The fact that North Korea assumes such center stage in the conduct of South Korea’s foreign and security policies is hardly surprising. Seventy years since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the two Koreas remain locked in confrontation. Despite multiple political and diplomatic initiatives since the early 1990s, all of the principal actors in the North Korean nuclear saga have failed to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons, and once it did so in 2006, there has been no tangible progress in denuclearization, much less in rolling back Pyongyang’s growing nuclear arsenal.

Read full article at www.theasanforum.org.