hankyoreh

Many people in Seoul hold that South Korea should thoroughly cooperate with the US. They think that “alliance-level” decisions must be obeyed as part of this “thoroughness.” They believe that’s the only way for South Korea to survive. Some of them are even “naturally sympathetic to all things American” - a phrase that appears in a diplomatic cable sent to the US in July 2006 by Alexander Vershbow, former US Ambassador to South Korea. The phrase was used to describe Ban Ki-moon as one of South Korea’s so-called mainstream experts in diplomacy and security.
There are fewer Korean Peninsula experts in Washington than there are experts on China and Japan. They keep up with developments in South Korea by reading the country’s English-language newspapers or by using translation services. Their knowledge and opinions are clearly represented in the South Korean news and media, as if they represented US policy and leading opinion.
These experts argue that it’s impossible to negotiate with North Korea and that tougher sanctions can be used to change the North. There are also quite a few experts who believe that North Korea will soon collapse. The interesting thing is that Korean Peninsula experts in Washington and the South Korean experts who are “naturally sympathetic to all things American” have strong ties and solidarity. They maintain a very close and tightknit network, whether because they went to the same school, have hobnobbed at seminars over the years, have worked together on policy assignments or simply because their mutual needs coincide.
This network effectively determines the success or failure of the alliance. More strictly speaking, their attitudes can cause a complete reversal of how the South Korea-US alliance is viewed. The idea that South Korea and the US had poor relations during the Roh Moo-hyun administration, for example, is a narrative that these experts have concocted. They hold that bilateral cooperation faltered and that the alliance was weakened. If that’s true, how did the two countries reach a free trade agreement and why did South Korea dispatch the third-largest ground force to the war in Iraq of any country? How could Ban Ki-moon, then South Korea’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, have become UN Secretary-General without American support? The flip side of their argument that bilateral cooperation faltered and that the alliance was weakened is that the Roh administration espoused opinions that were in the interest of South Korea but in conflict with US views and that its negotiators tried to bring about mutually beneficial results. This means, in short, that the South Korean government did not kowtow to the US.
The system of collusion maintained by these experts is still alive and well. They have established their attitudes and approaches as a kind of standard and arrogantly regard anything else as being opposed to the alliance. One very typical example was the commotion that resulted when Moon Chung-in (President Moon Jae-in‘s special advisor on unification, foreign affairs and national security) remarked during a recent US academic conference that “there’s this idea that the South Korea-US alliance would fall apart if THAAD isn‘t resolved, but if so, what kind of alliance would that be?” Experts in Seoul and Washington claim that the South Korea-US alliance is strong even while warning that the foundation of that alliance could be undermined if South Korea does not accept American demands or if an agreement is changed. The heart of that warning is the attitude that South Korea needs to obey the US.

Choi Jong-kun

President Moon and US President Donald Trump will soon be sitting down together. The American president thinks that the South Korea-US Free Trade Agreement is awful and that South Korea is getting a free ride on the alliance. The South Korean president puts the highest priority on the safety of the Korean people and peace on the Korean Peninsula and promises to boldly engage in cooperative diplomacy. I hope that their summit will serve to create an opportunity for South Korea to take the lead in peninsula affairs. That ought to be the objective of this meeting, because the alliance is not the exclusive domain of those who are “naturally sympathetic to all things American.”

By Choi Jong-kun, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at Yonsei University

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