President Yoon Says Time of Appeasing North Korea is Over; However Stresses He Does Not Want Regime to Collapse

However, if you ask someone on the Korean left they will say that the ROK has not appeased the Kim regime enough. If you just appease them a bit more than peace in our time will break out:

President Yoon Suk-yeol said the time for appeasing North Korea is over in an interview with CNN, and that he expects any new inter-Korean talks to be initiated by leader Kim Jong-un.    
   
“I think the ball is in Chairman Kim’s court,” Yoon told CNN’s Paula Hancocks in an exclusive interview aired Monday. “It is his choice to start a dialogue with us.”  
   
The remarks followed Yoon’s first summit with U.S. President Joe Biden in Seoul Saturday, an opportunity for the allies to coordinate the policies on Pyongyang amid increased missile threats from the North. Some military analysts believe North Korea could be preparing for a possible seventh nuclear test or an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch.    
   
Yoon said that he is against bending over backwards to please North Korea. “Just to escape North Korean provocation or conflict temporarily is not something that we should do,” said Yoon. “Many call it servile diplomacy, but the policy of being over-concerned about the other side’s feelings does not work and has proven to be a failure in the past five years.”  
   
He was referring to the policy of his predecessor Moon Jae-in, whose emphasis on dialogue and peaceful reconciliation led to the first North-U.S. summit in 2018. Talks collapsed in February 2019 after a second North-U.S. summit in Hanoi. Yoon has taken a more hard-line stance, more in line with the Biden administration’s “calibrated and practical” approach to the North.    
   
But Yoon stressed, “I do not want North Korea to collapse. My hope is for North Korea to prosper alongside South Korea.”  
   
Yoon said he wants a “shared and common prosperity on the Korean Peninsula” but underscored that enhancing North Korea’s nuclear capability is neither helpful nor conducive to “maintaining international peace.”  

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but all the decades of North Korean appeasement has accomplished is provide funding for the Kim regime’s nuclear and missile programs. Besides providing regime security, the Kim regime is now using these same programs to try and extort money from the ROK and the international community.