On a day heavy with memory, South Korea’s President Lee Jae-myung invoked the language of peace, urging restraint and dialogue even as the nuclear-armed North forges deeper ties with Russia and the Korean peninsula bristles with tension.
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“The surest way to secure our safety is to build peace – peace so strong that there is no need to fight,” Lee said in a solemn social media post, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the onset of the Korean war.
The conflict from 1950–53 left millions dead and ended with an armistice, but no peace treaty.
“The era of relying solely on military strength to defend the country is over,” Lee wrote in his post. “It is better to win without war than to win through war.”
His message was more than just rhetoric. In recent weeks, Lee’s newly formed government has moved to recalibrate the peninsula’s dangerous status quo, seeking to nudge North Korea from confrontation to conversation, even as the spectre of conflict looms larger than at any time in recent memory.
In a gesture laden with symbolism, Seoul this month halted its loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts along the border – the first such move in a year. Within hours, Pyongyang reciprocated, silencing its own speakers.