Korea-US: Swan song for an
alliance By Sung-Yoon Lee
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's
summit with President George W Bush on Thursday is
likely to go down in the annals of US-South Korea
relations as an epoch-making event, but not quite
in the way one might think. It may be the swan
song of the US-South Korea alliance.
Summits between world leaders at times
define an era, as the indelible images of Franklin
D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin
seated together in a row in Yalta in 1945 (and in
Tehran in 1943) remind us
more than 60 years after the event.
At
other times summit handshakes can open up a new
era, as did US president Richard Nixon's with Mao
Zedong in 1972. In most instances, however,
meetings between world leaders tend to be - all
the more when all is well in the bilateral
relationship - pleasant but in essence prosaic
affairs. Out of the public smiles, the toasts, and
the overflowing bonhomie routinely come
less-than-momentous pronouncements by the two
sides such as "reaffirmation of the alliance".
On its face, Roh's meeting with Bush was a
routine, even forgettable exercise in ordinary
summit diplomacy. The two men had already enjoyed
five cordial if unmemorable meetings since Roh's
inauguration in 2003, and neither side issued a
press-stopping communique out of the scheduled
hour-long conversation followed by an obligatory
luncheon.
Nonetheless, Roh's visit may
inadvertently prove to be a defining moment for
the US-South Korea alliance, presaging its sunset,
for beneath the public smiles and handshakes
between the two leaders and optimistic-sounding
but inscrutable pronouncements, such as seeking a
"joint comprehensive approach" to restarting the
six-party talks, unmistakably flowed an
undercurrent of unfriendly distrust.
The
alliance has proved to be one of the most
successful and durable in the world. But today Roh
wishes to destroy its time-tested dynamics by
wresting away from the United States wartime
operational control of the two countries' armed
forces, the result of which will be the complete
and virtually irreversible dismantlement of the
US-ROK (Republic of Korea) Combined Forces
Command.
This will set the stage, at the
cost of broader US interests in Northeast Asia and
to the detriment of South Korea's security, for
the withdrawal of US troops from Korea. With an
inter-Korean summit pageantry of his own in mind,
Roh has been offering North Korean leader Kim
Jong-il unconditional gifts throughout his
presidency: massive shipments of rice, fertilizer,
and other blandishments. Now it looks as if Roh is
preparing to give the Northern dictator the
ultimate gift of evicting US troops from Korean
territory.
President Roh believes he has
little to lose by insisting on the transfer of
wartime operational control, which he pointedly
defined recently as the "essence of sovereignty
for any nation". A refusal would mean to Roh's
supporters and an emotional South Korean public -
for whom the Northern threat has become a mere
abstraction - reaffirmation of US imperialism and
bellicosity, perhaps even "proof" of long-held
suspicions that the United States secretly wishes
to draw South Korea into a costly war with the
North.
A US consent would chalk up a
milestone in Roh's oft-proclaimed "self-reliant"
foreign and defense policies, with the added bonus
of pleasing the North Korean regime by achieving
on its behalf one of its oldest and most important
policy objectives. Roh could peddle each scenario
at home for political gains in the time leading up
to the South Korean presidential election in
December 2007.
Strains in the alliance are
not unprecedented. The United States has long
viewed South Korean leaders with skepticism when
it came to such matters as political liberalism in
the country or overzealousness on the part of
Seoul's anti-North Korea policy. Fear of being
entrapped by South Korea into fighting a second
Korean War remained very much on the minds of US
leaders throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and even into
the 1970s.
On the other hand, despite
misgivings, successive US presidents in the end
put up with Syngman Rhee's illiberal policies and
belligerence toward the North in the 1950s, Park
Chung-hee's coup d'etat in 1961 and iron-fisted
rule for the next 18 years, and, in more recent
years, even Kim Dae-jung's hopelessly pious
courtship of the North Korean dictatorship. These
South Korean leaders were not perceived to be
willfully challenging the vital national interests
of the United States.
President Roh has
proved to be different from his predecessors.
During his three and a half years in office, Roh
has followed through on his words with actions.
True to his rhetoric, "So what if I am anti-US?"
or "Yes, my anti-US stance has been good to me,"
Roh has unflinchingly and systematically aided the
enemy of the United States - and incontrovertibly
the main enemy of the US Forces in Korea (USFK) -
the totalitarian North Korean state that is bent
on increasing its arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD).
Roh's offering to the
North Korean regime of food, cash and material is
financing its buildup of WMD, with which the North
in turn threatens the the USFK, whose very purpose
is to protect Roh's South Korea from the North.
Such a convoluted reality is comprehensible only
in the theater of the absurd. In the real world of
international politics - especially in light of
America's overarching post-September 11, 2001,
policy of fighting a "war on terror" and
preventing the proliferation of WMD - it is simply
an unacceptable situation.
At no other
time in the history of the bilateral relationship
has a South Korean president with such audacity,
and with such success, manipulated for political
gains anti-American sentiments at home. It has
been proved over the past few years that a direct
correlation exists between President Roh's anti-US
remarks and a spike in his approval ratings. While
resistance or hostility toward the United States
was certainly not confined to South Korea under
President Roh, that the head of a key ally is
directly challenging vital US national interest is
certainly a highly unusual development.
At
the unceremonious meeting with Roh yesterday,
during which both leaders wore a weary look,
President Bush gritted his teeth and did his best
to keep up the pretense that all was well. To his
credit, Bush avoided an open row, concealed the
open fissure in the alliance, and avoided an
explicit endorsement or rejection of any South
Korean-proposed roadmap for the dismantlement of
the US-ROK Combined Forces Command.
Keeping in mind that the issue is a
potential trap for instigating anti-US
demonstrations leading up to South Korea's
presidential election in December next year, Bush
simply intoned that the matter should not become
"a political issue". Bush even deftly took a page
out of the communist playbook of a
"hardliner/softliner" smokescreen, and simply told
his guest that South Korea should take up the
matter with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
South Korean political spinners and
optimists on both sides of the Pacific will
accentuate the common grounds that the two nations
share, such as the intention to jump-start the
six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program,
concluding a free-trade agreement, and South
Korea's support in Iraq. They may have only the
best intentions in mind, but to ignore the ringing
of the death knell is to echo Dr Pangloss's
pontification to Candide on the futility of saving
Jacques as he is washed overboard in the Bay of
Lisbon: "The Bay of Lisbon had been formed
expressly for Jacques to drown in."
To
turn a blind eye to the state of the US-ROK
alliance in its present last breath is tantamount
to musing, "The North Korean nuclear crisis had
been formed expressly to test the US-ROK alliance.
We should just ignore it and sail on." In other
words, it bears no real-life relevance to the crux
of the problem, which is that the alliance is
predicated on the common threat of North Korea.
President Roh has come to Washington and
gone, and the dismantling of the alliance
structure will proceed as planned in the near
term.
Short on conviviality, solidarity or
a meaningfully shared vision for the future, the
meeting's sole significance will lie in its
marking of the end of an era. Unless the South
Korean people are able to persuade Roh to change
course abruptly or vote into office in December
2007 a new leader with a far greater appreciation
for the alliance and the integrity not to scuttle
it for short-term political gain, the meeting on
Thursday between Bush and Roh will be remembered
as the definitive punctuation mark to a long and
once special bilateral relationship.
Dr Sung-Yoon Lee is associate in
research at the Korea Institute, Harvard
University, and a former professor at the Fletcher
School, Tufts University.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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