Page 4 of
5 PART 10: The changing South Korean
position By Henry C K Liu
of the two Koreas imposed by the US
since the beginning of the Cold War.
Park
has the advantage of unmatched name recognition,
she is personally untainted by corruption and
scandals and, despite her conservatism, she has
shown herself to be pragmatic and flexible on
policy toward North Korea, favoring reconciliation
and economic cooperation with the North, in
contrast to others in her party who want a less
indulgent approach. Park's solid
conservative credentials may
give her credibility to open up cooperation with
North Korea. When she met with Kim Jong-il in
2002, by all accounts they got on well. Both are
the offspring of charismatic figures who built the
two Koreas in their own separate image: one a
hard-driving economic powerhouse built by
industrial policy and the other an unapologetic
socialist state.
Recent conservative
successes in local elections will boost Park's
chances of winning the hotly contended nomination
as presidential candidate for the GNP. After two
successive defeats, the party is desperate for
victory in the next election in December. But she
still faces formidable rivals inside the party.
Her ability to effectuate unification of Korea
will be a major asset in her campaign.
The
five presidential hopefuls for the December
election are Park, former Seoul mayor Lee
Myung-bak, former prime minister Goh Kun, former
GNP chairman Lee Hoi-chang and former Gyeonggi
provincial governor Sohn Hak-kyu. With an approval
rating above 40%, Lee Myung-bak is currently the
front-runner.
Waning days of Roh
presidency By current law, Roh cannot seek
re-election. His surprise proposal for a
constitutional revision to allow future heads of
state to seek a second term in office and reduce
the term to four years from its current five is
widely seen as a gambit to turn the tide of the
presidential race, as early opinion polls suggest
candidates from the Uri Party have little chance
of winning in the December election. Indeed, the
party collapsed when up to 30 lawmakers quit the
largest parliamentary bloc.
Roh's proposed
constitution change immediately divides South
Korean politics along ideological lines, providing
the ruling party an issue to rally its support
base again. Roh argued that a change in the
presidential term would bring stability and
consistency in state affairs, saying the current
single five-year term makes its leader a lame duck
for almost his entire final year, at the expense
of the national interest. The proposal, however,
is unlikely to pass the 296-member National
Assembly, as the main opposition conservative GNP
has vowed to kill the measure even before it is
formally presented. In South Korea, a bill on a
constitutional amendment must be endorsed by at
least two-thirds of the members of the parliament
and then pass a national referendum. The GNP has a
bloc of 127 seats in the single-chamber
legislature to the Uri Party's 139 seats.
Still, Roh is expected to host the second
inter-Korean summit in the months leading up to
the presidential vote. While North Korea has
significantly increased tensions in Northeast Asia
by conducting seven ballistic-missile tests,
including an abortive launch of the long-range
Taepodong 2, and a dud nuclear test, the Bush
administration described these tests only as
provocative but not an immediate threat to US
security. With universal non-proliferation
increasingly becoming a broken dream, the US has
openly relied on a nuclear-missile defense regime
as deterrence, coupled with a nuclear fatalism of
selective proliferation for trusted allies, such
as India, Japan, Taiwan and Israel, pitted against
a losing non-proliferation battle against North
Korea, Iran and a host of other minor states such
as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Germany.
North Korea, notwithstanding being labeled
as evil, has never adopted suicidal policies.
Without credible missile defense, for North Korea
to attack the US, which possesses tens of
thousands of nukes and accurate and reliable
delivery systems for counter-strikes, would be
suicidal. In other words, North Korea's nuclear
force logically is designed as only a defensive
deterrence against first attacks from the US. This
defensive deterrence nevertheless upsets the US
because it enables North Korea to be
geopolitically defiant of US hegemony without
being blackmailed by the threat of a first strike.
Still, for the US, reliance on deterrence
against a North Korean first strike is preferable
to embracing reckless preemptive strikes on North
Korea, which would unleash uncontrollable
geopolitical consequences. Deterrence is also
preferable to escalating the nuclear crisis by
adopting Japan's suggestion of imposing
comprehensive international economic sanctions.
Tokyo and Washington seem to have forgotten that a
US embargo of oil in 1940 pushed Japan to attack
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.
The division of the Korean nation into two
states of opposing ideology and economic systems
was the result of a US attempt to lure the USSR
into World War II against Japan. After the war, it
became part of the US policy of containment of
global communism. More than 15 years after the
fall of the USSR in 1991 and the end of Cold War
paranoia of communism as a threat to liberal
democracy, the antagonism between the two Koreas
is a dysfunctional anachronism devoid of an
operative cause. Korea has remained an unstable
and dangerous flashpoint for no geopolitical
purpose. In a similar manner, the gulf between
mainland China and a US-protected Taiwan is also
an outdated geopolitical anachronism that prevents
a normal US-China relationship from developing.
Notwithstanding the current US fixation of
promoting democracy around the world, democracy on
every continent is producing governments that are
critical of if not outright hostile to US
policies. Facing an endless quagmire in Iraq,
rising Iranian influence and the destabilizing
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the US has decided
that stability, not democracy, is its priority in
the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, a shift made
clear by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in
her January 15 meeting with Egyptian leaders. It
is a sobering shift from the delusional missionary
policy of "transformation diplomacy" to spread
democracy around the world promoted by Rice since
the beginning of the Bush administration more than
six years ago.
The United States'
confrontational posture with North Korea leaves
Koreans in the South and many other people in Asia
and around the world exasperated. US
"transformation" policy in Asia has escalated
North Korea's nuclear-weapons program and
engendered growing anti-US sentiment in South
Korea and other parts of Asia. Even within US
political circles, a rising number of analysts are
questioning whether Washington's East Asia
security strategy serves national interests, with
US forces spread thin by the Iraq war and the "war
on terrorism" and with the
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