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Roh win underscores US-Korea
rift
By Tim Shorrock
WASHINGTON - The election on Thursday of Roh
Moo-hyun, a former human-rights and labor lawyer, as
South Korea's next president should serve as a giant
wake-up call to US policy makers and foreign-affairs
commentators.
Roh won a narrow victory over
conservative challenger Lee Hoi-chang despite a
last-minute controversy over his remarks that South
Korea should mediate, rather than participate in, a
future conflict between North Korea and the United
States, and a forceful warning to North Korea from US
and Japanese defense officials on the eve of the
election that Pyongyang's use of weapons of mass
destruction "would have the gravest consequences".
A few years ago, those incidents would have
doomed Roh's candidacy and driven South Korean voters
into the welcoming arms of Lee and his supporters, who
have sided with the administration of US President
George W Bush in taking a tough stand toward North
Korea's nascent nuclear-weapons program and flatly
rejected President Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy" of
engagement with Pyongyang. Roh was the candidate of
Kim's ruling Millennium Democratic Party, while Lee ran
on the ticket of the opposition Grand National Party.
But times have changed. As the United States and
South Korea greet 2003, a year that will mark the 50th
anniversary of the end of the Korean War, they are
farther apart on issues of security and US forces in
Korea than any other time since US troops first entered
the country in 1945.
The most dramatic sign of
the deterioration in relations is the recent wave of
demonstrations protesting the acquittal by a US military
court of two US soldiers whose armored vehicle
accidentally killed two Korean schoolgirls last June.
Last weekend, hundreds of thousands of people held
candlelight vigils in Seoul, Kwangju and other cities
demanding revisions to the Status of Forces Agreement
that prohibits South Korean courts from trying US
soldiers accused of crimes against Korean civilians.
Significantly, both Roh and Lee called for a
revision of that agreement, as has President Kim. But
the Bush administration has refused, saying at a
US-Korean defense consultation last week that any
proposed changes wouldn't have prevented the accident
that cost the two young girls their lives.
Underlying the public anger is a conviction held
by many South Koreans that US forces are deployed in
Korea not to defend the South but to project US power in
Asia and elsewhere around the world. Many Koreans also
believe that the Bush administration has needlessly
aggravated tensions with North Korea by ridiculing Kim's
Sunshine Policy, labeling the North as part of an "axis
of evil" and, more recently, refusing to engage in
dialogue with Pyongyang over missile exports, a
non-aggression treaty and its attempts to restart its
nuclear weapons program.
"Bush is a
trigger-happy man," a 32-year-old voter in Seoul told
the Associated Press on election day. "We need a leader
who can say no when we think we should say no. Our
country has been too subservient to the United States."
Many people in the crowds protesting the verdicts on the
two US soldiers told reporters they want their
government to reconsider the presence of the 37,000 US
troops in the country.
The distance between US
and Korean perceptions was sharply drawn by a recent
poll on global attitudes towards the United States
conducted by the Pew Research Center. In Asia, "South
Korea stands out for its opposition to the war on
terrorism and its belief that the United States pays
little attention to Seoul's concerns", the center
reported last month.
According to the poll, 72
percent of Koreans oppose the US-led war on terrorism,
with only 24 percent in support; in Japan, those figures
were almost reversed, with 32 percent opposed to the war
and 61 percent in favor. Of all the Asian countries
polled, South Koreans also had the highest number of
people, 73 percent, who reject the view that US foreign
policy considers the interests of other countries.
During the campaign, Roh took up the banner of
Koreans who want changes in the relationship with the
United States, while Lee firmly held to the view that
South Korea and the United States should be closely
aligned. Echoing the views of many Bush administration
officials and US commentators, Lee called Kim's Sunshine
Policy a "failed policy of appeasement" and said he
would halt economic exchanges until the nuclear issue
was resolved.
"We should not entrust the nation
to unstable, premature and radical forces," Lee said
this week, using language that echoed charges leveled by
establishment figures against Kim when he ran for
president in the 1980s. At another campaign appearance,
he said, "North Korea's nuclear program must be stopped,
and inter-Korean relations should be dealt with on the
basis of reciprocity."
Roh, in contrast, said he
would continue talking with the North and carry on the
economic projects under way and argued that South Korea
should adopt a more independent course in foreign policy
than in the past. In a comment that was widely
publicized in the US press, he declared that "I don't
have any anti-American sentiment, but I won't kowtow to
the Americans, either."
In a debate this week,
Roh noted that the 1994 crisis with North Korea, when
the administration of Bill Clinton came close to
launching a preemptive attack on the North's nuclear
facilities, was almost entirely a US affair. "We almost
went to the brink of war in 1993 with North Korea, and
at the time we didn't even know it," he said. "We don't
want to become spectators again. In the old days, we
were not able to solve our problems ourselves. Now it is
different. We should say with confidence what we want
and what we demand."
And in a statement that led
Chung Mong-joon, the Hyundai executive and soccer
fanatic, to abandon his alliance with Roh, the winning
candidate said he would mediate between Washington and
Pyongyang in a future crisis, saying, "If the United
States and North Korea start a fight, we should dissuade
them." Chung was also reportedly stung by Roh's comment
that a Chung run for the presidency in 2007 might be
premature and his promises on the campaign trail to
reform Hyundai and other chaebol.
It was no
secret in Washington that the Bush administration was
hoping for Lee to win the election and heal the breach
between it and the Kim government on how to deal with
North Korea. In public, however, the administration took
a neutral stance, and on Thursday congratulated Roh on
his victory.
"We look forward to working closely
with Roh and his administration," said State Department
spokeswoman Amanda Batt. "President-elect Roh has
expressed his firm commitment to the US-ROK [Republic of
Korea] relationship and we are no less committed," she
said. "We view his election as an opportunity for us to
work with him and his government to build an even
stronger relationship for this new century."
But
in the days leading up to the election, the
administration and supporters of its policy toward North
Korea made sure that South Korean voters understood that
the United States intends to take a strong stand towards
Pyongyang no matter who is in the Blue House.
On
Tuesday, Richard Perle, the hawkish chairman of the
Pentagon Defense Policy Board, told the conservative
daily Chosun Ilbo that the US government has not
eliminated the option of using force against North Korea
to stop its nuclear program. "The Bush administration
will consider all the alternatives, because the dangers
involved are so substantial," he said. Perle added that
"the dangers to be brought upon us by North Korea's
nuclear development is so great that it will result in a
quarantine of unprecedented comprehensiveness". That is
quite a contrast to Roh's policies of continuing
economic exchanges with the North as the dispute is
settled through diplomatic means.
Also this
week, the Washington Times reported that the US Defense
Intelligence Agency informed a visiting delegation from
the Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff that North Korea had
carried out more than 70 high-explosive tests related to
its nuclear program. That information was clearly
designed to show that the North's program was far more
advanced than has been reported in the US or South
Korean press.
Recently, Marcus Noland, an
economist with the Institute for International Economics
and a major critic of North Korea, told Agence
France-Presse that a Roh victory in South Korea would
create a foreign-policy dilemma for the Bush
administration. "They would not be on the same page
strategically as to what they want to see towards the
North or even tactically," he said. "I think the Bush
administration would face, from its own standpoint, a
very unpleasant situation in which it has its main ally
undercutting its policy."
Clearly without a
major shift in US attitudes and policy toward Korea and
a corresponding effort by South Koreans to understand
the dynamics of US foreign policy, the United States and
South Korea could soon be as estranged as the Soviet
Union's former satellites in East Germany, Poland and
Hungary were from their Cold War master. And at a time
when US officials and some conservatives in Japan are
openly contemplating the possibility of armed conflict
with North Korea unless it ends its nuclear program,
that possibility could be very dangerous indeed.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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