Won Joon Choe in the WSJ, on the ROK-U.S. Alliance

Won Joon Choe kindly forwarded the following essay, which was published in The Wall Street Journal just before the Roh-Bush meeting at the White House. Because it mainly deals with long-term trends in the alliance, I don’t consider it dated. Obviously, I don’t agree with everything Won Joon says, but he makes his case thoughtfully and cogently.

Today’s summit between President George W. Bush and his South Korean counterpart Roh Moo Hyun brings two interwoven foreign-policy crises to center stage. The first crisis involves North Korea’s announcement that it has nuclear weapons. And the second crisis limits the Bush administration’s options in dealing with this first crisis, because it involves the decay of the alliance between the U.S. and South Korea.

Although it’s a mistake to see this decay as irreversible, there’s understandable pessimism about the future of the alliance. That’s because Mr. Roh, a leftist whom the local press dubs the “reformist dictator,” is a man America has great difficulty doing business with. He won the presidency by exploiting an ugly wave of anti-Americanism following the accidental death of two teenagers in a collision with a U.S. military vehicle.

On the eve of his Dec. 2002 victory, Mr. Roh laid bare his true intentions by brazenly declaring that he would maintain neutrality in the event of a war between the U.S. and North Korea. His latest foreign policy initiative reflects that, by casting South Korea in the role of a “Northeast Asian balancer” — which could see Seoul siding with China against the U.S. in some circumstances.

Mr. Roh’s foreign policy clashes most discordantly with American interests over North Korea, where he has embraced his predecessor Kim Dae Jung’s “Sunshine Policy” of one-sided concessions toward Pyongyang. That’s based on the fallacious notion that, rather than being a belligerent totalitarian menace, North Korea is simply an ordinary state that is only developing nuclear weapons in order to protect itself.

That hamstrings the Bush administration’s options when it comes to North Korea. While there is debate regarding the wisdom of military strikes, there is little debate that Seoul’s cooperation would be necessary to launch them. The military option was on the table during a prior nuclear crisis in 1994 because then President Kim Young Sam, a lifelong anti-communist, would have gone along with launching pre-emptive strikes against Pyongyang. But it is inconceivable that Mr. Roh would do so today. His bankrolling of Pyongyang also makes it far more difficult to impose workable economic sanctions.

Seoul’s cozying up to Pyongyang may also frustrate what many in the Bush administration officials regard as the best remaining alternative: relying on China to pressure North Korea. According to Park Jin, a prominent opposition parliamentarian, a Chinese diplomat recently complained that Seoul’s appeasement emboldens Pyongyang and renders it less amenable to Beijing’s influence.

The Bush administration’s policy on North Korea will continue to be plagued by problems so long as Mr. Roh and his allies remain in power. But that should not be allowed to induce a pervasive fatalism that South Korea is already a lost cause and prevent the Bush administration from reaching out to its wayward ally.

Such fatalism is fueled by the myth of a “generational shift” in South Korean politics, a myth which finds an unthinking acceptance among many foreign observers. According to this myth, the elections of Mr. Roh and his predecessor Mr. Kim represent the emergence of a new, permanent political majority in South Korea. Often referred to as the “386” generation, this new majority is said to be young, leftist, anti-American, and pro-Chinese.

The reality is there is no such new majority. Rather than an ideological realignment, Messrs. Roh and Kim owe their victories to the failure of the conservatives to coalesce around a single candidate who could defeat them. The conservative candidate Lee Hoi Chang would have beaten Mr. Kim by a landslide in the 1997 presidential election had former provincial governor Rhee In Je not bolted from Mr. Lee’s party to run on his own. Again in 2002, a third candidate split the conservative vote. Chung Mong Jun, a pro-American industrialist, initially stood as a third candidate and then pledged his support to Mr. Roh in a most bizarre ideological alliance.

Nor is anti-Americanism or pro-Chinese sentiment so deep-seated among the young. Attitudes toward America and China are far more complex, and often vacillate wildly depending on the political news of the day. For instance, pro-Chinese fervor cooled dramatically during the recent rhetorical tussle over Beijing’s claims that the ancient kingdom of Koguryo was actually part of China.

In fact, the recent incarnation of anti-Americanism in South Korea is a product of government propaganda. The Roh government and its allies have done their best to fan suspicions of the U.S., while striving to keep the true character of the North’s monstrous regime hidden from view.

Mr. Roh’s effort to re-educate the South Korean public sometimes eerily mimics the methods used by Pyongyang. His intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Service, routinely intimidates those who would speak out against the abuses of Kim Jong Il’s regime, including North Korean defectors and foreign humanitarian aid workers such as Dr. Vollertsen. Perhaps more shocking, Mr. Roh’s Uri Party recently ram through a “media reform” law designed to limit the circulation of the opposition newspapers that are critical of his appeasement policy.

All that can be countered by engaging the Roh government in a struggle for the hearts of the South Korean people. The Bush administration can seek to speak directly to ordinary South Koreans about the horrors of Kim Jong Il’s gulag state, explain why the world cannot allow it to possess nuclear arms, and also remind South Koreans of how their alliance with the U.S. has protected them for more than half a century.

America taught South Korea’s long oppressed people to yearn for the intoxicating beauty of freedom. And President Bush could do no better than to remind them of the fragility of freedom, and that freedom’s preservation requires unblinking courage in the face of those who would seek to trample it.

Mr. Choe is a commentator on Korean politics and a former associate at the law firm of Allen & Overy.

I’m also reading another of Won Joon’s pieces that should be published in the near future, and hope it will start a good discussion about where the alliance should go in the future. For now, I believe that we should remove all ground forces that aren’t needed to protect two airbases (Osan and Kunsan) and two naval bases (Pohang and Chinhae) . . . about four battalions under ordinary circumstances. I’d give favorable consideration to the Army keeping floating stocks of equipment in those harbors.

Let’s see if Won Joon can nudge me. Or if I can nudge him.