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South and North Korean delegations shake hands at their meeting at the truce village of Panmunjeom in the demilitarised zone separating the two Koreas on January 9. Photo: Yonhap via Reuters

With North and South Korea talking again, should the US be worried?

North Korea has assured the south that its nuclear missiles are all pointed at America, and not its “brethren” in the south

North Korea is starting off the new year with a fresh diplomatic initiative aimed at wooing South Korea ahead of next month’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. But it is sticking to a decidedly harsh and familiar message for US President Donald Trump: back off and let Koreans solve their own problems.

After its first talks with the South in more than two years, the North said that it would not discuss its nuclear weapons with Seoul because they were aimed only at the United States, not its “brethren” in South Korea.

In a joint statement after 11 hours of talks, North Korea pledged to send a large delegation to next month’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea but made a “strong complaint” after Seoul proposed talks to denuclearise the Korean peninsula.

“All our weapons including atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs and ballistic missiles are only aimed at the United States, not our brethren, nor China and Russia,” Pyongyang’s chief negotiator, Ri Son Gwon, said.

“This is not a matter between North and South Korea, and to bring up this issue would cause negative consequences and risks turning all of today’s good achievement into nothing,” Ri, chairman of the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, warned in closing remarks.

Officials from both sides said they agreed to meet again to resolve problems and avert accidental conflict, amid high tension over North Korea’s programme to develop nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States, but Pyongyang said disarmament would not be part of the discussions.

North Korea’s state-run media have been hitting the “one Korean nation” theme hard since leader Kim Jong-un struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone toward Seoul in his annual New Year’s address.

The North’s hopes for reunification negotiations that favour its position while excluding or minimising the role of the United States are a tough sell in the South.

South Korea has a strong military alliance with Washington, benefits tremendously from being a trusted and close trading partner with the US, and has good historical cause to be wary of the North’s bait-and-switch tactics.

With that backdrop, Tuesday’s talks were by design incremental and exploratory. It’s hard to imagine any breakthroughs or policy shifts by the South on the biggest issues – denuclearisation foremost among them – without US consultations. So Washington probably did not have much to worry about.

As Tuesday’s meeting started, the North’s ruling party made a point of slamming Trump by name in its daily newspaper, calling his claim to have set the stage for the talks with his strong position on sanctions and pressure a “ridiculous sophism.”

“It is very deplorable to see the US politicians boasting of their diplomatic failure as ‘diplomatic success,’” it said.

“North-south relations are an internal affair of the Korean nation,” the North’s official news agency said in a report on the eve of the talks that stressed how Koreans north and south must not allow outsiders’ “interference and tyranny” to keep the Korean nation divided.

In a separate article, it called Trump a “lunatic” and said the US needs to accept it is now a nuclear power.

As a first step after Kim’s New Year’s speech, South Korea agreed to postpone military exercises with the US until after the Winter Olympics and Paralympics are over.

That paved the way for the negotiators to meet and discuss a proposal by Kim to send a delegation of officials, athletes and supporters to the Pyeongchang Olympics. They also talked about other bilateral matters.

While the North’s strategy of focusing on ethnic pride and unity is also a clear attempt at prying Washington and Seoul apart, it does have an emotional appeal that resonates on both sides of the demilitarised zone.

The Korean Peninsula was divided after it was liberated from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. Splitting the Koreas along the 38th parallel was the idea of US military planners to limit the influence of the then-Soviet Union and approved without a Korean presence at the 1945 Potsdam Conference.

The two sides fought the Korean war in 1950-53, with China and the Soviet Union supporting North Korea and US-led United Nations forces backing the South. The war ended with a truce, not a peace treaty, and tens of thousands of US troops continue to be stationed in South Korea.

There are no foreign troops based in North Korea, but China continues to be an essential trading partner and political buffer in international forums.

It remains unclear exactly how Washington views the recent moves by the two Koreas and how involved it is.

Trump had previously scoffed at the futility of talking with the North, but when the dialogue was proposed last week tweeted: “Sanctions and ‘other’ pressures are beginning to have a big impact on North Korea. Rocket man now wants to talk to South Korea for the first time. Perhaps that is good news, perhaps not – we will see.”

The next day, he fired off another tweet, seeming to take credit for the whole thing: “Does anybody really believe that talks and dialogue would be going on between North and South Korea right now if I wasn’t firm, strong and willing to commit our total ‘might’ against the North. Fools, but talks are a good thing.”

US Defence Secretary James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, had both said they believed the talks would be limited to the Olympics, a position that did not jibe with what Seoul was saying.

When the officials actually sat down, they discussed a range of issues that included reuniting families divided by the Korean war.

“Is this the beginning of something?” Tillerson said in an interview in Washington last week. “I think it’s premature.”

Possibly. But for now, at least, it appears the two Koreas have taken the reins.

With additional reporting by Reuters

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