Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan said Thursday South Korea should ignore North Korea's recent saber-rattling. "We should step back and try to look at the big picture rather than responding to every action the North Korean government takes," he told to the Kwanhun Club, a fraternity of veteran journalists.
"The North's strategy has always been constantly to create small issues to test our patience to get what they want."
Speaking in a discussion at the Press Center, Yu said it was important to look closely at the patterns of the action North Korea has taken every time the U.S. had a new government.
Calls for Seoul to modify its North Korea policy before the inauguration of the Obama administration in the U.S., Yu said, are "difficult to accept" just because some people believe the relationship between the North and the U.S. will grow closer. "What more can we do when the North is giving us no other option?" said Yu.
North Korea is ostensibly demanding full implementation of various bilateral agreements. "Although the previous administration put too much emphasis on the inter-Korean relationship in the belief that this would help solving the nuclear issue, North Korea just showed us that such hypothesis is false by carrying out a nuclear test," he said.
He added citizens would not want the government to go back to the Sunshine Policy of the previous two administrations, seeing as they voted for current President Lee Myung-bak by a landslide.
