According to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, the country will take a new shot at reviving stalled talks with North Korea together with the incoming Biden administration, which start its work tomorrow. Moon is in hot water after two years of no meetings with the North at all, according to numbers by the South Korean Ministry of Unification.
In his New Year's speech last week, Moon said that his government's "will to meet anytime, anywhere, and willingness to talk...remains unchanged." After almost four years in office, progress on one of the politician's declared signature issues is in a stalemate.
Moon initially suceeded at furthering the cause of inter-Korean communications. Meetings between the two Korean states intensified in 2018 after another two-year hiatus. 36 meetings took place between the North and the South that year, most on political issues.
The most symbolic inter-Korean meeting of 2018 occurred in April when Kim Jong-un stepped across the demarcation line dividing the two Koreas, becoming the first North Korean leader to set in the South since the end of the Korean War in 1953. As Kim shook hands with his South Korean counterpart in the crisp spring air amid the flickering of cameras, he invited the South Korean president to briefly step into the north where both men shook hands again. Both leaders had vowed to "write a new chapter" in the troubled history of the Korean peninsula, but real change seems as far away now than it ever has.
Dialogue between the U.S. and Pyongyang also stalled by mid-2019 after a total of three summits between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un showed the inability to reach a consensus on nuclear disarmament.
