While global attention focuses on North Korea, analyses of South Korea’s political direction raise new strategic concerns.
Personnel appointments, policy orientation, and inter-Korean relations may significantly shape East Asian security dynamics.
This chapter introduces a SAPIO essay examining the evolving situation on the Korean Peninsula.

This is an essay worthy of careful listening not only by the Japanese people but by people around the world.
2018-01-06.
The following is an essay by Hong Yeong, editorial chief of the “Unification Daily,” published in this month’s issue of SAPIO.
It is an essay worthy of careful attention not only from the Japanese people but from people around the world.
More dangerous than North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is South Korea’s Moon Jae-in.
Amid the tense situation on the Korean Peninsula, Japanese attention is focused solely on Kim Jong-un.
However, the truly dangerous figure is Moon Jae-in.
Hong Yeong, former minister at the South Korean Embassy in Japan, sounds the alarm.
About eight months after Moon Jae-in assumed the presidency, the Blue House has been taken over by pro-North, anti-U.S. forces.
Not only political appointees but most of the secretaries and administrative officials equivalent to bureau and division directors in central ministries are individuals who studied Juche ideology, Kim Il-sung’s doctrine, and are from the National Council of Student Representatives or leftist activist groups that pursued a North–South federal system.
This envisions “one nation, two systems, two governments” on the Korean Peninsula, where the northern and southern regional governments each possess defense and diplomatic authority, with a central federal government above them.
They are pro-North forces with the strong belief of “offering South Korea itself to Pyongyang.”
A representative figure is Im Jong-seok, the presidential chief of staff and number one figure in the Blue House.
As chairman of the student council in 1989, he dispatched female students to the World Festival of Youth and Students held in Pyongyang and was sentenced to five years in prison for violating the National Security Law.
Later, after becoming a member of the National Assembly, he attempted to visit the United States on official business but was denied entry by authorities.
Han Byung-do, who replaced Jeon Byeong-heon as senior presidential secretary for political affairs after the latter resigned in a bribery scandal last November, is also from the same student movement.
Shin Dong-ho, Moon Jae-in’s speechwriter and secretary for speeches, is a former cultural bureau chief of the student council and was a year senior to Im Jong-seok at Hanyang University.
During the Lee Myung-bak administration, these two established the Inter-Korean Economic and Cultural Cooperation Foundation under commission from the Workers’ Party of Korea, supported Kim Il-sung University, collected content usage fees from South Korean media outlets when citing North Korean Central Television, and diligently sent the money to Pyongyang.
After the launch of the Moon administration, members of committees and task forces formed under the banner of “clearing accumulated evils” to transform the state structure are also overwhelmingly far-left and pro-North.
A key figure is Jeong Hae-gu, chairman of the National Intelligence Service Reform and Development Committee.
A longtime communist since his youth, he is listed among the “100 pro-North anti-state actors” designated by conservative groups.
The National Intelligence Service, a presidential agency, has served as South Korea’s “Cold War command” against the Workers’ Party of Korea and is the core institution defending the liberal democratic system.
Yet Jeong Hae-gu is dismantling it through measures such as renaming the agency, reducing its scope of duties, and abandoning investigative authority—effectively destroying the anti-communist democratic system.
Under the noble name of “clearing accumulated evils,” what is being mercilessly carried out is the purge of opposing forces.
In the first place, the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye began with fabricated and inciting reports by left-leaning cable television claiming that revised presidential speech drafts were found on the tablet of her confidante Choi Soon-sil.
However, in reality, the device was not owned by Choi Soon-sil, and there were numerous traces indicating external manipulation.
Even while the prosecution authorities were aware of these facts.
This chapter continues.