People Power Party lawmaker Na Kyung-won. [Yonhap]
People Power Party lawmaker Na Kyung-won. [Yonhap]

People Power Party lawmaker Na Kyung-won sharply criticized President Lee Jae Myung's proposal for an end-of-war declaration Sunday, calling it "a reckless act of self-harm that would dismantle the national security framework from within."

In a Facebook post Sunday, Na wrote that "President Lee Jae Myung's impure end-of-war proposal will hasten the end of the Lee administration — a declaration of its own demise."

She went on to say it amounted to "a rigged own goal driven by impure intent, sacrificing national security as an offering," and argued that "the more we volunteer to disarm ourselves and beg for a pie-in-the-sky end-of-war declaration, the more North Korea and the United States will bypass South Korea entirely and deal directly with each other."

On an end-of-war declaration without denuclearization, Na said "the security domino effect is clear." She warned that a unilateral declaration that the war is over would immediately weaken the UN Command — which manages the armistice agreement — and pressure its dissolution, and that it "would lead to the withdrawal of USFK."

Na said she had personally moved to block such an effort before. During the Moon Jae-in administration's push for an end-of-war declaration, she said, she rushed to the United States and met with then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton and others to persuade them against it.

"The enemy's threats are intensifying while our defense posture is moving in the opposite direction," Na said, citing the transfer of wartime operational control, reductions in combined US-South Korea military exercises, and opposition to upgrading the UN Command to brigade level.

"True deterrence comes not from the enemy's goodwill but from our own overwhelming strength," Na said. She proposed normalizing live-fire combined exercises with the United States, securing the right to reprocess spent nuclear fuel through a revision of the Korea-US nuclear cooperation agreement, and reviewing indigenous nuclear armament.


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