[Park admin. 3 year review] After three years in office, Pres. Park’s foreign policy in tatters

Posted on : 2016-02-22 18:09 KST Modified on : 2016-02-22 18:09 KST
Park has cut connections with N. Korea and is alienating China by clinging close to US interests
President Park Geun-hye shakes hands with US President Barack Obama after a press conference at the White House
President Park Geun-hye shakes hands with US President Barack Obama after a press conference at the White House

Three years into her presidency, Park Geun-hye’s main policies on North Korea, foreign affairs, and national security are mired in abject failure. Her “Korean Peninsula trust-building process” was effectively scrapped with her decision to shut down operations at the Kaesong Industrial Complex and her pledge to “change the regime in North Korea at all costs” after Pyongyang’s recent fourth nuclear test and rocket launch. Her ambitious Northeast Asian Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI) and Eurasia Initiative are dead in the water as a New Cold War order settles into Northeast Asia, pitting South Korea, the US and Japan on one side against North Korea, China, and Russia on the other amid what can be described as self-destructive and haphazard diplomacy.

No one in the administration - including Park herself - is bringing up these policies anymore. Pledges by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Unification to “consistently pursue the Korean Peninsula trust-building process” and “boost the substance of NAPCI and the Eurasia Initiative” in a Jan. 22 presidential briefing now ring entirely hollow.

Haphazard has been the word for Park’s actions since assuming the presidency. North Korea carried out its third nuclear test on Feb. 12, 2013; in her inaugural address the following Feb. 25, Park declared her commitment to the trust-building process, pledging to “use a clear deterrent as a basis for building trust between South and North” and suggesting that “trust can be built when we engage in dialogue and keep our promises.”

This restrained approach stands in stark contrast to the uniformly hard-line measures she has adopted since the fourth nuclear test in January. But Park has consistently put domestic political concerns ahead of North Korea and foreign affairs/national security police since taking office. A clear example came in her celebratory address for the March 1 holiday in 2013, just a week after taking office, when she unveiled an ultra-hard-line position on Japan that made resolving the issue of Tokyo‘s responsibility for the drafting of “comfort women” for the Japanese military a barrier to future developments in bilateral relations.

 Oct. 16
Oct. 16

“The historical positions of aggressor and victim can never change even if a thousand years of history pass,” Park declared at the time. The statement had the political aim of countering criticisms from some quarters at home over being a “collaborator’s daughter” - but it also conflicted with her own stated goals, since frostier ties with Tokyo would pose a seemingly fatal obstacle to NAPCI‘s success.

Another problematic decision that clearly showed Park’s lack of vision came on Oct. 23, 2014, when she postponed the scheduled 2015 transfer of wartime operational control from the US essentially indefinitely. At issue there is the fact that North Korea is unlikely to be persuaded into military trust-building measures without the kind of adjustment in the South Korea-US alliance that the handover represented. The decision also further prevents NAPCI from functioning.

By deciding to postpone the transfer indefinitely, Park essentially admitted that she preferred to have South Korea bask in the shade of the alliance rather than pursuing an independent balanced diplomacy program of forming friendly relations with both the US and China and contributing to a post-Cold War order in Northeast Asia. On Dec. 29 that same year, a trilateral agreement with Japan on the sharing of North Korea nuclear and missile information went into effect.

In light of this trend, Park raised eyebrows on Sept. 3 of last year when she appeared on Beijing‘s Tiananmen parapet alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her visit there went ahead over Washington’s objections, but her later actions showed no real plan for how to manage the situation. A month later in October, she visited the US and declared South Korea to be a “key partner in the US’s Asia-Pacific rebalancing policy” - a direct contradiction with the kind of diplomacy her watchtower visit represented.

In the wake of that US visit, Park more or less gave up on the idea of balanced diplomacy between Washington and Beijing and began a headlong charge toward closer cooperation with the US. The catalyst in this case was Seoul and Tokyo’s declaration last Dec. 28 that the comfort women issue had been “finally and irreversibly resolved” through an agreement by their foreign ministers that day. It amounted to an open declaration that Park would be joining the US’s push for stronger trilateral security cooperation with Japan - or what Handong University professor described as “South Korea accepting the role of secondary partner in the US-Japan alliance.” In that sense, US President Barack Obama’s decision to commend Park for her “courage and vision” in reaching a just agreement and pledge of activity support for its execution in a congratulatory telephone call on Jan. 7 (just after North Korea‘s fourth nuclear test) takes on a new meaning: it suggests that Seoul and Washington’s responses to the North Korean nuclear issue were inextricably bound to the terms of the Dec. 28 agreement. Their decision to declare official discussions on the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system on the Korean Peninsula, which came on the day of North Korea‘s rocket launch, is similarly fraught with implications.

Inter-Korean relations are now in tatters after Park’s decision to close the Kaesong Industrial Complex; South Korea‘s ties with China and Russia are severely strained after the THAAD discussions announcement. Both Beijing and Moscow have said they do not intend to stand by while THAAD is deployed on the peninsula. Meanwhile, the effective agreement on a THAAD deployment, which comes after last year’s amendment of US-Japan defense cooperation guidelines (Apr. 27) and enactment of new security legislation granting Japan‘s collective self-defense authority (Sept. 19), means the US is tightening its net around China. In short, peace on the peninsula is being threatened by an increasingly entrenched New Cold War order in Northeast Asia, and the Park administration is playing the role of catalyst and vanguard.

“Park is leaping into a pit of fire with an armful of kindling,” sighed one former senior government official on Feb. 21.

“I just hope she leaves even the slightest bit of room for the next administration to fix the situation.”

By Lee Je-hun, staff reporter

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

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