hankyoreh

As a child, I saw the US as a wondrous place. My father used a stubby double-edged razor, and he sometimes boasted about it being American-made. He’d served in the military right after the Korean War, and he’d gotten it from a US garrison, he said. Seeing him use it for more than thirty years, I sometimes marveled at how they could make something so sturdy. Perhaps it made it all the more special to have learned in school about how the Chinese characters used to write the name of the US meant “beautiful country.”
But the experience of Gwangju in 1980 left me seeing the US as a cold, unfeeling country. It had tacitly condoned the actions of a military dictatorship that slaughtered countless decent people with guns and knives. Only when I got to university did I realize that the US’s chief interest in South Korea was as a loyal forward base for containing the Soviet Union, and that this was the guiding principle for its response. I wasn’t an anti-American, though. I was there at a Seoul-area university in the mid-1980s when the first cries of “Yankee go home!” rang out, but I didn‘t fully support them. I felt we ought to try to use the US to survive wedged in between China and Japan.
The 9/11 terror attacks and Iraq War made the US seem omnipotent. Working night duty at an international desk around 9/11, I couldn’t shut up about the extremism of Islamic jihad. But I was also shocked at the unilateralism the George W. Bush administration showed as it rushed toward the Iraq War. In the end, the US didn’t find evidence of the weapons of mass destruction that were the supposed reason for the conflict. To them, it was a simple mistake, an error in intelligence judgment. To the people of Iraq, it was a catastrophe.
I thought about the US once again as I finished up three years of living in Washington. On the whole, it was unquestionably an advanced democratic society, but I also concluded that it was turning into a dangerous country.
I had two reasons for this. One was my discovery that American exceptionalism - the notion that US has an obligation to spread freedom to the rest of the world - ran much deeper and wider in society that I had understood. It was naive of me to expect the Democratic Party progressives to which Barack Obama belonged would be somehow different. As president, Obama refused to go into ground warfare in Syria, but he launched operations last year to repel the group Islamic State (IS). Unable to bear the political pressure, or the slide in public opinion from being seen as a “weak president,” he made another declaration of war.
My second reason was seeing the US political system rotting from within. Once a living textbook of modern democracy, with its checks and balances through the separation of powers, that system is being tainted by money-centered politics and a united front among vested interests. One need only look at the way the Bush family on the Republican side and the Clinton family on the Democrat side have dominated Washington for close to a generation. The extreme feuding that has gone on for years now is a result of this. I also personally witnessed the ways in which members of the House Representatives, who have to campaign every two years, end up at the beck and call of political funders. This also means US foreign policy is decided not by rational determinations, but by domestic political factors - a fact that could lead to disastrous outcomes abroad.

Washington correspondent

This transformation in the US holds a lot of significance for South Korea. At a time when the focus of Washington’s foreign policy is gravitating toward the containment of China, it’s deeply troubling that our dependence on the US in foreign policy and security is not only not improving, but actually deepening. A perfect example was the decision last year to once again postpone the transfer of wartime operational control, which Seoul virtually begged and pleaded for. There’s no such thing as a free lunch in international relations, and we can expect Washington to pressure us into being an active partner in its strategy to hem Beijing in. That’s what the strengthening of trilateral missile defense-centered security cooperation is all about. If only for the sake of our survival, it’s time for us to cut back on our deep dependence on the US and reestablish ourselves as a country with backbone.

By Park Hyun, Washington correspondent

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