Elections in the Republic of Korea
By David I Steinberg for Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
Both presidents Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun regarded the US alliance as important, but beginning with the disastrous summit between Presidents Bush and Kim in March 2001, there had been a serious deterioration in bilateral relations. This was mirrored by the growth of "alliance fatigue" in the Pentagon and the anti-American sentiment among elements of the Korean population that was a factor in the election of President Roh.
The US-Korean alliance has been touted as a success in deterring further North Korean aggression. But despite officially sponsored celebrations on its 50th anniversary in 2003-04, there was considerable skepticism whether it would continue or evolve into meaningless platitudes.
From its inception, the alliance has been fraught with disputes that in part stem from different perceptions of each state’s peninsula role and national interests. Historically, the US led the alliance in dealing with North Korea, but with the development of Kim's Sunshine Policy, that role seemed to have been transferred to the Republic. With the revelations of North Korea's cheating on the 1994 Agreed Framework, however, the US resumed leadership. President Lee has an opportunity to ease the alliance's differences on this score.
The national interests of the US and Korea are quite separate. For the US, worldwide control of WMD is its highest priority. Japan is the primary anchor of US relations in East Asia; the Korean peninsula is less important except insofar as North Korea has nuclear technologies and devices that it may provide to other state or non-state actors. In contrast, to South Korea the peninsula is paramount, and worldwide concerns revolve around trade issues. Korea has had as its highest priorities economic engagement with the North and eventual unification, a peace settlement on the peninsula, and to lesser degrees refugee issues.
The US is primarily significant to Korea as a protective shield against a potential threat from North Korea and as a market, even if its primacy as a trade partner has been replaced by China.
An evolving element in its US relations is the informal influence of the US through education and family relations, for there are probably few extended Korean families in which some member does not have a US experience. Where presidential candidate Roh in 2002 said proudly that he had never been to the US, President Lee visited Camp David in April, a symbolic indication of a changed relationship that is much appreciated by many Koreans.
Lee administration promises and programs
Although the conservative parties and factions may split over some of the president's ambitious domestic projects, they are likely to coalesce around a more conservative foreign policy: heightened skepticism toward North Korea and closer relations with the US.
Before taking office in February 2008, Lee laid out a broad, optimistic, and energetic foreign policy agenda. He called for South Korea to attain what he called his "747 vision" - an annual 7 percent growth rate, incomes of US$40,000 (essentially a doubling over 10 years), and an economy the seventh largest in the world (up from 11th or 12th, depending on who’s counting).
He appears to have been elected not just because of dissatisfaction with Roh's generous North Korean assistance policy, but more importantly because of dissatisfaction with economic conditions.
Lee called for a "creative reconstruction of Korean foreign policy." He committed to expanding Korea's Official Development Assistance, to making Korean culture - the "soft power" of the Korean wave - an element of his foreign policy, and to reshaping US relations.
The Korean media has reported that the new administration wants a renegotiation of the 2012 target date for the transformation of the US-Korean Combined Forces Command into two separate but coordinated structures. Roh had sought to have that transfer at the earliest possible date as it was viewed as an infringement on Korean sovereignty; now this might take place as late as 2020.
Lee's agenda also seems to include rebuilding the South Korea-Japan-US triple alliance, resuscitating the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group, and improving Korean-Japanese relations. He has indicated that Japan will no longer have to apologize for the colonial era, and that he would alter the laws instituted by Roh against those who collaborated with the Japanese. He has appointed a recent Korean ambassador to Japan, Yu Myung-hwan, as his foreign minister. He is also positive in describing Chinese relations, and does not want closer ties with Japan to endanger warm Chinese links. He has also called for Korean-supported development projects in Russia.
A major portion of his pre-inauguration program, however, related to North Korea. He characterized past South Korean engagement policies toward the North as failures based on "unilateral appeasement." Although humanitarian assistance and dialogue would continue, he argued, the North should give up its nuclear weapons, have a more reciprocal relationship with the South, and improve its human rights record. His policy would be based on "flexible reciprocity."
Economic relations with the North would expand, and five economic sectors (the economy, finance, education, infrastructure and living conditions) and five economic zones would be assisted with some US$40 billion through an international cooperation fund. His optimism extended to what the North might do to improve its own economy - raising per capita incomes from US$500 to US$3,000 over ten years. This questionable goal (later dismissed by the North) assumed an annual 15-20 percent growth, outstripping past Chinese economic performances by a considerable margin.
Lee's appointment of Han Seung-soo as prime minister - a perennial civil servant and diplomat who once was ambassador to the US - has reassured the US that relations between the two states will improve. But Lee's ability to move forward may be constrained by his party's showing in the April 2008 National Assembly elections.
Lee may have defeated the moderate and further left of the Democratic Labor Party, but he will have also to counter the new Liberty Forward Party on the right, led by former presidential candidate Lee Hoi Chang, who may be even more skeptical than Lee about North Korean intentions, as well as Park Geun-Hye (the daughter of former President Park Chung hee).
Whether this new centrist configuration could together or separately form a political amalgam on foreign policy that could endure in the National Assembly will be closely watched.
In his inaugural address, Lee charged that "at times over the past ten years, we found ourselves faltering and confused," implicitly criticizing the liberal regimes of Kim and Roh. He called for strengthening relations with the US, for peace and prosperity with China, Japan and Russia, and active participation in UN peacekeeping missions. He indicated he would meet with the North Koreans "whenever necessary."
Both the US and Japan have been reassured by Lee's election, although North Korea actively lobbied against the GNP. After the election, North Korea was singularly quiet in that regard for several months, but that has changed into a vituperative attack on Lee as ROK-US relations have improved.
Lee's foreign policy program will in part be hostage to a number of external factors: in the US, anti-free trade sentiment and concerns among conservatives related to North Korean intentions to denuclearize; and stalemate on the issue of kidnapped Japanese.
Internal heritages
Lee was elected not only because there was dissatisfaction with the government's policies toward North Korea, but perhaps primarily because of dissatisfaction with the state of the Korean economy and the thought that Lee, as a former Hyundai executive and mayor of Seoul who improved some of the downtown Seoul landscape, was best equipped to improve Korea's growth, which depends on its exports. Economic growth, although relatively high by OECD standards (growth was 4.9 percent in 2007), has fallen short of Korean experience and expectations.
China has replaced the US as its prime trading partner, and there are some 800,000 South Koreans in China either living or doing business there, in addition to some two million ethnic Koreans in the Korean Autonomous Region in Manchuria bordering North Korea. Foreign investment into Korea has faltered as increases in the value of the won concern exporters.
While US trade and economic ties remain important for Korea (and for the US, since Korea is its seventh largest trading partner and the fourth largest importer of US agricultural commodities), psychological dependence on the US in economic terms has apparently waned with greater Korean self-confidence and the increased importance of China.
There is still ambivalence toward the US: an emotional dependence on it in security terms, primarily among the elderly, and self-assertiveness among youth. Many older Koreans have doubts about the intelligence-collecting capacities of the Korean forces and their ability to handle even the markedly reduced threat from the North, while youth generally do not believe that the North would ever again attack the South. This internal dichotomy is critical to the future of the alliance.
The planned withdrawal of US forces from Yongsan in downtown Seoul, long a sore, has been a welcome change, although expansion of the US base at Pyongtaek is not without local controversy.
The US embassy's attempts to eliminate required US visas for Koreans have also eased tensions. Yet there are important, if minority, sentiments against the US-Korean FTA that both sides have initialed but not yet passed into law.
The US still wants the Korean government to pay more than its present 41 percent of "burden sharing" for support to US troops in Korea, and hopes that Korea would sign on (as has Japan) to the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which it may do.
External heritages
There are four critical actors in South Korea’s external relations - China, Japan, the US and North Korea.
Although China is the prime focus of South Korean investment, and some polls indicate that many Koreans feel that China will be their most important friend over the next few years, there is some withering of the bloom in the relationship. Korea has become concerned, like the US, over the quality of Chinese exports. There are concerns about the claim by a Chinese research institution (and all such organizations bear some imprimatur of the Chinese government) that Kokuryo, the most northern of the Korean Three Kingdoms that were united in 668 CE, in what is now North Korea and which included some substantial areas now within Manchuria, was in fact Chinese. Some feel that this claim might be a precursor to a more insidious one; if North Korea collapsed as a state, then the Chinese might claim a historic right to take over North Korean territory.
There are so many points of present and potential disputes with Japan that relations often seem a virtual minefield.
There is the ever-present issue over the claims of both to the rocky islets of Tokdo/Takashima, located in the Sea of Japan/Eastern Sea. Both have brought out their symbolic nationalistic guns. South Korea issues postage stamps on Tokdo, sends "tourists" there, and occupies the rocks, while the legislature of the Japanese prefecture to which Takashima is supposed to be affiliated formally indicated its sovereignty over that area. Even if only a very few local school districts in Japan used language in textbooks that Koreans feel whitewashes the Japanese colonial experience, this becomes a highly visible and political concern.
Then there is the question of the "comfort women" that the Japanese government has refused to acknowledge and compensate. Prime ministerial visits to the Yasakuni Shrine are a perpetual issue. Also, one can safely predict that some eminent Japanese politician will make some statement that the Koreans regard as egregiously offensive. The political saliency of the Japanese kidnapped by North Korea many years ago is broadly felt in Japan, in which nationalism has grown as it has in South Korea.
Although there is little anti-Korean sentiment in the US, the stresses of the US Middle Eastern policies have made the continuing static presence of overextended US forces a question for the US defense establishment. There has been "alliance fatigue" in some parts of the DoD, which has wanted to cut US forces in Korea, give them regional roles, and/or redeploy them elsewhere. Although there is no danger of the alliance being terminated and the US has indicated that troop levels will remain constant, the relationship could become ineffectual.
The importance of the FTA with Korea, which has been advocated in terms economically beneficial to both parties, may really lie in its related support to the alliance. If it is approved by the US, it will likely be because of security considerations. Korea could make concessions on keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing its share of the costs of movement of US troops from Seoul in exchange for passage of the FTA.
Future ROK foreign policies
In reviewing the prospects for the ROK's foreign policy, there are grounds for considerable optimism compared to the rocky transition over the past decade. Relations with the US are on more solid ground notwithstanding the FTA issue, and those with Japan will likely markedly improve - the Japanese prime minister in fact attended Lee's inauguration. There are pitfalls in both, however. Issues with Japan such as Tokdo/Takashima are not going to be resolved, but if they are frozen for a period, that will be the best that can be expected.
More problematic is the issue of North Korea. How will it live up to the agreements emanating from the Six-Party Talks and how will the work of the talks’ subgroups progress?
On 25 June it did hand over a 60-page nuclear declaration (in return for which President Bush moved to remove it from the US list of states sponsoring terrorism) and blow up part of its Yongbyon nuclear plant the next day.
However, it remains to be seen whether it will give up a complete catalogue of its nuclear facilities, including the uranium program the US claims it has, and give up its nuclear device(s) or place them under international supervision. This question could ultimately determine the foreign policy of both South Korea and the US.
Of interest is the Ministry of Unification's Work Plans for 2008. Its ambitious plans include three goals - implementation of the denuclearization opening and the US$3000 per capita income initiative, expansion of mutually beneficial economic cooperation, and also mutually beneficial humanitarian projects - and 12 main tasks, which also include such areas as dealing with the difficulties of Korean businesses in the North and ameliorating issues connected with the separation of families, South Korean POWs, North Korean refugees, transparency in the distribution of humanitarian aid, and efforts to improve North Korean human rights.
All this may be bureaucratic wishful thinking, as the North denounced Lee as a traitor and a US sycophant for his harder stance on relations with the North.
Although the US has now encouraged unofficial cultural contacts with the North (including the New York Philharmonic's performance in Pyongyang on 26 February), whether that will continue seems questionable should progress on the nuclear issues not be forthcoming. But what motivation North Korea might have in giving up the weapons it already possesses is unclear, for possession of such weaponry seems to enjoy high status in a country that is also very nationalistic and concerned about international respect.
The US is circumscribed in what it will offer and what actions it could take against the North. Over a longer period, it seems unlikely that Japan, which is far more nationalistic than it once was, would quietly tolerate North Korean retention of a nuclear capacity without some sort of IAEA control. Not only would it withhold the foreign assistance that North Korea has expected from it as a kind of reparations, but there would be strong internal pressures in Japan to develop its own nuclear weapons capacity. If this were to happen, the US would find it very hard to prevent the South from following suit. Many in Korea fear a resurgent Japan more than North Korea.
There are indications that Korea may follow a "resource-based" foreign policy, assuring that it has the resources it needs for its economic expansion. Closer ties with Russia would be critical here, and ideas have been circulated for some years of tapping into Siberia's oil and gas reserves with pipelines, some of which would go through North Korea.
At the same time, as Korea attempts to play a stronger regional role, it will assiduously try to avoid involvement with the Taiwan tangle that could exacerbate problems with the Chinese.
In some major sense, then, the Lee administration's policy will in part depend on its perception of the reliability of the US commitment to the region and its "forward policy."
Over the next five years, diminution of the US role in the region is, however, unlikely. At the same time, should North Korea insist on having its nuclear arsenal uncontrolled and intact, then the US would be in a dilemma, as would the South Koreans.
The US fear of sale or proliferation of such technology to other state or non-state actors is a clear line beyond which the US is unlikely to tolerate any action by North Korea. North Korean involvement in a Syrian site (the nature of which is still disputed) that the Israelis bombed is still unclear. South Korean assistance to the North could be held hostage on this point, and cause more concern about possible US preemptive actions and/or the resurgence of anti-American sentiment.
If the US believes that the Lee administration is any the less nationalistic than Roh's, it may be mistaken. The rise in nationalism is an inherent component of Korean economic success, enhanced worldwide stature, political maturity, the "Korean Wave" (hallyu), and cultural exports and acceptance. The US will have to be sensitive to this new situation.
The US has had a tendency to inform, not to consult, with its ally, but it needs to be acutely cognizant of Korean sensitivities in this regard. At the same time, South Korean sensitivities to its role in Asia need enhancement, for as Korea's economic interests expand, its managerial reputation, training in, and knowledge of Southeast Asia has lagged behind.
The Lee administration needs an overarching foreign policy framework and vision beyond the pragmatism that the president has stressed. Pragmatism is a method or tactic, not a goal. President Park acted out of suspicion of US abandonment. President Roh had Nordpolitik, President Kim Young Sam pushed the OECD membership, President Kim Dae Jung had his "Sunshine Policy" with North Korea, and President Roh tried to pursue a "balancer" role and Korea as a Northeast Asia hub. President Lee needs some such conceptual approach.
If Lee shares Roh's concern about the potential regional role that Korea might play, the lack of any continuing institutional means for consultation among all the powers in the region is a conspicuous lacuna, especially compared to the roles of ASEAN and its derivatives in Southeast Asia.
Many feel that the Six-Party Talks could evolve into a more permanent forum for discussion of important regional questions, but this is unlikely unless the nuclear questions are first resolved. Moreover, Lee's administration has been already embroiled in issues concerning the stress on English language education, and efforts to improve Korea's global competence may well result in a nationalistic reaction.
The welcome strengthening of the South Korean-US relationship is a positive development for both parties. Although the alliance of over a half-century has had its difficult periods, the trajectory is now upward. In part its continuation is dependent on US sensitivity to its importance.