talk about because of its concerns about China to explicitly talk about Taiwan but it's in there so again I think it is a sort of portent of potentially greater certainly US expectations for greater cooperation diplomatically and perhaps in sort of military terms around Taiwan how much ROK is willing to do that I don't know but as Aidan said US forces in in the ROK have designed primarily for the deterrents of North Korea but things like the US Marines and so on and Air Force and so on of course they would also be potentially involved in a Taiwan straits contingency. Question on Article 9 Will Article 9 be revised? I think probably unlikely Prime Minister Abe in the last couple of years of his administration was pushing very hard to revise Article 9 because for him symbolically it was very important as a statement of Japan escaping freeing itself from the constraints of the post-war settlement of which Article 9 was part of this kind of foreign imposed constitution which meant Japan couldn't really be Japan so he wanted to push for that but he found it domestically really really difficult to do because of the majorities you need in both houses of the diet but also you need a public referendum as well so very very difficult but I always say it doesn't really matter actually Article 9 is really symbolic Japanese conservatives would like to get rid of it as a statement but in effect they've already got rid of most of the constraints on Japan's ability to use military power through reinterpretation of Article 9 and 2014-2015 Japan reinterpreted the constitution in all kinds of very clever ways to be able to exercise the right of collective self-defence so to now come to the assistance of the United States in certain contingencies that affect Japan's own security so in a sense that was the most important political battle that Abe fought so Article 9 yes conservatives would love to get rid of it but I think they probably think it's just too difficult to do but substantially doesn't really matter you know Japan can do just about everything it wants to do under through reinterpretation Okay any more questions Yes please Hi I'm the PhD student from City University of London I actually have a question the continuity from the Article 9 to Christopher If Japan has that kind of perspective what do you think is about Korean Government perspective? Thank you So I think the question is maybe I should have answered that at the end of the last question as well so what's what is the South Korean Government thinking about Japan's discussions around constitution revision and not just revision but reinterpretation I guess it's going to depend somewhat from administration to administration but I think the traditional stance of that you get from South Korean Government is that Japan must be cautious must remember obviously that it's history and would prefer that Japan did not revise or reinterpret Article 9 but nevertheless I think whilst South Korean policy makers do not want to see I don't think they want again this is what I was talking about earlier they have no expectations or wish for Japan to come to the military assistance of South Korea I think they do recognise that United States expectation is that Japan will come to the military assistance of the United States and unless the United States is assisted by Japan then the US ability to assist South Korea becomes hampered so I think they're probably implicitly accept that this is something that Japan needs to do in order to maintain its alliance relationship with the United States whilst of course they would like Japan for obvious reasons to be as cautious and as limited as possible in terms of what it will do with revisions under Article 9 but I think probably there's an acceptance that Japan has to do this otherwise again no US-Japan alliance and then the whole alliance system US-Japan the whole US alliance system in North East Asia starts to come apart at the seams so probably an implicit acceptance that this is something that pragmatically Japan has to do but has to be cautious It brought to mind something from long ago I believe it's true Jim perhaps can confirm that back in the day of the Korean War when probably America didn't quite know relations between Japan and Korea and there was sort of vague talk oh well Japan will help Shingmonri Isengman said that if a single Japanese soldier lands in Korea he will immediately turn his forces round from fighting North Korea to fighting Japan those days are no longer with us but I think the answer to your questions it really does depend who is in power in South Korea any given time as far as I can see Yoon So-kyol is so keen to achieve a rapprochifon with Japan that Japan can can do almost anything but as I said before I worry that he isn't taking South Korean public opinion with him at the centre I mean from here I'm not close enough to the action I think any more but at the whole all the narratives the very real suffering never to be denied of comfort women slave labourers etc which the the opposition the democrat party makes much of I don't know how people here can probably answer it how that all plays with young South Koreans particularly I get the impression maybe it's going down a bit but this is political work that needs to be done if you want to get policy continuity otherwise if Japan can just do what it wishes then and South Korea seems not to be responding responding to it then I think there's a real risk that it may not go through and that raises something I forgot to say there is a precedent as they know well in Japan for South Korean leaders who began with wanting a rapprochement and then sort of did a U-turn I'm young back born in Japan keen to rapprochement and then my god he helicopter's on to doctor you know so late into 10 so Yoon Sokyol is unpopular his party just got a real thrashing which they deserved in a by election they have as you know a national assembly elections coming up the opposition already has a huge majority which I don't think is going to get small they might get bigger what if Yoon's party pressures him as you know Mr President you're going too fast for the public on this he's so stubborn that I think actually he will hold on in this issue if no other I'm glad of that but it's he's not he's not a politician is he we know this he's a prosecutor he's not preparing the ground anyway we shall see on this I wish him well okay thank you both and we have a few more minutes left so any last questions oh we've got two okay my name is Allah Tunde I studied calculus on the mass program at Barbeck University my question is that I want to refer to one previous statement by the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve chairman Aaron Greenspan that when he said that in order for the world to be saved from economic crisis there's need for increased international trade so do you then think that if there's that increase in economic activities within those countries that will promote peace in the region thank you very much and we can type the last question hi I'm a master student at Soares my question was since you've discussed the ROK, US Japan trilateralism and we've also touched upon our course I wanted your opinion about the potential of ROK being a part of the Quad both from the merits of it both from Korea's point of view and also from the Quad's point of view especially Japan since it was something very close to Prime Minister Abe's heart thanks to questions so the first one I mean trade economic independence I think those are kind of classic liberal views of international relations and I think from the Japanese perspective they've long subscribed to that view that the hope has always been that economic independence ultimately will win out over what we call more narrow security or domestic domestic interests where it's a relationship with South Korea United States or China and in the past Japanese used to talk about separation of politics and economics so you could separate the two with China they used to talk about sort of cold politics hot economics so again the economy would run well and politics would be difficult but ultimately Chinese pragmatic economic interests would win out and I think they still largely believe that but I think increasingly in Japanese minds I think they are believing that actually the real concern is that particularly with China is that that economic independence is now turning into economic asymmetry and that China is prepared to use that as leverage over Japan and its neighbours and that actually economic independence is not going to be the solution for peace and security in the region and in fact again Japan has to turn reluctantly to military deterrence as well alongside economic engagement so I think that's where Japanese are becoming more and more harder realists the quad that's very interesting certainly when Japan first came out with the idea of the quad that's Abe in 2007 South Korea actually worked quite actively to block it so again it's sort of upset the Japanese and then Japan when it revived the quad when Abe came back in his second administration he revived the idea of the quad he didn't talk about ROK as a potential quad so it wasn't the quid or the quinn it was he deliberately left out the ROK because relations weren't great even though ROK is a democracy alongside Australia, India and the United States but I think actually the Japanese have started to come around to the idea that having the ROK in would be really beneficial again because of the change of relationships between the two countries and also particularly because the ROK has begun to shift its view on China I think those in the quad would argue the quad is not about China but of course we know it is about China and the ROK traditionally was standing aside from trying to label China as a concern and again that goes to my point about differing strategic interests between ROK and Japan when it comes to China but now that the UN administration is being much more forthright on China and again you can see that in the Camp David statements when actually talking about South China Sea explicitly for the first time I think the Japanese are thinking yes ROK would be a good partner in something like a kind of expanded quad so there is potential for much closer strategic alignment now I think we found something we might slightly disagree on I would say that South Korea is slightly more forthright about China under UN they are still very careful I mean all this universal human right stuff do we hear UN saying anything about the Uighurs I mean he is not the only one all the Tibetans Dalai Llamas still can't even transit through so not saying that it is wrong necessarily because there are huge economic interests in that I mean I say the way the whole chip thing has just been very successfully lobbied about so that actually you probably know this fact about the interconnectedness of the world economy so in a way this brings in the earlier question as well there are some bits of interdependency that just can't be undone I'm kind of glad in some way the two largest makers of memory chips both kinds in the world are South Korean and for both Samsung and SK Heinex it's funny no one in the world has heard of SK Heinex everyone's heard of Samsung all the Koreans have heard of SK Heinex anyway they are it's the number two chip all as well now and for both of them production in China is key Samsung is the largest NAND chip factory in the world in Xi'an terracotta army and NAND chips I like the juxtaposition these are brutal facts of geoeconomic life that you cannot change Yoon is on the Japan front all systems go he's very keen on the China front he will still tread carefully I would be surprised if South Korea was ever formally to join the Quad it will align itself I don't know enough about how the Quad works working groups talk of alignment even under Moon Jaehyun who was more cautious again I'll leave it at that thank you very much both of you have covered a lot of ground a lot of questions I thought as well in the panel I think you have both highlighted the positive trends the fact that they are all talking to each other more but also the many risks and the difficulties that have grown in the region you have covered a lot of issues China, Taiwan the war in Ukraine all course Quad economic independence domestic issues please join me in thanking the panellist for a fascinating end to the peace forum today thank you very much right thank you very much all the thanks to all of the panellists and the moderators and the audience it just leaves me to make some concluding remarks well first of all I'm relieved that there's no fire alarm today there have been so many there have been so many fire alarms getting nightmares what if there's a fire alarm it will put us out we can enjoy the autumn sunshine but it would have ruined the event so just some final points wrapping up from the two sessions the first session some takeaway points we saw that North Korea North Korea's concern in building up its nuclear weapons is actually with deterring the United States so this means a massive buildup of nuclear weapons but it also has a belief that by building up its nuclear capabilities that eventually it cannot be ignored and it will have to be engaged and eventually integrated into the international community and also we dealt with the question of you know whether to engage with North Korea or to call it out over its human rights abuses this remains a very very contentious issue this strategy and also I think something we could all agree with is that the reunification formulae proposed by the two careers need to be acceptable to both sides rather than talking across each other and the second session dealing with triangular relationships the camp David agreement strengthening the potential for the deepening of cooperation between the three allies the potential for the extension of the Indo-Pacific free and open Indo-Pacific into the into North East Asia but we saw that this can be that there's potential for much closer military cooperation especially between Korea and Japan but this can be endangered by political short termism whether President Yoon can bring the South Korean public along with him the short term nature of the South Korean political system and the return of Donald Trump who doesn't have much time for allies or for institutions and also we looked at the other the other triangular the other triangular relationship China Russia North Korea and that this is actually not as menacing as it superficially looks that there are actually a lot of strategic mismatches between the three parties and historically even when the relationship was useless in the 1950s actually the relationship was characterised by suspicion and friction even at the best of times in the 1950s so this relationship is actually much more fraught than the ROK Japan United States relationship as Aden said North Korean nuclear weapons is not just to counterbalance United States and South Korea but also China and Russia as well so to what extent would they want to enhance the North Korean nuclear capabilities and also there is also the China, South Korea Japan economic interdependence which is actually very very deep for example in making the memory chips South Korea makes a lot of the chips but it depends upon chemicals imported from Japan but it also needs the import of rare earth metals from China so the the geoeconomics are very very deeply embedded so the question is whether this deep economic interdependence is something that can offset the political polarization and the military tension in the region last of all I'd like to thank the Embassy of the Republic of Korea for initiating and supporting this event and to thank the SOAS conference office Hannah Angelica thank the marketing office and the student the two student ambassadors also to thank the AV department Jerry who's up there just gave me a thumbs up so we hope you enjoy the event please fill out the surveys if you can and you are welcome to take a souvenir with you so thanks very much see you next year