Park was eventually impeached for corruption and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. But Moon and his aides believed that the public anger toward Park had its roots in the Sewol disaster. They had seen evidence of her malfeasance firsthand: upon taking office, Moon’s staff found a cache of documents that showed that Park’s aides had lied about when she was notified about the disaster. They turned the documents over to investigators and filed a complaint with the Seoul prosecutor’s office. Moon’s surviving aides all believe that he was determined not to repeat Park’s mistakes. “Moon was so hard on Park over her failure with the Sewol,” Im recalled. “He was not going to open himself up to the same criticism.”
This crisis was precisely what Moon had tried to avoid. The president had thought that North Korea’s participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, might offer the chance to fundamentally change the relationship between the two countries. President Moon had been an unapologetic advocate for reviving the “Sunshine Policy” of South Korea’s first progressive president, Kim Dae Jung. The idea was simple: hostility toward North Korea would only make Kim Jong Un cling to his nuclear weapons, the same way a cold wind might make a man draw a heavy winter coat around him. If you want the man to take off the coat, the warm sunshine is far more effective.
It was inevitable that the new version of the policy would be nicknamed “Moonshine.” The term was a pun on the president’s name, of course, but it also conveyed a certain weary skepticism about the enterprise. It wasn’t an indictment of diplomacy per se, so much as a weary acceptance that all of the policies tried to date, both hard and soft, had failed to deliver a Korean Peninsula free from nuclear danger. It is only with hindsight, perhaps, that the brief and intense period of summit diplomacy that followed the 2018 Olympics seems like a heroic effort to avert a catastrophe.
In the end, however, it had come to nothing. For Moon and his advisers, persuading Kim Jong Un to abandon his nuclear weapons would take time. Reduce tension, get a peace agreement, and Kim would eliminate his nuclear arms just as a man would take off his coat in the hot sun. But President Trump wanted Kim to give up his nuclear weapons right away—permanent, irreversible, and verifiable disarmament, without delay and, in any event, no later than the end of the president’s first term. Kim had suspended nuclear and missile tests in the hope that summits with Moon and Trump marked the beginning of a new relationship between North Korea and the rest of the world. Those around Trump, though, continued to insist upon what Bolton called a “Libya-style” disarmament agreement. The notion that Kim would surrender his weapons as Muammar Gaddafi had, only to suffer a grisly death at the hands of opposition forces supported by American airpower, was a nonstarter. More than a few White House staffers believed that was precisely why Bolton, who was generally thought to oppose the negotiations, kept bringing it up. Kim ordered his scientists and engineers to resume missile and nuclear tests in order to make the point as clear as possible: North Korea was, and would remain, a nuclear power.
The implosion of negotiations between the United States and North Korea put unbearable pressure on Moon Jae-in. Moonshine simply could not work without a simultaneous improvement in relations between Pyongyang and Washington. The issues were simply too closely intertwined. “Neither South-North relations nor US-North relations will go far if the other fails,” explained South Korean diplomat Suh Hoon following the short-lived thaw. “They are like two wheels on a wagon that must roll together.” Without a deal between Trump and Kim, and with North Korea resuming its nuclear and missile testing, the wheels came off.
Once North Korea resumed missile and nuclear tests, support for Moon’s efforts collapsed. Jokes about the Moonshine policy had a sharper edge to them. The political center in South Korea had shifted, and Moon was forced to shift with it. “Dialogue is impossible in a situation like this,” Moon lamented in one interview. “International sanctions and pressure will further tighten to force North Korea to choose no other option but to step forward on the path to genuine dialogue.”
It is hard to recall that, at the time, Moon’s decision to step back from his policy of engagement was widely lauded as a return to realism rather than the collapse of the last real diplomatic effort to head off a crisis. This sense that Moon was adopting a pragmatic policy was particularly strong among national security experts in Washington, many of whom believed that the Moonshine policy was dangerously naive. Some suggested that Moon had been “mugged by reality” and would now adopt a more traditional approach.
But according to those who knew Moon, he was still seeking a path toward dialogue with North Korea even until the very end. What was no longer clear to him was how to get to that path from the bunker in which he was now sitting.
It was cold enough on March 21 that there was still snow on the ground in Seoul. Perhaps because of the inclement weather, Moon’s aides trickled in slowly, and he was not able to convene the meeting until 1:00 PM—some twenty-five minutes after he had been notified of the downing of Flight BX 411 and more than thirty minutes after the aircraft had been lost. By this time, Moon was upset and let the others know it, according to a memorandum of the meeting. He wanted to know what had happened and what was being done to look for survivors.
Moon’s actions that day are essential to understanding why events unfolded as they did. There are some discrepancies between the memorandum summarizing the meeting and the recollections of Moon’s surviving aides. The memorandum records that the first few minutes were dedicated to simply explaining what had happened—the flight itself, the problems in the cockpit, the detection of the missile launch.
“Moon had been given fragments of information while waiting for the meeting to start,” Im Jong-seok explained, “and we didn’t take time to go back over what we thought he knew. This was maybe a mistake, but it was very stressful, very upsetting.” Moon seemed focused on the emergency response, asking about search-and-rescue operations, apparently in the hope that the aircraft had been damaged but somehow survived a water landing. Moon’s aides appear to have been reluctant to explain that there was no realistic hope of survivors. “I remember when the navy chief, Admiral Um [Hyun-seong], finally told President Moon that he didn’t think any of the kids had survived,” one aide recalled. “President Moon flinched at the word ‘kids.’ I could see on his face that he hadn’t known the plane was full of students.”
At 1:11 PM, North Korean state media released a statement confirming that the state’s missile forces had deliberately shot down the aircraft, which it called a bomber. A military aide brought a printout of the statement into the meeting room.
IT IS THE HEROIC [NORTH] KOREAN PEOPLE’S ARMY’S METTLE TO MERCILESSLY PUNISH ANY PROVOKERS WHO HURT THE DIGNITY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA, NO MATTER WHERE THEY ARE. AT ABOUT 11:45 ON MARCH 21, A US BOMBER INTRUDED DEEP INTO THE SKY ABOVE KANGRYONG COUNTY, SOUTH HWANGHAE PROVINCE OF THE DPRK, BEYOND THE MILITARY DEMARCATION LINE IN THE WESTERN SECTOR OF THE FRONT. A SURFACE-TO-AIR MISSILE UNIT OF THE KPA ANTI-AIR FORCE SHOT DOWN THE AIRCRAFT WITH A SINGLE SHOT, DISPLAYING ITS FIXED WILL TO SHOW NO MERCY TO THE AGGRESSORS.