PEACE ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA?

It’s hard to imagine that the man who threatened a sovereign nation with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” has been credited by several world leaders as a force for good and a candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize.

But, as anyone who’s familiar with media coverage of President Donald J. Trump could tell you, sometimes we just can’t make this shit up.

The sentiment was voiced by none other than South Korean President Moon Jae-in in the wake of a historic meeting with North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un in Panmunjeom on April 27. Titled “The Panmunjeom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity, and Unification of the Korean Peninsula,” the meeting laid out a set of agreements that Koreans throughout both nations – not to mention the world at large – have been awaiting with bated breath since the Cold War cease-fire in 1953.

Though not a formal treaty, the new declaration contains encouraging stipulations, stating that “South and North Korea will reconnect the blood relations of the people” and agreeing to “completely cease all hostile acts against each other… that are the source of military tension and conflict” – not the least of which is the repeated testing of nuclear warheads and ballistic missile capabilities that in recent decades has constituted inter-Korean public relations.

On the nuclear note, the Panmunjeom declaration also states that “South and North Korea confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”

This is excellent news to fans of nuclear disarmament as a general approach to world peace, but it’s also a stark departure from Seoul’s foreign policy up to now. In the 2017 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris noted that the “South Korean-based nuclear arsenal peaked at an all-time high of approximately 950 warheads in 1967. Since the last U.S. nuclear weapons were withdrawn from South Korea in 1991, the United States has protected South Korea and Japan under a ‘nuclear umbrella,’ using nuclear bombers and submarines based elsewhere.”

So was the historic meeting really a result of the Trump administration’s “ ‘maximum pressure’ approach,” as President Moon was quoted, per the New York Times? Possibly. It’s quite possible that the administration was able to use its political clout, coupled with explicit threats of annihilation, to bring about this historic, and honestly, extremely sudden, about-face.

It should be noted that the South Korean president isn’t the only world leader Kim Jong Un has met with in recent weeks. Approximately a month ago, Kim made his first trip outside North Korea’s borders since assuming power seven years ago, meeting with Xi Jinping, the leader-and-maybe-sorta-now-dictator-for-life of China.

In Mr. Xi’s official statement on the pair’s meeting, he said, “This year there have been promising changes in the situation on the Korean Peninsula, and we express our appreciation for the major efforts that North Korea has made in this regard.”

And a unified Korean peninsula, especially one amenable to Chinese foreign policy (not to mention one without that pesky “nuclear umbrella” of the U.S. Navy) certainly behooves a China rapidly stepping up its overtures as a global, and especially maritime, power.

Still, who really knows what, if any, influence Xi had on these talks? This is all relatively baseless conjecture.

All this assumes that the statements made in the Koreans’ joint declaration were made in good faith, and that both nations intend on following through. We could very well see more nuclear tests come November.

But, given the hermit kingdom’s willingness to march under a unified Korean flag in this year’s Winter Olympics, perhaps times really have changed. Perhaps the Cold War armistice that has shakily held the status quo ’til now is really just that, a holdover from the Cold War.

Maybe, just maybe, we might actually see peace on the peninsula in our lifetimes.