The Death of an Alliance, Part 49: The Perception Gap

[Update: The U.S. and Korean authorities are now denying that the Humphreys move is on hold. The Commanding General of the USFK admits that “minor adjustments” may be necessary, but that they can be “easily handled within the framework of the current plan.” H/t GI Korea]

It begins with the apparent perception that Roh Moo Hyun could expect a state dinner or a 21-gun salute. I guess he perceived wrong:

Unlike the incumbent, former presidents Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung were treated to the full honors in the U.S., the former in 1995 and the latter in 1998, respectively, according to the Foreign Ministry.

A state visitor merits a welcome ceremony, host country officials greet him inside the plane and an honor salute is fired, the treatment symbolizing the amicable relations between the two countries. Working visits pass without such courtesies.

Generally, a president invites the head of another country for a state visit only once during his tenure. Pundits say Bush may have felt he has done his duty by inviting Kim Dae-jung on a state visit, whose administration he thought Roh directly inherited.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon’s impeccable diplomatic spidey-sense tells him that something may be amiss:

Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon on Friday admitted to “perception gaps” between the Korean and American people. The chief diplomat was speaking at a forum by a group of veteran journalists at the Korea Press Center about the planned bilateral summit on Sept. 14. “Once created, such perception gaps are hard to dispel,” Ban said. “No matter how hard we try to explain in words, in writing or via official briefings, they are difficult to remove and we must urgently get rid of them first.

… and in his next breath, Ban said this:

“When we withdraw wartime operational control of our troops from the U.S., it will contribute to creating a positive environment where we can discuss a peace framework on the peninsula” with the North. Asked about the possibility of North Korea conducting a nuclear test, he said, “We started to review action plans to prepare for any nuclear test by Pyongyang. I’m willing to go to Pyongyang if it would be of any help to deal with the situation.

Ban is absolutely right about the gap in perceptions between the U.S. and Korea, and to prove his point, he spits out this splendid example. The truly unbridgeable gap, however, is within the minds of Ban and his colleagues. I honestly have no idea what Korea reasonably expects. South Korea claims to want a strong alliance (the foundation of which would have to be unity of command) to protect it from North Korea. It simultaneously demands to “withdraw” control over its forces to create a “positive environment” for what vaguely sounds like some sort of coalition government with North Korea (with a North Korean defense minister?). Simply stated, South Korea seems to see North Korea as both a threat to be deterred by maintaining closeness to America and a friend to be appeased by creating distance from America. I both respect and favor South Korea assuming full responsibility for its own defense as quickly as a realistic assessment of threats and budgets allows, but this government doesn’t seem capable of either.

While we’re on the subject of the alliance, let the great, bloody Battle of the Hump end with these words: “Never mind!”

The U.S. has shelved plans to move its forces headquarters in Korea from Seoul’s Yongsan to Pyeonbgtaek after deciding to cede sole wartime operational control of Korean troops to Seoul, it emerged Thursday. The handover will make changes to the “master plan” for moving the base inevitable since it will mean dissolving Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command.

[….]

“The plans for the Pyeongtaek base were worked out on the premise that the CFC would be maintained for a substantial period,” the source said. “But if the Korean military ends up exercising independent wartime control, the CFC will be dissolved and one of the main buildings at the Pyeongtaek base will not be needed, so a reworking of the plans seems in order.” In April, the USFK said the building, with Korean-style roofs, would house the CFC, USFK Command and UN Command.

Somewhere, a girl daddy never loved is looking for a life. Again.

the farmers’ dream, to dig up the installation with their trowels – that’s going to happen. and i’m going to see it. we’re going to do it together, damnit, if we all have to dig it up with our fingernails. the end of empire is near. i can taste it. and the taste is sweet.

I would have guessed it was just the bong resin under there, but I digress from a serious point here. I’ve never been unsympathetic to the people whose homes and farms were actually destroyed to make way for this base expansion, which South Korea had insisted all along was essential. Now, after moving those people off their land, knocking down their houses, plowing their fields under, and giving the anti-American left yet another reason to demonize Uncle Sam, we have come to the point of realizing that at least part of it was for nothing. Since the U.S. and South Korean sides had a long and acrimonious negotiation over each pyong of land the U.S. claimed it would need for the Humphreys expansion, I have to wonder when it occurred to the South Koreans to raise the issue of “withdrawal” of wartime command. This leads to yet another perception gap.

There are two possibilities here — either the Pentagon knew the Combined Forces Command was headed for the scrap heap, or it didn’t. Start with the first possibility. To say that the Pentagon knew there would be no CFC by 2012 requires you to believe that it planned to build a huge HQ building that it would use for five years, tops. Even this requires you to believe that the Pentagon accepted the longer Korean timetable for handover, although everything I’ve read suggests that the Pentagon has consistently demanded a much shorter timetable, ending no later than 2009. The Pentagon could not have known that the very command it was spending millions of dollars to house would cease to exist before its furniture was delivered. The Koreans obviously didn’t tell us, which causes you to wonder what they knew, and when they knew it. Either Korea decided to press the wartime control issue just recently, after both sides had negotiated the Humphreys relocation down to the last pyeong, or they planned to take back wartime control all along but lied to us, perhaps to get us to pay for as much of the construction and relocation costs as possible. I prefer to believe that the Korean side rammed through the Hump expansion plan and then, belatedly, characteristically, and incompetently, decided to press for “withdrawal,” which they must have known would mean the effective termination of the CFC. You have to wonder how much of this expansion and movement to Humphreys the Pentagon would have even requested had we known those facts all along. Either way, it shows the Korean government’s callousness toward the residents who were unnecessarily uprooted.