In Teck Seo is field representative for Global Peace Foundation Korea and co-chairman of Action for Korea United, a grassroots civic coalition for Korean reunification.
SEOUL, Aug. 28 (UPI) — A troubling idea has gained ground in Seoul — that Pyongyang’s doctrine of “two hostile states” can be repackaged into a more palatable “peaceful two states.”
The proposal comes from Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, who has moved to retire the term “North Korean defector” (talbukmin) in favor of the softer bukhyangmin — “person whose hometown is in the North” — and has floated calling North Korea by its official name, Joseon, while retiring labels such as “principal enemy” from official use.
The defector-term change advanced far enough that the ministry asked dozens of government bodies to adopt the new wording before defector groups, who protested that it strips away the meaning of having fled a dictatorship, forced it back into question.
The Joseon idea drew a cool response from President Lee Jae Myung. However well-intentioned, the impulse behind these gestures rests on a serious misreading of the regime they seek to reassure.
Kim Jong Un’s declaration of permanent division and his rejection of a shared Korean nation are not a good-faith negotiating offer. They are the defensive isolationism of a regime that fears the South’s overwhelming social and economic superiority.
When Seoul adopts Pyongyang’s own vocabulary, it does not placate Kim. It hands his isolation strategy a ready-made justification — and helps strip away the last ideological restraint against the use of force among people once regarded as fellow Koreans.
What accepting the framing would cost
Playing along with the two-state frame is not a path to co-existence, and it carries concrete risks.
The first is foreign interference and permanent division. The danger is not hypothetical. During his visit to Seoul in late August, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke openly of the hope that “South and North Korea, as two countries,” might move toward peaceful coexistence — the first time Beijing had referred to the two Koreas as separate states in that setting.
South Korea’s own government played down the remark, and Chinese officials had used similar language before. But that is precisely the point. Once Seoul itself steps into the two-state vocabulary, it invites surrounding powers to speak of a permanently divided peninsula without hesitation.
Those powers have every incentive to see the division fixed in place, the better to shape its future to their own advantage — and the moment Seoul abandons its own claim to be the agent of unification, others will move to fill the vacuum.
The second is damage to the alliance. The ROK-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty and the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions rest on the premise that the Republic of Korea is the peninsula’s sole legitimate government. Should Seoul relinquish its claim to unification jurisdiction, it erodes its own legal standing to act in a North Korean contingency.
The third is economic. Were the peninsula to settle into two permanently hostile, nuclear-armed states, the long-standing “Korea discount” could harden into a permanent fixture, with consequences for the country’s sovereign credit standing and its capital markets.
Firmness the precondition for dialogue
Critics respond that resisting the two-state doctrine will only inflame tensions. This misreads how the regime works. Capitulating to Pyongyang’s unilateral claims has not bought peace before. It signals weakness and lends credibility to Kim’s strategy of nuclear coercion.
The paradox of inter-Korean relations is that the regime returns to the table only when it confronts the limits of its own strategy. At home, renouncing unification undercuts a founding tenet of the system Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il built.
Pressed on that contradiction, the regime faces a question of internal legitimacy. Abroad, a South Korea that refuses the fiction of “two states” denies Kim the diplomatic refuge he seeks. Firm resistance, then, is not escalation. It is the condition under which substantive dialogue becomes possible.
Not a veto, but a vision
Rejecting the two-state frame is necessary, but not sufficient. Seoul and Washington have cycled through approaches that have not worked. Washington has viewed the North too narrowly through the lens of denuclearization, while Seoul has swung between appeasement and pressure with each change of government.
The alternative my colleagues and I have advanced is the Korean Dream – a vision of unification grounded not in summit bargaining, but in a shared national identity and the old principle of Hongik Ingan, “broadly benefiting all humanity.”
Its premise is that the nuclear threat cannot be resolved apart from the division that produces it, and that a credible vision of a free and unified Korea speaks past the regime to the North Korean people themselves. A future its citizens can recognize and choose for themselves does more durable work than any slogan — and no regime can fully suppress it by renaming itself or its people.
That is why the vision belongs in policy, not in civil society alone. Renaming North Korea will not make its weapons disappear, and a false peace is no substitute for a real one.
What Seoul and Washington owe some 75 million Koreans whose future is at stake is neither confrontation nor submission, but principled realism — and a unification policy built on an accurate reading of why Pyongyang closed the door.
In Teck Seo is field representative for Global Peace Foundation Korea and co-chairman of Action for Korea United, a grassroots civic coalition for Korean reunification. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.