hankyoreh

Washington correspondent

By Park Hyun, Washington correspondent

It’s safe to say that the person who is most busily traveling the globe the most these days is US Secretary of State John Kerry. On top of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the Iran nuclear negotiations, and the Syrian civil war, the recent unrest in the Ukraine has made Kerry spend nearly two thirds of each month outside of the US. Take last month for example: he was only at his desk in the State Department for one week.

If you look at John Kerry’s overseas schedule since he joined Obama’s cabinet in Feb. 2013, it is immediately apparent that most of his traveling has taken place in the Middle East and Europe. The Middle East, in particular, is where Kerry has gone for 16 of his trips thus far. In contrast, he has only been to Northeast Asia twice. It would not be inaccurate to dub him the “Minister for the Middle East.”

When the US Secretary of State - the man in charge of American diplomacy - is behaving like this, it would be foolish to expect much progress on the Obama administration’s much-touted pivot to Asia. There has been a surge in military strength, but diplomacy has effectively been thrown to the wayside. While China’s military build up and Japan’s shift to the right are partly to blame for the rising level of tension in Northeast Asia, the US’s military-focused policy in the region has also played a major role.

Indeed, the US has effectively put off looking for a diplomatic solution to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. In fact, the US regards Pyongyang’s nukes as an excuse to boost its military presence to counter the rise of China and to reinforce the three-way security pact with South Korea and Japan. In the words of a Korean proverb, Korea is a shrimp that gets smashed when whales fight around it.

But Kerry is not the only reason why the US has dispensed with diplomacy on the Korean peninsula. Kerry may be Secretary of State, but he must still take orders from President Obama and act in line with the president’s intentions. Obama’s true interest became evident in his keynote address to the UN in Sep. 2013, when he devoted most of his 40-minute speech to Middle East policy. He did not mention the North Korean nuclear issue even once. The same could be said about his State of the Union address in Jan. 2014.

This behavior is not unrelated to the fact that the people on the White House National Security Council who are in charge of North Korean policy take a hard line on North Korea.

National Security Advisor Susan Rice is the figure who pushed the UN to implement stern sanctions against North Korea; Sydney Seiler, Korean Director on the National Security Council, is a former CIA agent who is regarded as a hawk. They continue to believe in the efficacy of the policy known as “strategic patience,” even though most experts, both conservative and liberal, regard this as having failed. They seem uninterested in the fact that North Korea is making progress on its nuclear and missile technology each day that they wait for the North to change.

“The people in the White House are cut off from the outside world,” an expert on Korea living in Washington D.C. told me last year. “They couldn’t care less about the opinions of people coming from a different perspective. You get the impression that they are a new kind of neo-cons,” the expert said, referring to the conservative hardliners in George Bush’s administration. This is why Obama cannot help but have a limited understanding of North Korea.

In the US, just as in Korea, the system ensures that major foreign policy cannot be put into play without the consent of the president. As long as Obama is surrounded by figures in the White House who take a hard line on North Korea, it will be difficult for him to try a different approach. Of course, it is not like just anyone could step forward and change his mind, either.

In reality, there is only one person on the planet who could approach Obama and talk to him seriously about the issue of the Korean peninsula from the perspective of those living there. That person is the South Korean president.

Around this time a year ago, I wrote a column on a similar theme before the US-Korea summit. But unfortunately, President Park Geun-hye kowtowed to the current American policy framework, which demands that North Korea be the first to change.

Once again this month, the South Korean and American presidents will be meeting. Considering the time left in Obama’s presidency and the grim prospects for the mid-term election in November, this summit is probably the last chance to push for change in Obama’s North Korean policy. I hope that, this time, Park and Obama agree to look for a solution through dialogue.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]