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Who will defend South Korea? And why?

Even as President Lee’s government stokes fears of another North Korean attack, we’re seeing a steady stream of reporting that he may drop his demand that North Korea apologize for the attacks of 2010 before there would be any direct bilateral talks. So far, Lee has thrown cold water on those reports, all of them anonymous and all of them seemingly indicative of some internal debate in the ROK government. Here’s the latest such report.

That this should be a matter of debate is hard for me to fathom — and I hope you’ll forgive the choice of that word. If the premeditated murders of 46 South Korean sailors, four of its civilians, and a village don’t even rate a simple apology, it’s hard to see why any young South Korean would put his life on the line to be the next sacrifice. Yes, soldiers implicitly accept the risk of the sacrifice of their lives, but that is not a forfeiture of their honor, or the value of their humanity. And for all the talk about his supposed hard-line positions, one precondition President Lee has never quite attached to Kim Jong Il’s money supply is the return of several hundred South Korean POW’s the North has been holding since 1953. In some ways, much too little has changed since the shameful days of Roh Moo Hyun.

All of this sends a powerful, if indirect, message about the value South Korea attaches to the lives of the young men who defend it. It might just be that a few of those young men have gotten that message:

In a sign that the country might be failing to instill patriotism into the minds of young people, about 44%, or 892 students, said they would “flee the country” if a war with North Korea broke out. Only 15% said they would “join the war or help the country in other ways.

Funny, their World Cup cheering section sure sounded brave.

Perhaps I’m making this more complicated than it really is. Maybe 44% of young Koreans are just cowards, typical shallow kids, or — God forbid — hippies. I doubt that many of them have given the matter serious thought. I suppose it’s ultimately up to the people of South Korea to elect a government worth dying to defend, and then deciding to put their lives on the line to defend it. Most of this is a matter for the Korean people to settle for themselves, but then you wonder: if they could run, where do you suppose they would run? And why do young South Koreans assume they would be able to run? Who do they assume will be guarding their backs as they board the planes they assume will fly, from airports they assume won’t be under fire? Do they assume that their inalienable right to spend “their” war guess-where will be defended by other Koreans of lower class and status? Or is the assumption that the Americans will bear this burden? Does it serve America’s interests, or South Korea’s, that so many Koreans harbor such false hopes and assumptions, and fail to understand that it is they who must preserve what distinguishes their lives from the wretchedness of Chongjin? My standing to object to these assumptions begins when the Second Infantry Division fights to hold Munsan while the flower of Korea’s youth flees to Irvine. As a practical matter, of course, that isn’t going to happen, but it’s worth asking why so many young Koreans expect it to.

The problem I continue to see with too many young South Koreans is that they’ve built dependency on America into their calculations about national and personal survival. Perhaps some know that one infantry brigade isn’t enough to stop the North Korean army, and that large-scale reinforcements are by no means assured in this political climate, but I doubt it. I suspect that the very visibility of our military presence in Korea reinforces Korea’s sense of dependency more than it reinforces South Korea’s defense. For all of the nationalism Korea has exhibited in recent years, it still suffers from an insufficiency of self-confident independence (in fact, I doubt that these things are unrelated). To change this attitude, South Korea will have to invest in a modern, professional army in which its people can invest their sense of security and their national pride. But the temptation to appease North Korea remains an impediment to this, because at the core of a professional army is a culture of respect for every young man and woman who serves in its ranks. In a professional army, the life of every young soldier must be considered priceless, and the taking of each life is a potential casus belli.

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13 Responses

  1. It seems to me that the issue is more of a failure to recognize North Korea as an enemy. The same article you cited identifed Japan as their greatest enemy.

    “Asked to name South Korea’s jujeok (main enemy), 687 chose Japan, more than twice as many as the 341 people who chose North Korea. The U.S. was a close third, at 307”

    Since hippies also hate the U.S., I’d tend to favor the Hippie conclusion. Given that hippies are also cowards, It could also be just a matter of degree.

  2. I wouldn’t read too much into this poll. There’s a reason why kids don’t reach age of majority until their late teens: kids don’t think critically, they oversimplify, and they fail to properly grasp and appreciate complex concepts like war. Although technically South Korean teens live in an active war zone, the idea of fighting and the attendant disruption to their lives probably seems as remote and unreal to them as a fairy tale. More indicative of South Korean attitudes would be a poll of people aged 20 to 40.

  3. “and that large-scale reinforcements are by no means assured in this political climate”

    I don’t know. I don’t see how any American president and Congress could not jump into a war with at least one foot if not both in the event the North launched a full-scale invasion.

    The tripwire still exists. As long as we have fighting forces north of the Han and within easy reach of North Korea, American soldiers are going to be some of the first to die in any general military attack, and that means we’ll have to fight full on…

  4. milton, whats scary is that Korean youth only less than 40 miles north of Seoul also lack critical thinking skills…

    Yet succeed in being human Computers when it comes to Juche.

  6. I believe you are discounting the effect of the leftist teachers of SK in causing the lack of patriotism in the South. If you allow a leftist to poison the mind of a ten year old you will find it very hard to get that child to every think right again. That is why 40% of SK students don’t think NK torpedoed the Cheonan. The south korean left can get millions of koreans out in the street to oppose american beef or the accidential death of korean students, while a handful of eighty year men try to defend the US. It is time for the US to kick south korea under the bus and that is only if we can’t find a nuclear powered steam roller. Korea gets to sell a million cars in the US and we get to sell 5,000 cars in the south. The US spend over a trillion dollars a year on defense as we go broke and the middle and working class people in America are destroyed. While North Korea is first on the list of countries needing regime change I would say the US is second.

  7. The youth hate the Japanese not for political reasons, but because of the large number of Japanese trolls who post rude comments on Korean portals and websites. If you go to any Korean portal site, or even Korean youtube videos, then there are many Japanese trolls who post things like “Korea is dirty” and “Korea is inferior.”

    The Korean youth are at age when they don’t care about politics, and only care about their social media websites and portals.

  8. Dennis, I will repeat this mainly because it is very very funny but a girl from a very serious korean university said the Cheonan was sunk by the Americans as revenge for Kim Yuna winning gold. She unfortunately wasn’t joking and neither was my wife when she declared that she just wanted the government to tell her the truth about what happened.

    As for my personal, ancedotal experience most koreans don’t seem to care about North Korea one way or the other.

  9. I tend to agree with Milton on this, a more interesting poll would have been to see what the attitudes of people 20-40 are since they would be serving or would have served in the ROK military and hopefully had more patriotism instilled into them from their service.

  10. Sadly, I think you would find a poll with a similar demographic taken in any “blue” state in the US (and several purple and red ones) to have even more extreme numbers than this one in Korea. The leftists teaching establishment in the US is even more deeply rooted, and has made great strides in teaching that all political and cultural systems are equal, and that being more powerful or free than your neighbor is provocative, and you “deserve what you get”.
    Despite ample and direct evidence form the 50’s, South Koreans cannot believe that the Norks mean them any harm. Even some of my in-laws distrust the US more than the Norks, despite the fact that their grand father was hunted by the Norks in the war, and my mother in law has no hearing in her left ear, thanks to the butt of a Nork rifle.
    A huge percentage of problems in the world would be solved if people could look past accidents of birth, like bloodlines, and pay more attention to the “content of character” of other people.

  12. It said he went ballistic for VERBAL abuse…

    How many hundreds of thousands of Korean draftees over the last few decades have withstood physical abuse and not harmed a fly? (And how many today withstand physical or verbal abuse without doing so?)

    This is one of the most pathetic items I’ve read in awhile.

    Destroying 4 families (and murdering 4 individuals) because of verbal abuse….