hankyoreh

Late last month in Washington, President Moon Jae-in had his first summit with US President Donald Trump since taking office. He deserves some generous marks, given the short time he had to prepare. It even seemed somehow thrilling, after the absence of any South Korean administration early this year and the pain of worrying whether the Trump administration was going to take military action against North Korea.
That said, it’s difficult to shake the feeling there was something lacking in that South Korea-US summit preparation process. The administration was forced on its heels amid the onslaught from the conservative South Korean media and the US over the THAAD issue. Now we seem to have more or less lost any kind of leverage we could use in our relations with China. The Battle of Chosin Reservoir, during the Korean War, story was certainly moving and tactically marvelous, with the way it tied in to Moon’s own history, but it also gave the sense of being a bit overplayed.
For all this hard work and striving, it doesn’t seem like the US government or people are going to shake their sense of concern over the Moon administration. Here in South Korea, the conservative media will continue availing themselves of every opportunity to go after the administration over “cracks” in the South Korea-US alliance. All of this is foreseeable, and it’s nothing new. The best thing would be start bracing for it now.
While it may take some time, South Korea’s progressives also need to strengthen their human network with the US. They need to reach out and grow their influence in the US. Empires have two faces, civilization and barbarism. Barbarism is a constant. It may be a reason for hating an empire, but it should not be a reason for avoiding one. Efforts to blunt the swords of barbarism are all the more necessary when dealing with the Trump administration, which has made no bones about its own barbarism in the name of “America first.”
In practical terms, progressives should be adopting more comprehensive, all-out response with the US, if only to plant the seeds of discourse toward detente on the Korean Peninsula and a resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue. If we can’t sway Washington, we can’t sway Pyongyang. If we can’t sway Pyongyang, we can’t sway Washington. No matter how terrific our strategy and goals may be, we won’t succeed without a network to see them through.
A good step would be to have large numbers of private progressive North Korea and foreign relations experts descend on Washington like a swarm of bees. It might not be a bad thing to have them sit down with some of the North Korea hard-liner experts in the US and argue until they’re red in the face. If they can’t get invited to seminars, they should make their own small-scale seminars. It’s not hard.
In the long term, we should also consider setting up a permanent base for progressives in Washington. Since government institutions are forced to change their logic as administrations come and go, there needs to be a stable framework to serve as a window for ongoing communication. This could be a separate think tank or a Washington branch of an existing South Korean think tank. If the main goal is to influence Congress, we might consider putting together a political action committee.
This is not to say there aren’t experts among South Korea’s progressives who have excellent networks in the US. But the channels need to be diversified, and the “contact surface” needs to be increased to encompass all the hard-liners and pragmatists in the US. Aren’t the US and Japan attempting right now to meet with progressive and conservative experts in South Korea to get a feel for the situation? If you look at the materials coming out of the US executive, think tanks, and Congress, the trend hasn’t been hard to detect.

Yi Yong-in

Without solid US channels of their own, progressives must rely on taking power and using official diplomatic channels. Cross-checking becomes impossible. They fail to get a firm grasp on the situation, and then we end up hearing about how you can’t trust career diplomats. By that point, the situation is difficult to recover from.

When progressives have come to power, they have had to approach relations with the US from a disadvantageous place in terms of opinion and circumstances. Now’s the time for us to start investing our people and money more aggressively.

By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

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