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South Korean President Moon Jae-in gave a speech on the occasion of the third anniversary since his inauguration. The speech, and subsequent Q&A, had little to say on North Korea. But what was said mattered.

In short, Seoul will continue to press for all types of potential inter-Korean cooperation – as long as they do not break the sanctions regime.

The Moon government will follow this path regardless of North Korea’s official response, because there are hints that there is a disconnect between Pyongyang’s official messaging and what it says in private.

Crucially, South Korea wants to make clear to the U.S. that its policy continues to be engagement. No matter who wins the upcoming presidential election, the message from Seoul come November will continue to be that this is its preferred approach.

Only a new North Korean nuclear test, and perhaps an ICBM test, could start to shift Seoul’s approach towards Pyongyang.

Crucially, many Blue House and MOFA officials and advisers believe that a future President Joe Biden wouldn’t be a President Barack Obama redux.

This gives Seoul hope, premised on three ideas: that Kim Jong Un was focused on internal consolidation during most of the Obama years, which reduced his incentives to engage in negotiations; that Obama’s policy was aligned with that of former presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, which allowed him to implement a ‘strategic patience’ approach with no substantial engagement; and that the failure of sanctions and isolation to prevent North Korea’s development of its nuclear weapons program would prompt Biden to give talks a try.

In other words, rightly or wrongly, the Moon government thinks that both under Biden or a re-elected President Donald Trump there will be a new round of talks.

In private, many officials would rather have a proper working-level process under Biden than the chaotic approach of the Trump administration, even if Biden brings human rights and other issues to the talks. But South Korea will have to adapt to whichever style is on offer from the U.S. side.

In his speech Moon thus confirmed that South Korea will continue to put inter-Korean cooperation in dealing with COVID-19 on the table – the so-called human security approach to bilateral links. This has been suggested for months, but, officially, Pyongyang has not replied.

North Korea is, however, receiving international aid, and reports suggest that COVID-19 has indeed hit the country. At the very least, the coronavirus has reached the Sino-North Korean border where much of the trade between the PRC and DPRK takes place.

So – from Seoul’s perspective – COVID-19-related cooperation is not necessarily a non-starter for North Korea.

In his post-speech Q&A, Moon also stressed sanctions-free projects that, from his perspective, the two Koreas should pursue regardless of the state of U.S.-North Korea relations. They include individual tours of North Korea, inter-Korean railway connections, joint war remains excavation, and developing the DMZ into a UN-led peace zone.

Critics will argue that North Korea has disengaged from these projects as U.S.-North Korea talks slowly broke down after the Hanoi summit. And Moon himself acknowledged that inter-Korean links are clearly weaker today than they were a few months ago.

But this misses a crucial point. The Moon government has always stressed that any inter-Korean reconciliation process will take years if not decades. From this perspective, it does not make sense to simply give up on the process because of a lack of progress over a period of a few months.

After years of pressing for and participating in inter-Korean cooperation, Moon is very unlikely to change his approach during his two remaining years in office — especially when a majority of South Koreans continue to express support for inter-Korean engagement.

While conditions on the Korean peninsula today are of course very different to conditions in Europe all those years ago, the Moon government asserts that one of the key lessons of the Helsinki Process and other European engagement processes is that they took many years to bear fruit.

Indeed, one of the often neglected aspects of the security situation on the Korean peninsula is the positive change since 2017.

A recent shooting in the inter-Korean border violated the 2018 Pyongyang Declaration. But it was ruled by the South Korean military as a one-off accident and, interestingly, a hotline was used to clarify the incident.

Even more tellingly, in yesterday’s Q&A Moon confirmed that communication between both Koreas, and between the U.S. and North Korea, is still ongoing.

Seoul will continue to press for all types of potential inter-Korean cooperation – as long as they do not break the sanctions regime

There has been speculation as to whether the two Koreas were still talking to each other. However, this suggests that Pyongyang has no intention to completely cut off communication with Seoul, which would be consistent with the message that North Korea was sending prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.

In any case, Seoul is under no illusion that there will be much progress in inter-Korean relations – or U.S.-North Korea relations, for that matter – before the U.S. election. Barring a dramatic change of heart from Trump or Kim, there is a wide gap between the negotiation positions of Washington and Pyongyang.

From Seoul’s point of view, only sustained engagement can serve to bridge this gap, which is why it wants to lay the groundwork for talks to be the policy of choice after November. After all, Kim needs a deal to realize his economic vision for North Korea.

Will engagement, once it resumes, be successful? Nobody knows. Will isolation and sanctions be successful? From the Moon government’s perspective, the answer has been and will continue to be no.

Edited by James Fretwell