At first glance, it may seem that Lee is being a bit too conciliatory with the North. But when just a year ago, Yoon tried to instigate both military incidents and false flags involving North Korea to justify and legitimize his coup and gather both domestic and US support to it, then SK going “lets chill things out” makes sense. Well the entire domestic politics instability and cultural bs going on probably makes Lee want to try his best to not have the NK headache as well so he can focus on patching some things up domesticaly
Also, North Korea has been empowered quite a bit in recent years. Sanctions wise, with the US-China cold war and Ukraine war going on both China and Russia have been less eager to pretend to follow UN and US sanctions. They were circumventing them before sure, but only in a scale that would be considered economic/trade drip feeding of the NK economy. A lot of the post USSR hard limitations of the NK economy, like energy imputs, fertilizers, machine tool and electoronics are or can be overcame in this new state of things. More importantly they got some access to military tech from russia in return for their involvement in Ukraine that kinda elevated their conventional threat. Still no match for SK and US military in the region but they important got satelite, submarine, naval, rocket and other tech. Its not just “they fire all their nukes and 1 works” or artillery memes anymore. SK maybe has to be a bit more carefull, especially with Trump running things in the US
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Bro Kim isn’t interested
At first glance, it may seem that Lee is being a bit too conciliatory with the North. But when just a year ago, Yoon tried to instigate both military incidents and false flags involving North Korea to justify and legitimize his coup and gather both domestic and US support to it, then SK going “lets chill things out” makes sense. Well the entire domestic politics instability and cultural bs going on probably makes Lee want to try his best to not have the NK headache as well so he can focus on patching some things up domesticaly
Also, North Korea has been empowered quite a bit in recent years. Sanctions wise, with the US-China cold war and Ukraine war going on both China and Russia have been less eager to pretend to follow UN and US sanctions. They were circumventing them before sure, but only in a scale that would be considered economic/trade drip feeding of the NK economy. A lot of the post USSR hard limitations of the NK economy, like energy imputs, fertilizers, machine tool and electoronics are or can be overcame in this new state of things. More importantly they got some access to military tech from russia in return for their involvement in Ukraine that kinda elevated their conventional threat. Still no match for SK and US military in the region but they important got satelite, submarine, naval, rocket and other tech. Its not just “they fire all their nukes and 1 works” or artillery memes anymore. SK maybe has to be a bit more carefull, especially with Trump running things in the US