On June 15, 2000, the leaders of South and North Korea met for the first time and discussed what then seemed like imminent reunification. Nineteen years on, the dream of a united Korea slips further and further away.

Worse, South Korea’s position between the North and the United States is becoming almost untenably precarious.

The U.S.-led ‘maximum pressure’ campaign now effectively forbids Koreans in the South from trading with those in the North, and Washington directly called major South Korean firms to warn them about this. This makes it impossible to revive the inter-Korean economic projectsthat were supposed