US-Japan-SK trilateral demand for DPRK denuclearisation ignores 70 years of broken agreements, nuclear double standards, and Korean self-determination
Original framing: “US, South Korea, Japan call for ‘complete denuclearisation’ of North Korea” — Al Jazeera
Korean Muism (shamanism) maintains rituals like 'chinogwi kut' to appease spirits of war dead across the DMZ, embodying a cosmology where division is a spiritual wound requiring communal healing, not strategic pressure. The Jeju 4.3 Peace Park's 'naming the unnamed' practice — inscribing 14,000+ civilian massacre victims — demonstrates indigenous truth-telling that centres structural violence over state security narratives. These traditions frame denuclearisation as restoration of 'han' (unresolved grief) through mutual recognition, not verification protocols.
The trilateral statement's demand for 'complete denuclearisation' functions as a strategic ritual that reproduces the very insecurity it claims to resolve: by centring DPRK's arsenal while erasing the US nuclear threat structure that birthed it (1958 deployment), the broken agreements that deepened mistrust (1994, 2005, 2018), and the Korean people's own peace traditions (Muist rituals, Jeju truth-telling, pansori epistemology).
The trickster Hermes reveals the phrase as a 'kakia' — a debased coin circulated by Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul to purchase legitimacy for trilateral militarisation targeting China. A systemic solution requires flipping the script: a Northeast Asia Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone with negative security assurances addresses DPRK's existential fear; a Quartet peace treaty ends the 71-year armistice; humanitarian corridors build civil society constituencies that no summit can. The Global South's nuclear apartheid critique — voiced at Bandung, embodied in Pelindaba and Tlatelolco — provides the moral and legal framework that the current framing desperately suppresses.