OPINION:
When President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, his administration should consider a dramatic shift in U.S. policy toward North Korea. Current policy calls for Pyongyang to achieve the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement, or CVID, of its nuclear program. Instead, the Trump administration should pursue a policy to achieve complete, verifiable and irreversible freedom, or CVIF, for the North Korean people.
This policy would mirror the current goals of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, recognize the hard reality that decades of U.S.-North Korea negotiations have failed and achieve lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula with the liberation of a people who suffer unspeakable atrocities for being born north of instead of south of the Demilitarized Zone.
Recent events in South Korea make this an urgent priority because Mr. Yoon declared martial law this week “in order to defend a free Republic of Korea from the threat of the Communist forces of North Korea, to eradicate all the unscrupulous anti-state, pro-North Korea forces who are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the constitutional order based on liberty.”
Mr. Trump can understand Mr. Yoon better than anyone. Mr. Yoon has faced the weaponization of the legal system and the National Assembly by the pro-Pyongyang factions and constant calls for his impeachment and arrest — a “deep state” bent on destroying South Korea’s democracy and supporting North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship.
First, Mr. Yoon made it clear that the policy of his administration is a “freedom-based” peaceful unification.
In his Aug. 15 Korean Liberation Day Address, Mr. Yoon said, “The freedom we enjoy must be extended to the frozen kingdom of the North, where people are deprived of freedom and suffer from poverty and starvation.” He said Korean liberation could truly be achieved only when the two Koreas became “a unified free and democratic nation rightfully owned by the people.”
Dramatic changes have occurred since CVID was first described as a policy goal during the George W. Bush administration in 2004. North Korea has become a nuclear threat, but something positive has also happened: The North Korean people have become far more knowledgeable about the outside world and no longer believe the regime’s lies.
During the most recent North Korea Freedom Week in July, a delegation of North Korean defectors explained that North Koreans, especially younger ones, are hungry for change, and they cannot understand why Mr. Kim is developing nuclear and ballistic missiles while they are starving. Thus, it is important that the United States put their well-being — their human rights — at the forefront of our policy rather than treating it as a secondary concern.
Second, this policy shift would recognize that despite decades of hopeful negotiations by the U.S., from former President Jimmy Carter’s visit to North Korea to meet with then-leader Kim Il Song in June 1994 to Mr. Trump’s summit meetings with Kim Jong Un, North Korea has become a nuclear power and a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction. North Korea is even making the Europeans nervous by supporting Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with weapons and troops.
Hwang Jang Yop, the highest-ranking defector from North Korea, repeatedly warned us when he defected in 1997 that North Korea will use negotiations to extract concessions, but it will never give up its nuclear program. Human rights are the issue, its Achilles’ heel.
Since then, hundreds of North Korean defectors have said the same thing. In all the years of talks with North Korea — the Four Party Talks, the Agreed Framework, the Sunshine Policy, the Engagement Policy and the Six Party Talks — millions of North Koreans have died as we made their suffering secondary to achieving a breakthrough on the nuclear issue.
Worse, we fed the regime’s anti-America propaganda that tells them that the United States is their sworn enemy and occupies South Korea, and that Americans are cruel and murderous people. North Koreans are told that we caused the Korean War, and the stars on our flag represent the people and groups they invaded. Mr. Kim tells them they may be suffering from starvation and deprivation but he is keeping them safe from us.
Third, there will never be lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula until North Korea’s people are liberated and given the opportunity to create for themselves the miracle on the Taedong River that South Koreans created with the miracle on the Han River. Continued direct negotiations with Kim Jong Un will only breathe new life into his murderous but dying dictatorship.
His recent actions are signs of increasing desperation: planting land mines at the China-North Korea border to prevent people from escaping, publicly executing teens for listening to K-pop music or sharing South Korean dramas and most recently executing two women who were helping other women escape to South Korea. Defectors explain that Mr. Kim gave up the 80-year-old policy of unifying the Korean Peninsula under the Kim family dictatorship because he was worried about keeping power.
Now, he is sending trash balloons to South Korea to stop Operation Truth, a partnership between North Korean defectors and freedom-loving citizens to get information and humanitarian aid into North Korea by land, sea and air.
The people of North Korea are increasingly understanding the horrible fact that their dictator does not care about their suffering, only his own survival. Thus, now is the time to embrace CVIF, not fall back into the failed negotiations of the past. Instead, the Trump administration should make their human rights the No. 1 issue and focus on efforts to communicate the truth to the people of North Korea through the best communicators: the North Korean escapees in South Korea. North Korean escapees believe fervently that it is the truth that will set their homeland free.
When Mr. Yoon addressed Congress when he visited in May 2023, he started with a quote from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and used the word freedom 36 times. I believe he was acknowledging that the U.S. overcame a tragic war and division but succeeded in ending the scourge of slavery. Still, the Korean Peninsula is also a divided nation, half free and half slave, as everyone born north of the DMZ is a slave to the Kim regime.
I hope that when Mr. Trump takes office, he will embrace Mr. Yoon’s freedom-based agenda for the Korean Peninsula and pen his next letter to Kim Jong Un: “You have been a terrible leader of your people, only giving them starvation, misery and death. If I could speak on their behalf, I would tell you: ‘You’re fired.’”
• Suzanne Scholte is chair of the North Korea Freedom Coalition and Free North Korea Radio, which carries out Operation Truth to reach North Koreans by land, sea and air. She hosted the first North Korean defectors to speak out in the United States in 1997 and hundreds more since then and is the recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize for her work.
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