Abstract

Since the Korean War, the Korean Peninsula has been under a wartime regime, not a peace regime by the international law of "the Armistice Treaty" in 1953. The Moon Jae-in government of South Korea has poured all its efforts in realizing an end-of-war declaration and a peace treaty for the transition to a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. Whether its attempt succeeds or not has emerged as a matter that determines the fate of the Korean Peninsula, and it has deepened not only the sharp diplomatic competition between South Korea and the United States, but also a strong schism in Korean society. The study attempted to suggest a productive and restrained approach to this issue by analyzing this political phenomenon from a realist international political perspective and revealing its problems and limitations. As long as North Korea is nuclear-armed, the prevailing view on the transition to a peace regime, in which causes a military imbalance between the two Koreas, is that it rather leads to a crisis on the Korean Peninsula. From the circunsatnces of the collapse of the US-DPRK negotiations for the denuclearization of North Korea, the worsening of the US-China conflict, and the escalating tensions in the South China Sea, the argument of an end-of-war declaration collides the strategy and interests of the US. The South Korean government's idealistic approach, which puts trust-building first with North Korea, ultimately proved to be ineffective in the reality of international politics, which values national interest and war deterrence. The study was based on the data from international treaties related to the Korean Peninsula, official agreements and declarations between governments, and official responses and media articles.

Key words: Korean Peninsula, transition to a peace regime, peace treaty, end-of-war declaration, denuclearization, US-China confrontation