Introduction
The prospects for renewed U.S.–North Korea dialogue appear to be growing, given President Donald Trump’s expressed interest in dialogue and South Korea’s efforts to create favorable conditions for a potential meeting. The Lee government has strongly supported renewed dialogue, emphasizing that South Korea should help facilitate contacts between Washington and Pyongyang rather than remain a passive observer. This approach is closely connected to a phased strategy toward denuclearization: halting further advances in North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities in the short term, progressively reducing its existing capabilities in the medium term, and ultimately working toward a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
This emphasis on dialogue reflects a broader approach to peace on the Korean Peninsula. Rather than treating complete denuclearization as an immediate precondition for engagement, the Lee government places greater emphasis on reducing tensions, restoring channels of communication, and creating conditions under which more substantive negotiations can gradually take place. Renewed U.S.–DPRK dialogue could therefore serve not only as a means of addressing the nuclear issue but also as an initial step toward rebuilding political trust, improving inter-Korean relations, and eventually establishing a more durable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.
The history of U.S.–DPRK and inter-Korean relations, however, provides reasons for caution. Since the 1990s, periods of diplomatic engagement have repeatedly produced important agreements and temporary improvements in relations, only to be followed by renewed confrontation, mutual distrust, and further advances in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. The question faced by the South Korean government at the moment is therefore not simply whether dialogue can be resumed, but whether renewed engagement can be translated into a more stable and sustainable political relationship.
Prospects for Renewed Dialogue
Efforts to promote U.S.–DPRK dialogue are by no means new. During the Moon Jae-in administration, the two sides held historic summit meetings in Singapore in 2018 and Hanoi in 2019, with the South Korean government actively facilitating dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang. Although these meetings generated considerable expectations, particularly following the Singapore summit, they ultimately failed to establish a sustainable process of denuclearization and normalization. The breakdown of the Hanoi summit was followed by a gradual deterioration in U.S.–DPRK and inter-Korean relations.
Nevertheless, expectations surrounding summit diplomacy have never entirely disappeared. They have again gained prominence as the Lee government has emphasized dialogue and engagement as important instruments for managing relations with North Korea. Underlying this position is a broader liberal expectation that sustained interaction can contribute to peace and stability. Dialogue is important not only because it provides an opportunity to negotiate immediate security issues but also because repeated interaction may reduce uncertainty, generate common interests, and establish expectations of continued cooperation.
Functionalist and neo-functionalist approaches offer valuable insights for this expectation and have indeed underpinned the so-called Sunshine Policy. Functionalism, above all, suggests that practical cooperation over specific functional needs can gradually weaken political divisions by demonstrating the benefits of cooperation. Neo-functionalism further develops this logic through the concept of spillover, whereby cooperation initially established in one sector may create incentives and pressures for cooperation in related areas. Applied to the Korean Peninsula, cooperation in relatively less politically sensitive areas—including humanitarian assistance, family reunions, tourism, sports, and economic exchanges—could potentially generate interests and routines that facilitate cooperation in more politically sensitive areas.
Constructivism offers a related but distinctive argument. Cooperation can change not only the material interests of states but also how they understand one another and themselves. From this perspective, sustained interaction may gradually transform a relationship in which the other is regarded as an enemy into one in which it is regarded as a rival or potentially even a partner. Dialogue and engagement can therefore be understood as social processes through which adversarial identities and expectations may change over time.
Such expectations have informed successive South Korean governments’ efforts to engage North Korea through summit diplomacy, economic cooperation, and the like. The United States has likewise periodically pursued direct negotiations with Pyongyang. Yet these efforts raise a fundamental question. Despite the expectation that interaction may reduce hostility and gradually transform adversarial relations, the past history of engagement marked by renewed confrontation now prompts us to question whether the quantity of interaction itself matters, or if not, what kinds of political and institutional conditions should guide the interaction of parties concerned.
Systemic Compatibility and Ontological Security
The experience of the Korean Peninsula demonstrates that interaction does not automatically produce convergence, and understanding this outcome requires closer attention to the relationship between systemic compatibility and ontological security. Above all, systemic compatibility, which refers to the degree to which interacting states share or can mutually accommodate fundamental political, economic, and social principles, can be an important prerequisite for interaction to produce positive results. The European experience in this regard illustrates the significance of this condition. Early European integration developed among states that, despite substantial national differences, increasingly shared broadly compatible commitments to representative democracy, market-oriented economies, and the rule of law.
The point is not that cooperation requires identical political systems, but that a sufficient degree of compatibility makes sustained interaction less threatening to the political identity and legitimacy of participating states. Cooperation can then become routinized, generating what may be described as basic trust and increasingly stable expectations concerning the behavior of the other. It is here that systemic compatibility becomes closely connected to ontological security. States seek not only physical survival and material interests but also continuity in their understandings of who they are. Where systemic compatibility is relatively high, interaction can be incorporated into existing self-narratives without fundamentally challenging identity continuity. Cooperation can consequently become routinized and gradually reinforce expectations of peaceful interaction.
Where systemic compatibility is low, however, interaction may produce the opposite effect. Encounters with a fundamentally different political and social order can make differences between Self and Other more visible and challenge established understandings of political legitimacy and identity. Instead of transforming identities through interaction, cooperation may encourage actors to reaffirm precisely those identities that distinguish them from one another.
This mechanism is particularly relevant to the Korean Peninsula. North and South Korea share a common historical and national background but have developed profoundly different political, economic, and social systems. South Korea’s political identity has increasingly become associated with liberal democracy, a market economy, and pluralistic civil society, whereas North Korea has maintained an authoritarian socialist order centered on regime sovereignty, self-reliance, and military strength. Moreover, the legitimacy of each Korean state has historically developed partly in opposition to that of the other. Interaction consequently takes place not simply between two states with different interests but between political systems whose identities and claims to legitimacy have long been mutually implicated.
Increased contact may therefore expose systemic differences rather than automatically overcome them. North Korea may respond to greater interaction by reaffirming narratives of strong and prosperous nuclear state, while South Korea may similarly reinforce its liberal-democratic identity. Under these conditions, systemic incompatibility can generate an ontological security dilemma. When one side responds to identity uncertainty by strengthening its own self-narrative, the other may perceive those practices as a challenge to its own identity and legitimacy and respond by reaffirming its own identity. Each side’s attempt to restore ontological security can thereby increase the ontological insecurity of the other.
South Korea’s Role
Renewed U.S.–DPRK dialogue may have important political and security implications for South Korea’s role. If the primary problem were simply insufficient interaction, Seoul’s principal task would be to facilitate as much dialogue and cooperation as possible. Yet if the durability of engagement depends on systemic compatibility and ontological security, South Korea’s role must extend beyond that of a simple intermediary between Washington and Pyongyang, and there are a number of ways in which South Korea can make its own contributions.
First, South Korea can serve as a facilitator of U.S.–DPRK dialogue. Given the present difficulty of restoring direct inter-Korean dialogue, renewed communication between Washington and Pyongyang may offer an opportunity to resume broader negotiations down the road. Seoul can help narrow differences over the conditions and sequencing of negotiations and prevent misunderstandings from closing diplomatic opportunities before substantive talks begin. Its role in this sense is not to determine the outcome of U.S.–DPRK negotiations but to help maintain the political space that allows negotiations to continue.
Second, South Korea can help promote a phased and reciprocal process of tension reduction. The history of negotiations with North Korea suggests the difficulty of resolving the nuclear question through an all-or-nothing approach. An initial halt to further nuclear and missile development, followed by gradual reductions and eventually denuclearization, can provide a longer time horizon within which reciprocal actions and verification mechanisms can develop. The significance of such an approach lies not only in its immediate security effects but also in its potential to create repeated and predictable interactions. Small but implemented agreements may be more useful for rebuilding confidence than ambitious agreements that subsequently collapse.
Last but not least, it is necessary to recognize the ontological dimension of engagement. Cooperation is unlikely to become sustainable if either side understands it as threatening its effort to preserves its identity. Seoul therefore needs to distinguish between seeking behavioral change and appearing to seek transformation of the North Korean regime itself. This does not require South Korea to abandon its own political values. On the contrary, it requires recognition that sustainable cooperation is more likely when engagement does not immediately create existential uncertainty concerning the biographical narratives of the other side, let alone physical survival. Reducing such existential anxiety can help prevent political and economic interactions from being interpreted solely through an exclusively zero-sum framework and becoming trapped by the ontological security dilemma.
Moosung Lee
Professor
Department of Political Science and Diplomacy, Myongji University