South Korea Has a New President

South Korea just elected a new president who is less hawkish on North Korea than Donald Trump.

Moon Jae-in of the liberal Democratic Party is a career human rights lawyer and the son of North Korean refugees. He’s pledged to review his predecessor’s decision to allow the US to deploy the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea and said he wants to improve relations with North Korea, including reopening a joint industrial park on the Northern side of the border that the previous president had said was funneling money to Kim Jong Un’s regime in Pyongyang.

That stands in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s far more aggressive stance toward the dictatorial regime in Pyongyang. Fearful that North Korea is rapidly developing missiles capable of hitting mainland America, the administration has sent some of the US Navy’s most powerful warships to South Korea, and top administration officials are openly talking about a potential preemptive military strike on North Korea’s nuclear facilities. They also sped up the deployment of the THAAD system, currently in place on a South Korean golf course.

But despite — or perhaps because of — the very real threat North Korea poses to the South, many South Koreans favor a gentler approach toward Pyongyang. After all, South Korea’s capital city, Seoul, is within direct firing range of thousands of pieces of North Korean artillery already lined up along the border. As my colleague Alex Ward has written, a 2005 war game predicted that a North Korean attack would kill 100,000 people in Seoul in the first few days alone.

There is also robust opposition to THAAD in some parts of South Korea over safety and environmental concerns as well as fear that China, which staunchly opposes THAAD, will inflict severe economic punishment on South Korea in response to its deployment.

With Moon — whose victory ends nearly a decade of conservative rule in South Korea — now coming into office, THAAD’s future, as well as the future of the US-South Korea relationship, is uncertain.

And given all the turmoil that’s been happening on the peninsula in recent months, from the possibility of a new North Korean nuclear test to the scandal that led to the impeachment and arrest of Moon’s predecessor, more uncertainty is just about the last thing anyone needs right now.