President Lee Jae Myung delivers a speech during a ceremony marking the 81st anniversary of Korea’s Liberation Day at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts in Seoul on Aug. 15.JOINT PRESS CORPS
Koh Yu-hwan
The author is an emeritus professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University and former director of the Institute for Unification Studies.
President Lee Jae Myung said in his Liberation Day address on Saturday that South Korea would “embark on a journey to end the war and transform the unstable [1950-53 Korean War] Armistice Agreement system on the Korean Peninsula into a peace regime.”
Seventy-three years after the armistice, the war remains unresolved because of geopolitical interests. Proposed formulas include an inter-Korean peace treaty advocated by North Korea from 1965 to 1974; a North Korea-U.S. treaty in 1974; three-party talks among the two Koreas and the United States in 1984; four-party talks including China proposed by South Korea and the United States in 1996; and a separate forum agreed in the Joint Statement of the Six-Party Talks on Sept. 19, 2005.
The most serious effort came when the Kim Dae-jung administration sought to dismantle the peninsula’s Cold War structure while the Bill Clinton administration advanced the Perry Process. The North Korea-U.S. joint communiqué of Oct. 12, 2000, cited four-party talks and other means of replacing the armistice with a permanent peace arrangement and formally ending the Korean War. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration labeled North Korea part of an “axis of evil” with Iran and Iraq and focused on the war on terrorism. Peace-regime efforts faded.
When a peace treaty proved difficult, an end-of-war declaration emerged as an interim measure. After George W. Bush said at a South Korea-U.S. summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2006 that Washington was willing to sign a security agreement with North Korea if the nuclear issue was resolved, terms including a security agreement, peace treaty and end-of-war declaration were used without clear distinctions, former South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon writes in “The Iceberg is Moving” (2016, translated).
President Roh Moo-hyun gave the idea significance as a political declaration, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il proposed including it in the declaration from Oct. 4, 2007. The two Koreas later pursued three- or four-party end-of-war declarations, including through the 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, without success.
During the Cold War, Seoul and Washington dismissed North Korean peace treaty proposals as offensives aimed at removing U.S. forces from South Korea. Once Pyongyang accelerated its nuclear program, complete denuclearization took precedence over a peace treaty.
The Moon Jae-in administration pursued an end-of-war declaration after the Panmunjom Declaration and ahead of the 2018 North Korea-U.S. summit in Singapore, but opposition remained strong. Moon later writes in his memoir, “From the Periphery to the Center” (2024), that White House advisers, including John Bolton, restrained U.S. President Donald Trump by arguing that such a declaration could generate pressure to dismantle the United Nations Command and withdraw U.S. troops.
The Singapore joint statement committed Washington and Pyongyang to building a peace regime and achieving complete denuclearization. This reflected North Korea’s demand that denuclearization and peace be treated as a security-for-security exchange rather than denuclearization first.
After the second summit between Kim Jong-un and Trump collapsed in Hanoi, North Korea accelerated its nuclear buildup and peace talks receded. Moon again promoted an end-of-war declaration at the UN, but Pyongyang did not respond. As North Korea severed inter-Korean ties, embraced a “hostile two-state” doctrine and declared its nuclear status irreversible, the initiative lost momentum.
Lee’s proposal to transform the armistice into a peace regime can be seen as groundwork for phased denuclearization — freeze, reduce and dismantle — now that immediate denuclearization is increasingly unrealistic. The aim is to move beyond directly exchanging complete denuclearization for a peace regime and instead discuss practical ways to halt North Korea’s expanding nuclear capabilities.
Unification Minister Chung Dong-young proposed four-party talks in a policy briefing on Aug. 5, but Foreign Minister Cho Hyun called the idea “idealistic,” exposing differences within the government.
Four-party talks among the two Koreas, the United States and China remain ideal, but North Korea is unlikely to join denuclearization talks anytime soon. Pyongyang is pursuing its two-state policy and seeking to turn the military demarcation line into a national border. The strategy seeks to block South Korean cultural influence and establish an independent state identity as a nuclear-armed North Korea, securing diplomatic autonomy.
With intensifying U.S.-China rivalry, Washington may also hesitate to pursue a peace regime that could affect the UN Command or the status of U.S. Forces Korea.
A breakthrough may therefore have to begin with bilateral North Korea-U.S. or U.S.-China talks rather than bringing all four parties together immediately. One option is to normalize North Korean-U.S. relations while maintaining the armistice, followed by a “2+2” format adding South Korea and China. Another would have Washington and Beijing, the signatories to the armistice, first agree to end the Korean War, followed by participation from the two Koreas in building a peace regime.
Geopolitical rivalry may still lead Washington to prefer the armistice. Much depends on Trump’s decision. With Trump signaling openness to North Korea and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi expected to visit South Korea soon, Seoul must precisely develop its “Korean Peninsula peaceful coexistence process” and persuade Washington and Beijing. That will be crucial to changing regional diplomacy.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
