CFR Daily News Brief Update 4/25: South Korea Offers TalksWith Nort on Kaesong

Daily News Brief April 25, 2013

Top of the Agenda: South Korea Offers Talks With North on Kaesong

South Korea on Thursday extended an offer to hold talks with North Korea over restarting operations (Yonhap) at the jointly-run Kaesong Industrial Complex, which has been idle since early this month amid heightened tensions on the peninsula. Pyongyang had blocked South Korean access to the site and pulled out more than 50,000 workers it had stationed there (AP). Seoul said it made the offer after the North flatly denied a request on Wednesday for informal talks between South Korean representatives at Kaesong, and warned of "grave measures" if the North did not agree to the talks.

Analysis

"The right message is the one Obama voiced on NBC: 'We're not going to reward this provocative behavior.' That should be Washington's unshakable policy, and the president should insist that his secretary of state not undermine it with talk of concessions or a return to negotiations," writes Jeff Jacoby for the Boston Globe.

"Despite everything, this crisis will almost certainly not peak with North Korea deciding to launch a full-scale war. Instead, the big risk is that a small incident could trigger an escalation that runs out of control," writes David Blair for The Telegraph.

"What Pyongyang wants from the United States is basically acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state and the end of the U.S. 'hostile policy' toward North Korea. With South Korea, we're still at an early stage with the new South Korean president, Park Geun-hye. We're still in the early stages of a period in which both sides are going to be testing each other to see what their prospects are for a more stable relationship than what existed with the previous president," says CFR's Scott Snyder.