June 13, 2025
SEOUL – Silence fell on the inter-Korean border for the first time in about a year, as North Korea abruptly halted its propaganda and noise broadcasts on Thursday — a day after Seoul preemptively paused its own loudspeaker broadcasts along the frontier.
Uncertainty still surrounds whether Pyongyang’s pause will endure or mark a turning point, as inter-Korean relations are at their lowest ebb, underscored by North Korea’s designation of South Korea as an “enemy” in its constitution and amid the rapidly shifting international landscape.
However, with President Lee Jae-myung’s preemptive measures to restore confidence and North Korea’s apparent response, his pledge to promptly restore now-severed inter-Korean hotlines has nevertheless raised cautious hopes.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed Thursday that “there has been no noise since the last anti-South Korea broadcast was heard late last night on the western front.” The military, however, is “closely monitoring North Korea’s movements” to see whether the halt to anti-South Korean propaganda broadcasts will continue, JCS added.
The liberal Lee administration has fully paused loudspeaker broadcasts along the inter-Korean border as of 2 p.m. Wednesday, around a year after the previous conservative Yoon Suk Yeol administration resumed propaganda broadcasts in June 2024 in response to Pyongyang’s launches of trash-filled balloons.
North Korea had responded to anti-South Korea broadcasts since July last year, transmitting eerie and raucous sounds such as screeching metal, ghostly wails and animal noises, which had tormented residents in border areas for nearly a year.
“As North Korea responded to our government’s pause of loudspeaker broadcasts toward the North, the suffering of residents in border areas has been alleviated,” a senior Unification Ministry official said on condition of anonymity Thursday during a closed-door briefing. “This has been assessed as a meaningful opportunity to ease military tensions between the two Koreas and restore mutual confidence.”
The halt to propaganda broadcasts came after the Unification Ministry publicly urged civic groups on Monday to stop sending anti-North Korea leaflets across the inter-Korean border, marking a shift from the previous policy under the Yoon administration.
President Lee pledged to “strive to promptly restore the suspended inter-Korean communication channels” in his congratulatory message on Thursday, marking the 25th anniversary of the June 15 inter-Korean summit in 2000.
“We will put an end to wasteful acts of hostility and resume dialogue and cooperation,” Lee said. “The Lee Jae-myung administration will make every effort to achieve a peaceful, coexistent and prosperous Korean Peninsula.”
North Korea has refused to answer regularly scheduled military-to-military calls from South Korea since April 7, 2023. The two Koreas are supposed to hold calls twice daily —in the morning and afternoon — via liaison and military hotlines.
Pyongyang did not respond to Seoul’s call through the liaison hotline Thursday morning, according to the Unification Ministry.
However, a group of South Korean experts raised caution about resuming inter-Korean dialogue in the report “Policy Considerations on the Prospects of a US-North Korea Summit” issued by the Chey Institute for Advanced Studies in Seoul on Thursday.
“If the Lee administration pursues dialogue simply for the sake of dialogue without stringent demands or verification on the nuclear issue, it may face serious backlash in the future,” read the report, principally authored by Chun Chae-sung, a professor at Seoul National University, reflecting a consensus of expert opinions.
“It is important to ensure that the goal of improving inter-Korean relations does not lead to the implementation of an incomplete nuclear policy jointly pursued by the Trump and Lee administrations.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesperson, said Wednesday that Trump “remains receptive to correspondence with Kim Jong-un, and he’d like to see the progress that was made at that summit in Singapore.”
The White House’s response came after NK News, a Seoul-based media outlet specializing in North Korea issues, reported Wednesday that North Korean diplomats in New York had refused to accept a letter from Trump to Kim on multiple occasions, citing an unnamed informed source.
Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, said North Korea’s refusal to receive Trump’s letter — if the media report is true — could be seen as Kim telling Trump to first take action.
“It is a message of pressure that preemptive measures, such as a substantive change to the US’ hostile policy toward North Korea, must be taken in order to restore leader-to-leader relations through exchanging personal letters as did in the past,” Lim said.
Trump and Kim held three in-person summits between 2018 and 2019 and exchanged at least 27 personal letters, according to publicly disclosed records, as key means to build rapport between the two leaders.
Lim also noted that growing alignment between North Korea and Russia, and internal circumstances in North Korea — such as Kim’s goal to inspire anti-South and anti-American sentiment for the regime’s stability — could be reasons for its apparently cold response to Trump’s letter.
“However, it is difficult to conclude that North Korea’s position is fixed and unchanging in the mid-to-long term,” Lim added, pointing to various factors, including developments in the war in Ukraine and consequent changes in US–Russia relations.