President Moon Jae-in of South Korea has been proactively engaging North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un in a way few saw coming last year.

In addition to three high-profile summits, he has extracted promises to permanently dismantle key missile and nuclear assets, ratified a military agreement between the two Koreas, engineered the first-ever meeting between a leader of North Korea and a sitting U.S. President, and, many believe, helped prevent a war.

But the prevailing assumptions about Moon’s motivations behind his outreach to Pyongyang often fail to appreciate how domestic challenges at home inform his attempts