Putin's return reverberates in
Korea By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - The resurgence of Vladimir Putin
as president of Russia ushers in a new era of
power politics and diplomacy in Northeast Asia
with implications that may not be good news for
either the United States or China.
Campaigning against strong opposition from
the educated, intellectual, often critical elite
of Moscow, Putin appealed for mass support by
raising suspicions about the US. He found it easy
to get through to millions of voters beyond the
capital with claims that the US was influencing
elitists against him.
For now Putin would
seem far more kindly disposed toward China than
the US, talking up much improved relations between
the two countries that a couple of brief
generations ago faced off against
each other in what was
called "the Sino-Soviet dispute".
The term
has receded into the miasma of history, but Russia
has to worry about the danger of rising Chinese
power on their long common border and inside
Mongolia, the vast landlocked country that’s
wedged between them.
True, Putin did sign
a treaty of friendship with China in 2001, and he
has often called for strengthening ties in which
Russian natural gas and vital pipelines play a
strategic role. Against that background Russia and
China have steadfastly stood side by side in the
United Nations, blocking moves against Iran and
Syria.
To the West, the nationalist appeal
of Putin evokes uneasy memories of the era of
Soviet rule when Russia was the dominant element
in an empire that encompassed much of eastern
Europe and central Asia. Since the fall of
communist leadership more than 20 years ago,
Russia has retreated as a global power. The Cold
War is long over, and nobody believes that Russian
armies are gearing up to take over neighbors as
did the dreaded Soviet forces of Josef Stalin.
Still, we have to wonder whether Putin
equates his own resurgence with the rebirth of
Russia as a strong power capable of intimidating
rivals from Europe to Asia. The Soviet Union may
no longer exist, but Russia still stretches across
the Eurasian land mass. No other country begins to
match that geographical reach.
Russia's
long border with China, moreover, is a
double-edged sword. On either side simmer local
disputes as business interests and border guards
eye each other warily now as years ago. Russia and
China did manage a few years back to bury the
hatchet on where to draw the line on the Amur
River border, across which their soldiers were
firing shots at one another in 1969, but
sensitivities run deep in a remote region over
which Russians and Chinese have quarreled for
centuries.
On a broader scale, though,
Putin has clearly targeted the United States as
the more serious threat. During his first two
terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, he grew
increasingly critical of the United States while
US policy called for shielding Europe with
missiles and expanding NATO (the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization).
Having failed to
convince George W Bush in his last year in office
that implanting missiles in NATO nations on
Russia's western flank would not be a good idea,
Putin got into a habit of blaming the Americans
for spurring on opposition both within Russia and
on the fringes.
The fact that he was
barred by Russia's constitution from running for a
third term in 2008 did not diminish his influence.
Dmitry Medvedev, who he got to run as president in
his place, rewarded him with the post of prime
minister in a deal that called for Medvedev not to
challenge him in 2012.
Putin as prime
minister accused the US of inciting Georgia, once
a Soviet republic, to invade secessionist South
Ossetia. The US said nonsense to that notion while
most Americans didn't care - or notice. Former
Soviet republics such as the Ukraine, where
nightmares go back to the slaughter of millions of
peasant farmers during Stalin's long reign, took
Putin's position more personally. They see Russia
as a re-rising menace.
Putin's distrust of
the US carries significant implications for Korea.
In his first year as president he visited
Pyongyang in July 2000 and received the late
leader Kim Jong-il in Moscow in August 2001.
That visit climaxed in an epic journey
that saw Kim spend nine days on a train. Kim
Jong-il saw Putin again in Vladivostok in August
2002 and last August met Medvedev at a military
base in Siberia. They had two topics to talk about
in that last venture by the Dear Leader onto
Russian territory. First was a deal for Russia to
ship natural gas through North Korea to South
Korea. Second, as might be expected, was food aid
for the North's near-starving masses.
Against this background, it's highly
likely that Russia will want to build on its
historic relations with North Korea. Stalin was
not enthusiastic when Kim Il-sung begged him to
endorse his plot to invade South Korea in June
1950, but the Soviet Union wound up giving air
support, military aid and advice to North Korea.
The 17-kilometer Russian border with North
Korea along the Tumen River is strategically more
important than ever. Trains from the Soviet Union
carried vital supplies across the Tumen at highly
discounted prices until the downfall of Soviet
rule. After that, Russia demanded full payment at
realistic exchange rates, not the vastly inflated
value that North Korea put on its near-worthless
funny money. The shipments stopped, and Russia's
relations with North Korea deteriorated.
Still, Russia would like access to the
Rason special trade zone and port facilities at
the mouth of the Tumen, all of which China also
sees as a gateway to the Pacific. North Korea
needs Russia as a foil against overwhelming
dependence on China for just about everything,
notably food and oil. That's why Kim Jong-il made
sure to call on Putin and Medvedev.
We may
expect to see latter-day Russia and latter-day
China competing with one another for access to a
port and industrial area long seen as a future
major link between Asia, the western Pacific and
the US Look for overtones when Russia hosts the
nations of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
summit of powers bordering the Pacific in 2012.
That rendezvous comes up in September the
booming nearby port of Vladivostok, Russia's great
commercial and naval hub in the western Pacific,
just as US President Barack Obama enters the
climactic phase of his campaign for re-election.
Russia is also eager to get along with
South Korea. Roh Tae-woo as president of South
Korea from 1988 to 1993, introduced "Nordpolitik",
signaling a new era in relations with Moscow. More
than three years before his election as president
in 1992, Kim Young-sam in June 1989 spent a week
in Russia. He called on Mikhail Gorbachev, the
last communist president, and returned to Seoul
with documents proving Kim Il-sung's pleas to
Stalin to support the North Korean invasion of
South Korea.
Putin in his first year as
president called on South Korea's late president
Kim Dae-jung in Seoul in February 2001. Kim's
successor, the late Roh Moo-hyun, visited Moscow
in September 2004. South Korea's current
president, Lee Myung-bak and President Medvedev
talked enthusiastically about prospects for the
gas pipeline when they met in St Petersburg last
November.
It's possible that South Korea
can hope for broader relations with Russia as a
counter both to North Korean "warnings" and to
reliance on the US-Korea alliance. That's vital
when North Korea seems increasingly hostile and
the US is distracted by conflicts in the Middle
East, notably Iran. At the same time, Putin may
find good relations with South Korea - and maybe
improved ties with the US - as a useful foil
against China regardless of all the happy talk
about getting along with the country with which it
shares by far its longest common border.
Donald Kirk, a long-time
journalist in Asia, is author of Korea
Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine.
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