Mick Hartley

South Korea's President Moon is interviewed in Time Magazine – and makes the front cover.

Moon Jae-in can still hear the roar today. South Korea’s President had been seated next to Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium on Sept. 19, 2018, for the close of the Mass Games when North Korea’s leader beckoned him up to the dais. Beneath a vast collage calling for Korea to “unite the strength of the entire people,” Moon urged the 150,000-strong crowd to “hasten a future of common prosperity and reunification,” while revelers brandished white flags with powder blue outlines of a unified Korean Peninsula. For Moon, it was a transformative experience. The North Koreans’ “eyes and attitudes” showed that they “strongly aspire for peace,” he tells TIME. “I could see for myself that North Korea has completely changed … and is doing everything possible to develop.”

That speech was the first by a South Korean leader in North Korea and the high point of a long, often agonizing process of engagement that Moon had charted since his election in May 2017. Odds were strongly against him at the outset: Moon’s arrival into Seoul’s presidential Blue House was bookmarked by North Korean weapons tests, including three long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and a purported hydrogen bomb, prompting then U.S. President Donald Trump to dispatch a U.S. Navy carrier group and threaten “little rocket man” with “fire and fury” in riposte. There had been no official dialogue between North and South since 2013, and caught between an irascible dictator and a geo-political neophyte, Moon feared the worst: “We were actually on the brink of war.”

Moon helped guide the world back from the abyss….

I think not. If you follow the official pronouncements that come out of North Korea – at least until recently, now they're too busy dealing with the problems from their coronavirus-inspired isolation – the world was always on the brink of the abyss, with constant apocalyptic threats against South Korea and the US. But Moon is obsessed with North Korea, to the point of delusion…“I could see for myself that North Korea has completely changed". Yeah right.

Surprisingly perhaps, the Time journalists close the article with some accurate but less-than-flattering comments:

Moon has paid a high price of his own. His political opponents are aghast that a former human-rights lawyer, imprisoned as a student activist for opposing South Korea’s own military dictatorship, could buddy up to a man like Kim. Moon insists Kim somberly told him that “he wants to pass down a better future for his children, and that he did not want them to carry the burden of nuclear weapons.”

Asked about Kim’s character, Moon found him “very honest … very enthusiastic [and] one with strong determination” who has “a good idea of what is going on around the world.” But lest we forget, this is the same man who murdered his uncle and half brother in cold blood and, according to a landmark 2014 U.N. Commission of Inquiry, presides over “crimes against humanity” including extermination, torture, rape and causing prolonged starvation.

For many North Korea watchers, Moon’s steadfast defense of Kim is verging on delusional. Those Mass Games that he addressed in 2018, for one, have been condemned by human-rights groups for forced child labor. Desperate to maintain momentum, Moon has long urged for the easing of sanctions and explored workarounds, such as donations through the World Food Programme and a now nixed plan to exchange South Korean sugar for North Korean liquor. After Moon banned activists from sending propaganda balloons into the North, a bipartisan group of 13 former U.S. officials accused his government of “undermining North Korea’s human-rights movement” in an open letter. “There are people in senior positions in the U.S. government who think that what he’s doing is counterproductive and harmful in the long run,” says King. The question is no longer whether his own principles have been sacrificed in pursuit of reconciliation, but whether any success is rendered moot.

“President Moon would like a serious diplomatic win with North Korea before he leaves office,” says Sean O’Malley, a professor and political scientist at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. “Otherwise he will be viewed as a failed President. And I’m pretty sure he thinks so too.”

Moon is so invested in rapprochement and consumed by a waning legacy that he has lost support from those who put him in power in the first place. His domestic approval rating plummeted to just 35% in early May owing to scandals like a corrupt housing scheme—the average price of a modest apartment in Seoul has increased from $590,000 to $1.06 million over his term—while an epidemic of sexual harassment has led to a string of high-profile suicides….

And despite early success controlling the coronavirus, South Korea is now flagging badly on vaccinations, with only 6% of the population fully immunized by mid-June. In April, Moon’s Democratic Party suffered crushing defeats in the mayoral elections in South Korea’s two largest cities. “South Korean voters are focused on very internal issues,” says John Delury, a professor and East Asia expert at South Korea’s Yonsei University. “Moon himself is focused on North Korea.”

On that score too, Moon may be part of the problem. According to one formerly high-ranking North Korean defector based in Seoul, Kim felt utterly betrayed by Moon for siding with the U.S. after Hanoi, as well as by his purchase of 40 U.S. stealth fighter jets, and sees little point in negotiating with an administration on its last legs. After all, the denuclearization deal signed by Clinton in 2000 was effectively ripped up soon after, when Bush included North Korea in his “axis of evil.” Likewise, a 2007 joint declaration between South Korea and North Korea was walked back by incoming President Lee Myung-bak a year later. “There’s no chance of another summit with Kim Jong Un within Moon’s term,” the defector tells TIME…