The Death of an Alliance, Part Somethingorother (Actually, 22)

I just don’t know how long I can make this delicious agony last.

In any event, once everyone else starts to declare a trend to be so, spotting it loses a lot of the fun and most of the originality. The death certificate won’t have been signed until we announce a timetable for withdrawing the bulk of our people, but Roh Moo Hyun’s visit seems to have reminded everyone that it’s time to start fighting over the choice of the casket and burial plot. All of this has been observed by the all-seeing eyes of the Chosun Ilbo, who I often suspect of downplaying things that worry them while exaggerating things that really only hurt Roh Moo-Hyun. This week, they seem to be downplaying.

First up, the Christian Science Monitor with a news article under the Op-Ed-sounding headline, “Untying the Korean Knot:”

“The core of the US-South Korea alliance is North Korea, and the fact that [the two countries] see the issue very differently is what stands out,” says Derek Mitchell, an Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But beyond North Korea are other sources of tension…. The US is questioning what it is getting out of the alliance, and that makes South Korea nervous.”

The article goes on to suggest that Bush and Roh are unlikely to agree to see other people and split up the CD collection for now. This meeting is more likely to focus on immediate problems with North Korea. It sounds like Kremlinology to me, and I can wait a week or so to find out.

Next up, Jasper Becker, who’s quickly becoming my favorite author whose book I haven’t yet had time to read. Becker has a very powerful piece in the New York Times today entitled “Dancing With the Dictator,” and I consider this entire piece a must-read, even if I think that post-Kim Jong Il North Korea will be a great deal harder to digest than Becker does. Like the ROK government, I think reunification will be extraordinarily costly. I just don’t happen to agree that having to give up Prada handbags and kimchee refrigerators justifies pitching the North Korean people into the furnace. On the latter sentence, Becker and I are in seamless lockstep:

[B]eyond the economic factors, we must consider the moral ones. South Korea is seeking to keep a tyrant in power against the wishes of his own people. At 63, Kim Jong Il has spent a lifetime in a paranoid and claustrophobic dictatorship. If he were going to become a reformer, we would surely know it by now. And even if against all odds he undertook reforms, he is still personally responsible for a manmade famine that has killed 3 million people over the last decade. Would Pol Pot have been given a second chance if he had vowed to open Cambodia’s markets?

Rather than coddling Kim Jong Il and paying him nuclear blackmail, we should be working to arraign him before an international criminal tribunal, just as we did with the murdering leaders of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. . . .

Mr. Becker has earned himself a free pint for that one, redeemable on demand by the bearer of this note. I also have some experience at drafting charges.

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And it gets better–so good that several Korean government ministries are denying that this was even said (while some officials are privately admitting it). Undersecretary of Defense Richard Lawless, a man whose dog has been kicked by the Koreans before, appears to have been very blunt about his opinion of this “balancer” concept.

Reports said U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Richard Lawless threatened Korea during a visit to Seoul on Sunday to Monday, saying the country’s strategic value was finished, and if it failed to accept American demands, the U.S. forces in Korea could be withdrawn. Reports also have Lawless visiting the Korean Embassy in Washington on May 31 and telling Korean ambassador Hong Seok-hyun, “Korea’s Northeast Asian balancer role is a concept that cannot coexist with the Korea-U.S. alliance. If you’d like to change the alliance, say so anytime. We’ll do as you like.”

You know that you’ve stayed too long when you suggest moving your armies from a faraway nation, which then calls it a “threat.” Lest you think me a mere ankle-biting diplomatic ghoul, I will repeat that I’ve married into the Korean family. I confess to some schadenfreude for the rock-chucking recreational lefty activists who can’t get jobs when they graduate because they’re driving out all the foreign investment, and I want the evidence of Uri’s mismanagement of Korea to be manifest to all. At the same time, I want these things to happen–and I want them to happen dramatically–because I that’s the only way there will ever be a backlash from this bizarre experiment in statecraft.

Freedom and prosperity too easily gained have ways of boring some people to tears. Literally. That may partially explain why things may get worse, and why it may be for reasons we can’t control, or control enough. There’s never a short supply of reasons to hate America for those sufficiently determined to find them. If we aren’t having traffic accidents one day, Congress will hold hearings on whether the wind carried an errant drop of soldier-piss onto a head-chopper’s sacred slaughter-thy-neighbor text the next (here’s a concept: take away the Korans and give them copies of Dianetics!). This week, we learned that the people who can’t see the real gulags next door are often the most visionary in making up fake ones. And if defending ourselves from attempted genocide makes us unpopular, we have to wonder whether it’s the attempt’s lack of success that has some people so damned irritated. The last time Le Monde said “We Are All Americans,” thousands of Americans were laying dead in smoldering heaps. And if that’s what we have to do to make Le World like us, then F-Le-W. The only known cure for that special pathology is to experience actual poverty, repression, and terrorism, things not everyone lives long enough to describe to the rest of the kaffee klatsch. If that’s the case, better to get out with as few losses as possible now. That might free us up to concentrate on engineering a moderately controlled (political) detonation of North Korea before North Korea engineers the (actual) detonation of Seattle.

I happen to take a fairly negative view about the state of Korea’s anti-Americanism and ambivalence about human rights and democracy. From this, I suspect that it will take a mighty zap from Life’s Great Shock Collar to turn those matters around. If relations have a chance of getting better–and do I think they have a chance–it’s going to be because Korea rediscovers some commonality of interests and values with us; something they’re unlikely to realize until they conclude that the danger of losing them is real, and until both nations’ governments make some effort to define them. That doesn’t mean that we should rebuild our old Cold War-era alliance and keep our ground troops in. Those days should have passed years ago. But I do think that having a small-yet-expandable U.S. air and naval presence in Korea is good for both countries’ long-term interests, as long as Korea remembers who owns the planes. Above all, it means that good leaders need to persuade both peoples that there is a reason for an alliance to exist. I humbly suggest that these might include the preservation of democracy and the reunification of Korea as a strong and independent nation.

Of course, nothing would do more wonders for the US-Korean relationship than the addition of 22 million needy new voters with the fresh experience of life under dictatorship. And if that could temporarily shift the balance back to the alliance, it will also be accompanied by grave challenges and very high costs.

All of which should keep me busy for a few decades, at least.

UPDATE: A little bondo here, a little primer there, and some clear red tape over that busted tail light. Good as new, right?