hankyoreh

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after his announcement of his resignation at the Office of the Prime Minister in Tokyo on Aug. 28. (Reuters/Yonhap News)

The quadrilateral security dialogue known as the Quad began in 2007 on the initiative of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. It was an informal security forum designed for the US, Japan, Australia, and India to make a joint response to China. Abe imagined the four countries banding together to encircle China under the slogan of an “arc of freedom and prosperity.”

The Quad has waxed and waned over time, depending on its members’ respective relations with China. During a visit to China in 2008, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that India was not part of efforts to contain China. Then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who had a background in researching China, announced that Australia was leaving the quad and pursuing a strategy of reconciliation with China. After those developments, the Quad appeared to disintegrate.

The forgotten concept of the Quad was unearthed through a mutual understanding between Abe and Donald Trump, after his inauguration as US president in 2017. During the intensifying conflict between the US and China, this plan has evolved into the Quad Plus, which seeks to create an expanded multilateral security organization against China in which the US, Japan, India, and Australia would remain the key members and other countries would be recruited as junior partners. The vision is an Asian equivalent to NATO, the organization that was the military antagonist of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The US has continued to signal that South Korea ought to take part in the proposed organization. US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper have repeatedly spoken of the need for a multilateral security organization akin to NATO in the Indo-Pacific region and have mentioned South Korea, New Zealand, and Vietnam, in addition to the four original Quad members. When US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visits South Korea early next month, he’s likely to ask South Korea to play an active role in containing China. Pompeo will be stopping by South Korea on his way to Tokyo to attend a meeting with other Quad foreign ministers.

The Quad encapsulates Japan’s strategy for Asia. Japan’s right wing wants to strengthen the alliance with the US and lasso in South Korea and Taiwan as junior partners; another goal is to increase Japan’s military might by amending the country’s “peace constitution” and giving the Japan Self-Defense Forces better weaponry and a broader scope of activity. This strategy simultaneously expresses Japan’s ambition to strengthen its leadership in Asia at the expense of China and its anxious belief that Japan must prepare for the US’ eventual withdrawal from Asia. Abe stubbornly obstructed South Korea’s Korean Peninsula Peace Process — that is, its pursuit of reconciliation with the North — which he regarded as an obstacle to the Quad strategy. Even after Abe’s resignation, his plans cast a long shadow over South Korean foreign policy in the form of the “Asian NATO.”

If South Korea buckles to pressure from the US and Japan and joins the Quad Plus, it will face a number of consequences. Its economic relations with China will be severely damaged; it will be subordinated as a junior partner in an anti-China strategy dominated by the US and Japan; the Moon administration’s Korean Peninsula peace process will be blown to smithereens; and the adversarial relationship between South and North Korea will be calcified. While East Asia would be swept by a long storm of military tensions, actual US withdrawal from Asia would lead to a “great power compromise” between Japan and China that would potentially inflict severe harm on South Korea.

It’s impossible to foresee the outcome of a new cold war between the US and China, but it’s more likely to be a long period of competition and conflict rather than a head-on clash or a complete decoupling between the two countries.

In his book “The US-China Cartel,” Park Hong-seo, a professor at the Center for International Area Studies at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, diagnoses the two countries’ conflict as a sort of cartel inside the capitalist international order. While the two countries feign willingness to wage war, they both have nuclear arsenals (which means war would bring their mutual destruction), they are geographically distant, and they have far too much gain from each other economically speaking. From these factors, Park infers that the two countries will probably continue to collude and compromise.

In such a situation, Korea needs to be careful about choosing one side or the other in what is superficially a hegemonic struggle. Even during times of struggle, powerful countries strike deals for their own interests at the critical moment. The Korean Peninsula has often been the victim of such deals between great powers — for instance, during the Japanese invasions at the end of the 16th century, Japan’s annexation of Korea, and the division of the Korean Peninsula.

To be sure, it wouldn’t be easy for Korea to stand alone against pressure to pick a side from China on the one hand and the US and Japan on the other. But around the world there are countries that share Korea’s concerns and that are striving to create the diplomatic space to resist the pressure to choose sides.

While Germany is a key European ally of the US and has forged a close economic relationship with China, it has recently been attempting to keep an appropriate distance from both sides. Germany has maintained its economic ties with China while criticizing US President Donald Trump’s strategy of insulting his allies; it has also rejected US requests to join a boycott of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications manufacturer. At the same time, Germany has criticized China for its human rights record and for its market controls, and it has also unveiled a new foreign policy of strengthening relationships with democratic countries in the Indo-Pacific such as South Korea and Japan. Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who has cooperated closely with the US on security issues, is also carving out a space of balance by warning the US to stop treating China as an enemy. That’s the path that South Korea should take as well.

By Park Min-hee, editorial writer

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