Seoul rethinks US's marching
orders By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - The United States and South
Korea face the prospect of fresh negotiations to
strengthen their longstanding alliance almost
immediately after president-elect Lee Myung-bak's
inauguration in Seoul on February 25.
Just
as US defense planners were getting used to the
idea of downsizing the military relationship,
broadening South Korean responsibilities, Lee and
his aides and advisers want to go into reverse.
With North Korea seen as not likely to do much if
anything to downsize its own military
establishment, they hope to undo what they see as
the damage done the alliance during a decade of
left-leaning leadership under under Kim Dae-jung
and his successor, outgoing president Roh
Moo-hyun.
Lee signaled the shift in
strategy and outlook by sending a most
unusual emissary to
Washington last week to open a new chapter in
US-Korean relations. The visitor was Chung
Mong-joon, whose 11% stake in Hyundai Heavy
Industries, the world's largest producer of
commercial ships, has made him probably South
Korea's richest man.
Chung, representing
the Hyundai industrial enclave of Ulsan for years
in the Korean National Assembly, was in Washington
ostensibly to lay the groundwork for the first
summit in March between Lee and President George W
Bush, but the visit had much broader implications
as evident in a handwritten note from Lee to Bush
in which Lee expressed the wish to bolster the
alliance.
Chung, after presenting the
note, spent 20 minutes chatting with Bush during
which Bush invited Lee to call on him in March for
a meeting that is likely to be considerably more
than just a polite welcoming handshake. Chung in
turn asked if Bush could swing over to Seoul to
see Lee during the Group of Eight summit of
leading economic powers in Hokkaido, Japan, in
July.
As the socially most adept of the
five surviving sons of the founder of the Hyundai
empire, Chung Ju-yung, Chung Mong-joon may have
been too polite to get down to details of the
US-Korean relationship.
His visit,
however, indicates the desire in Washington and
Seoul to overcome differences that have strained
relations between the US and South Korea in recent
years. Chung elaborated somewhat after seeing the
deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, whose
record from his early days as a political
secretary in the old US Embassy in Saigon (now Ho
Chi Minh City) to US ambassador to Iraq to overall
chief of intelligence in the White House has been
that of a hardline pragmatist. There had, Chung
remarked, been "unnecessary misunderstandings" of
late due to lack of "prior consultation".
The real question for both the US and
South Korea remains how tough to get with North
Korea while the North shows no sign of itemizing
its nuclear inventory, as promised in six-nation
talks, and refuses to acknowledge the existence of
a program for developing warheads with highly
enriched uranium.
Holder of a doctorate in
international economics from Johns Hopkins
University, Chung himself has appeared somewhat
uncertain as to his real diplomatic orientation. A
political independent in Korea's fractious
National Assembly, he was briefly a candidate for
nomination for president in 2002, then threw his
support to Roh Moo-hyun, only to withdraw it
before Roh's election. Though not a hardliner,
Chung evinced little interest in Roh's eagerness
to extend aid and other concessions to the North
in exchange for words on paper.
It's
unlikely that either Bush or Chung would have
criticized Roh's policies in their meeting, but
the subtext had to have emerged in Chung's
conversation with US National Security Adviser
Stephen Hadley, in whose office Bush showed up for
the carefully staged "drop-by" encounter with
Chung. Just as important, Chung also saw Vice
President Dick Cheney, whose tough outlook on
North Korea has been largely muted while the US
pursues reconciliation.
The avowal on all
sides of the need to "strengthen the alliance"
assumes special significance in view of problems
ever since Kim Dae-jung called on Bush at the
White House at the outset of Bush's first term as
president seven years ago.
It was during
that infamous encounter that Bush expressed
"skepticism" about the possibilities of verifying
any agreement with North Korea's leader Kim
Jong-il.
Much criticized for appearing to
alienate an ally, Bush eventually shifted gears,
approving moves toward reconciliation in six-party
talks under which North Korea agreed finally to
abandon its nuclear program in return for vast
quantities of aid. At the same time, South Korean
leaders showed increasing reluctance to cooperate
militarily with the US even as Donald Rumsfeld,
then US defense secretary, came out with plans for
substantially decreasing the US military role.
South Korean conservatives, led by Lee,
now want to return to the status quo ante - that
is, the previous relationship of close
cooperation, and Chung is believed to have gotten
into more details when he called on US Defense
Secretary Robert Gates.
One especially
sensitive issue focuses on revision of the plan
under which South Korea is to assume command of
all allied forces in the event of a second Korean
war. Roh's closest advisers made this transfer of
command a priority, decrying the longstanding
agreement for the US to take charge in time of war
as an insult to national sovereignty, an assault
on independence. They were in close alliance with
South Korean leftists demanding nothing less than
the complete withdrawal of all US troops and
abrogation of the US-Korea alliance.
The
conservative Lee is asking to postpone the
transfer of war-time command, just as he wants to
put off Roh's plan for reducing the number of
South Korean troops, at 650,000 or so far fewer
than North Korea's 1.1 million-man military
establishment.
The US, downsizing its own
troop levels in South Korea from 37,000 several
years ago to 29,000, on the way to a bare minimum
of 20,000, agreed after much debate to transfer
war-time command by 2012. In fact, having accepted
the need to go along with the outlook of the Roh
administration, US planners wanted the transfer to
happen by 2010. Korean defense officials,
overwhelmed by the intricacies of the transition,
said they needed more time.
Chung
acknowledged during his visit the difficulties of
canceling a plan that took much time to develop.
Nonetheless, he also warned against sending "the
wrong message" to North Korea by doing away with a
command structure in effect ever since the Korean
War.
If a second Korean war were to break
out, the US would have to take charge of a vast
infusion of air and naval power and bring in much
new armor and artillery. South Korea, however,
would supply most of the ground forces, at least
initially. Lee, in his initial meetings with Bush,
hopes to restore rapport that's been lost - and
that Korean military planners will be sorely
needed if the six-party process finally breaks
down regardless of who's actually in command.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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