When President Park Geun-hye in her Independence Day speech proposed South-North exchanges and cooperation in nonpolitical fields, the North Korean authorities retorted that without eradicating the political and military confrontation between the two sides, economic, social and cultural cooperation would be meaningless.

Since the end of the Korean War, North Korea has consistently claimed that the U.S. and South Korea threaten it through their combined military forces, reinforced by the U.S. nuclear umbrella; through all kinds of military and economic sanctions; through demonizing and isolating it in international society by blocking it from joining international economic organizations; and by accusing it of violating international norms and human rights.

North Korea concludes that both the U.S. and South Korea’s objective is to destroy its regime, and demands that the U.S. withdraw its troops from South Korea, retract its guarantee of nuclear defense and lift its sanctions against North Korea, while insisting that South and North Korea reduce their armed forces to the level of 100,000 each and honor and implement all major South-North agreements. To ensure the implementation all of these measures, a peace treaty between the U.S. and North Korea and a nonaggression pact between South and North Korea should be concluded.

The chronology of South-North Korean relations since 1950 shows that until the end of the 1980s, the North Korean leadership pursued an aggressive South Korea policy and concentrated on the overthrow of the South Korean regime, using all kinds of traditional communist tactics of subversion and infiltration. Since then it has been more concerned with the survival of its political system and has relied on a defensive policy. The reasons seem to be twofold: the irreversible economic gap between South and North Korea caused by its rapid and drastic economic deterioration in stark contrast with South Korea’s rapid and unprecedented economic growth; and the end of the Cold War, which meant the loss of its security protectors and main economic partners and aid givers.

These developments must have been frightening for the North Korean leadership. The ruling class must have felt that it had lost almost everything: guns and butter, while South Korea had secured both. Since the end of the Cold War the U.S.-South Korean alliance has become stronger than ever and South Korea has become a developed nation.

To deal with the situation, Kim Jong-il launched the military-first principle and the strong and prosperous nation slogan. North Korea has also developed WMDs to deal with this situation. All these strategies are double-edged: They aim to counter the military superiority of the South Korea-U.S. alliance and to keep the autocratic political system alive.

They are also the only way to prop up the ruling class and forestall a possible revolt of the masses. An unstable regime usually needs a scapegoat. In the case of North Korea, the U.S. is the biggest scapegoat and South Korea the second biggest. The North Korean leadership has no intention of risking its political system for economic recovery. By making its people not too rich and not too poor so that they can depend on the political leadership, it can muddle through economic difficulties.

Under the circumstances, the North Korean leadership will keep its WMD programs and its economy at the subsistence level. It will do anything for the sake of these dual purposes. It will abandon its WMD programs only when the U.S. withdraws its troops from Korea and remove it from its nuclear umbrella on the one hand and renounces all of its sanctions against North Korea on the other.

North Korea would not object to economic cooperation with the U.S. and South Korea but only under the condition that they do not try to transform North Korea into an open society. It firmly believes that capitalist democratic states use this kind of functionalist approach to convert communist or authoritarian states into democratic states or to undermine their political systems.

For this reason, North Korea insists that mutual trust between South and North Korea can be built by resolving the political and military confrontation between them first, not through cooperation and exchanges in nonpolitical fields first, while South Korea proposes mutual trust-building through cooperation in nonpolitical fields. South Korea should keep in mind Kim Il-sung’s central tenet that distrust of the South is North Korea’s raison d’etre and that a communist regime cannot coexist with a capitalism regime.

North Korea seeks neither war nor peace because whether it makes war or peace with South Korea, it will lose. But if it makes neither war nor peace, it will neither win nor lose, as a Chinese pundit told me.

South Korea should separate political and security matters from nonpolitical matters and apply different approaches to them. In political and security matters it should continue its present policy in close cooperation with the U.S. and apply the principle of reciprocity flexibly. In dealing with nonpolitical matters, it should simply promote mutual exchanges and cooperation for mutual economic benefits, without sticking to the principle of reciprocity or linking nonpolitical matters to political and security issues.

In this context, the May 24 Measures should be reexamined. It is better if the unification issue is not linked to the economic cooperation issue. At this juncture, talk of unification in public makes the North Korean leadership extremely sensitive, but is necessary for educating the South Korean people. The main concern for South Korea and the U.S. should be contingencies such as a sudden collapse of the North Korean regime through a coup or popular revolt.

As former Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Dobrynin said, just as the Soviet Union collapsed due to an internal conflict, not due to Reagan’s hard-line policy and the arms race, North Korea is likely to collapse on its own if it continues to muddle through its difficulties.

By Park Sang-seek

Park Sang-seek is a former rector of the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, and the author of “Globalized Korea and Localized Globe.” ― Ed.