The future unification of the two Koreas, growing cybersecurity threats and maritime challenges around the region and the world are expected to top the agenda at a high-level conference that kicked off Wednesday in Seoul.
Some 250 senior defense policymakers, military executives and academics from around 30 countries and four multinational agencies are taking part in the three-day Seoul Defense Dialogue, a vice-ministerial forum launched by the Defense Ministry in 2012.
Under the theme, “70 years of the Post-WWII Era and the Division of Korea,” the participants will explore the prospect of the peninsula’s unification and its potential impact on regional security, as well as unabated historical and territorial tensions in Northeast Asia and ways to defuse them.
They are also forecast to analyze emerging cybersecurity challenges and the outlook for international cooperation to tackle them, while addressing constant regional maritime conflicts such as over islands in the East China and South China Seas, exclusive economic zones, continental shelf delineation, and air defense zones.
“Reunification would set the conditions for an enduring peace on the peninsula by removing a source of potential regional conflict,” David Helvey, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, said in a speech summary released ahead of the event.
“(Following Korean reunification) the emerging security architecture might be a hybrid mechanism designed to promote cooperative solutions to nontraditional or transnational threats existing alongside/on top of a more traditional, self-help and alliance-based architecture for managing hard security adapted to the new realities of Northeast Asian security dynamics.”
Lim Jong-in, President Park Geun-hye’s special adviser on security and dean of Korean University’s Graduate School of Information Security, stressed the rising need for the states to beef up their cybersecurity capabilities while fostering international cooperation for better responses.
“As one of the most serious threats that most states face, cyberthreats are getting more sophisticated and targeted,” he said.
“To deter the rapid growth of cyberthreats, it is important for each state to build its own capacities and yet cooperate internationally.”
Other attendees include Vice Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yong, former Japanese Defense Minister Satoshi Morimoto, Edmond Mulet, assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping operations at the U.N.; and Martin Libicki, a professor at RAND Graduate School in the U.S. Han Min-koo, Seoul’s defense minister, will also deliver an address.
Three special sessions are also scheduled to take place to discuss defense cooperation for global health security, violent extremism, and nuclear nonproliferation, respectively. On the sidelines, working-level officials from the 30 countries plan to hold separate talks on cybersecurity, while another meeting on Northeast Asia will bring together six countries — South Korea, the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and Mongolia.
By Shin Hyon-hee (heeshin@heraldcorp.com)
