South Korea offered talks. North Korea fired missiles. Will the two Koreas meet?

What happened

North Korea fired about 10 short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said, less than a week after Seoul proposed talks over a growing border dispute.

South Korea has offered North Korea military talks to calm their border. On 23 October deputy defence minister Kim Hong-cheol said the talks would agree where the border line runs and restore military phone lines, to prevent accidental clashes. Dates and place could be set through Panmunjom, the truce village on the border, and Seoul is also open to talks that include the US-led UN Command.

Six days later North Korea fired about 10 short-range missiles. They were launched on 29 October from near Wonsan and fell into the sea off the east coast, South Korea’s military said. North Korea has given no public answer to the offer. On 25 October its UN ambassador, Kim Song, wrote to the UN Security Council that Seoul had made up a landmine blast in September, and reports of the letter do not mention the offer of talks.

The last offer got no answer. Seoul proposed similar military talks in November 2025, and the North ignored them. Leader Kim Jong Un has stopped almost all contact with the South, and in December 2023 he declared it a separate, hostile state. His sister Kim Yo Jong has described the idea of talks between the two Koreas as “the climax of the farce”.

If nothing changes, each side keeps drawing the border line its own way. North Korean troops crossed the line about 50 times in August and September, against 17 times in all of 2025. The military phone lines cut in 2023 stay closed.

Talks with North Korea would aim to “mutually confirm” the precise location of the land Military Demarcation Line (MDL), “discuss ways to restore military communication lines and prevent accidental clashes in border areas”

Al Jazeera, on South Korea’s offer of 23 October

Sources: Al Jazeera (2, 3), The Guardian

The Pattern

We looked for cases where a government offered talks to a hostile country that had refused almost all contact with it for years. We found seven such offers since 2017, six of them to North Korea and one from Pakistan to India. Only once did the other side sit down to talks, within a week.

The Read

Six of seven times, a country that had refused talks for years did not sit down after such an offer, and the refusal lasted longer than the 69 days from Seoul’s offer to the end of December. The one meeting, in January 2018, came within a week, after Kim Jong Un had himself offered talks about the Winter Olympics the day before. This time a week has passed with no answer and the North has fired missiles. Both earlier offers that were only about military matters, in 2017 and 2025, met silence. In 2021 the North reopened the phone line within two weeks, but no talks followed.

There are reasons for doubt. Six of the seven offers went to North Korea, and three came from the same South Korean president, Moon Jae-in. Five of the seven came before December 2023, when Pyongyang declared the South a separate hostile state. The one offer from Seoul since then, in November 2025, got no answer. Donald Trump says he wants to meet Kim Jong Un before the end of the year, but he said the same in August 2025 and no meeting came. Before the landmine blast, Seoul said it was working to help talks between Pyongyang and Washington, which is about the US, not the two Koreas. On 29 and 30 October Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis had talks in Pyongyang that touched on security on the Korean Peninsula, then went on to Seoul. It was a visit to each country in turn, and the report says nothing about carrying messages between the two Koreas. None of the seven earlier offers led to a meeting through a go-between.

Sources: Al Jazeera (2, 3), The Guardian