South\u00a0Korea’s Foreign and Unification\u00a0ministers\u00a0publicly\u00a0disagreed this week\u00a0over\u00a0how to engage\u00a0North\u00a0Korea, exposing differences within President\u00a0Lee\u00a0Jae Myung’s government as it seeks to revive stalled contact with Pyongyang.<\/p>\n
Foreign Minister Cho Hyun called\u00a0North\u00a0Korean\u00a0engagement\u00a0proposals unveiled by Unification Minister Chung Dong-young at a Wednesday\u00a0policy\u00a0meeting with\u00a0Lee\u00a0“idealistic,” saying they had not received the backing of other ministries.<\/p>\n
“Since Minister Chung was speaking in idealistic terms, I would ask you to discount those remarks somewhat,” Cho told reporters. Chung responded in comments to local reporters on Thursday, saying that ideals were needed “to change reality.”<\/p>\n
Chung’s proposals included launching four-party talks involving the two\u00a0Koreas, the United States and China as a key initiative for the second half of the year.<\/p>\n
Cho said the ideas had not been sufficiently discussed or found consensus within the government.<\/p>\n
The disagreement comes as Seoul has been trying to persuade\u00a0North\u00a0Korea\u00a0to respond to a series of conciliatory gestures since\u00a0Lee\u00a0took office.<\/p>\n
His administration has\u00a0shifted away\u00a0from a “denuclearisation-first”\u00a0policy\u00a0toward a “peace-first” approach, while urging U.S. President Donald Trump to seek a meeting with\u00a0North\u00a0Korean leader Kim Jong Un to reopen dialogue.<\/p>\n
The Foreign and Unification ministries, when asked about the contrasting positions on Friday, said they would continue to coordinate policies and declined further comment.<\/p>\n
The presidential Blue House said it did not have an immediate comment.<\/p>\n
Analysts said any\u00a0policy\u00a0differences were likely to be watched closely by Pyongyang and could complicate Seoul’s efforts to re-engage with the\u00a0North.<\/p>\n
The disagreement “exposed internal differences and weakening\u00a0policy\u00a0momentum surrounding\u00a0North\u00a0Korea\u00a0policy,” said Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University.<\/p>\n
“Internal division and conflict would reinforce\u00a0North\u00a0Korea’s perception that even if meaningful agreements are reached, they could easily be reversed within\u00a0South\u00a0Korea.”<\/p>\n
Relations between the two\u00a0Koreas have sharply deteriorated since the COVID-19 pandemic, with Kim announcing in 2024 that Pyongyang would no longer seek reunification and demolishing joint inter-Korean projects on its territory.<\/p>\n
Dialogue has since all but halted, and tighter\u00a0North\u00a0Korean border surveillance has sharply cut defections. Just 63\u00a0North\u00a0Koreans crossed\u00a0south\u00a0in the first half of 2026, compared with 1,047 in 2019.<\/p>\n
Seoul has dropped measures it says could be seen by Pyongyang as hostile, including anti-North\u00a0loudspeaker broadcasts, though\u00a0North\u00a0Korea\u00a0has largely ignored such\u00a0overtures.<\/p>\n
Some rights groups have criticised\u00a0Lee’s approach, contrasting it with his conservative predecessor’s more pressure-focused stance toward Pyongyang.<\/p>\n
While\u00a0South\u00a0Korea\u00a0co-sponsored a U.N. resolution on\u00a0North\u00a0Korean human rights last year, advocates say\u00a0Lee\u00a0has downgraded the issue to avoid antagonising the\u00a0North, including by suspending some rights reports and broadcasts.<\/p>\n
Kim Tae-Hoon, former president of the advocacy group PSCORE, told Reuters in June that the shift had dried up donations to the organisation, which fights for human rights in\u00a0North\u00a0Korea. “It’s been very, very difficult,” he said.<\/p>\n
Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South\u00a0Korea’s Foreign and Unification\u00a0ministers\u00a0publicly\u00a0disagreed this week\u00a0over\u00a0how to engage\u00a0North\u00a0Korea, exposing differences within President\u00a0Lee\u00a0Jae Myung’s government as it seeks to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1523,134,2329,2333,2328,2336,2331,2330,2332,2334,129,2335,1583,2327,2326,207],"class_list":["post-111998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pyongyang","tag-breaking-news","tag-china","tag-english-daily","tag-finance","tag-free-newspaper","tag-headlines","tag-hong-kong-media","tag-hong-kong-news","tag-hong-kong-news-media","tag-latest-news","tag-pyongyang","tag-sing-tao","tag-sports","tag-standard","tag-the-standard","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}