SEOUL - It's all going to be chummy when
South Korea's fledgling President Lee Myung-bak
sees President George W Bush next week at the US
presidential retreat at Camp David, nestled in
woodland 96 kilometers north of Washington.
"The American side has suggested this
visit is informal," said a senior South Korean
official. "Which also suits President Lee's
style."
That means a ride in a golf cart,
sports shirts, no neckties - a prelude to what are
sure to be difficult discussions focusing on how
to deal with the North Korean nuclear issue and,
equally important, a free-trade agreement that
needs ratification by a
reluctant US Congress and South
Korea's always fractious if newly elected National
Assembly.
The Blue House - the center of
presidential power in South Korea - hopes to
convince not only Bush but also his top aides and
a legion of critical Congress people that this
president is totally different from his two
left-leaning predecessors.
"In some areas
there were difficulties," said the senior
official, carefully choosing his words. "We hope
these problems will be resolved to build a closer
relationship."
The message in Seoul is
that Lee really means it when he says he wants to
strengthen the US-South Korean alliance after a
decade of slights and sometimes slurs by the past
two presidents, Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung.
Differences were most evident in how firmly to
press North Korea on getting rid of its nuclear
program - and extended to questions of transfer of
command over US and Korean forces in war-time,
picking up the cost of US bases, and the basic
level of the US military commitment.
The
South Koreans say the two presidents "will be
meeting amid high expectations", but how these two
conservative leaders will really get along is
another matter, considering all the possibilities
for an impasse on such tendentious matters as
yielding to North Korean pressure for a compromise
on the nuclear issue and prying South Korea open
to the import of US beef, seen as a prerequisite
for the US Congress to approve any free-trade
deal.
Lee, however, goes to Washington
with the confidence of a fresh "mandate" in the
form of the majority that his conservative Grand
National Party picked up in elections on Wednesday
for all 299 seats in the National Assembly.
How strong a mandate he really has,
though, remains unproven. The GNP wound up with
153 seats, but faces difficulties in hard
bargaining with independents and members of two
small conservative parties that won more than 32
seats.
Lee Hoi-chang, who lost two
presidential campaigns, first to Kim Dae-jung and
then to Roh Moo-hyun, won a seat as the head of
his own highly conservative party, while a number
of followers of Park Geun-hye, daughter of the
dictatorial Park Chung-hee, also formed a separate
party after Lee's people refused to put them on
their ticket. Park herself got almost 90% of the
votes from her district in the conservative
stronghold of Taegu - a margin that is sure to put
her high in the running in the next presidential
election to succeed Lee five years from now.
Lee may not need endorsement from the
National Assembly when it comes to negotiating
with North Korea, but he will need the assembly's
support to ratify the US free-trade agreement.
That alone may not be a huge problem, but he's
sure to encounter severe criticism if he yields to
US demands for opening up Korea's beef market,
closed tight after an outbreak of "mad cow"
disease in the US and then reopened only slightly
amid bureaucratic barriers and nitpicking X-ray
inspections for bone particles.
Although
the beef issue is not covered in the free-trade
agreement, hammered out in 16 months of extremely
difficult negotiations, US officials, on all
levels, have said the US Congress simply will not
ratify it if the market is not fully opened.
Lee will argue, however, that opening the
Korean market would create such tremendous
pressure as to undermine support for the
government in other areas and in the end "not be
very helpful" for either the US or South Korea.
As it is, the agreement faces huge
opposition from members of the US Congress from
the industrial states with the most voters and
where factories are closing and unemployment
rising as the US economy slides into recession.
So strong is the opposition there that the
Congress may not be able to consider it until
after the US presidential election in November,
when political careers are no longer at stake.
Both candidates for the Democratic nomination,
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, he from
Illinois, she from New York, both major industrial
states, have gone on record opposing it as they
look for support across the broad American
heartland hardest hit by the US subprime crisis.
The beef problem has ramifications that
may go well beyond the free-trade agreement - and
impinge on such questions as the South Korean
commitment to US military campaigns in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The US administration would like
Seoul to stop cutting down its commitment to both
countries, almost none in Afghanistan and
approaching that level in Iraq, as a sign of
mutual goodwill befitting a staunch American ally.
But how strong is the alliance? Lee has
said he would like to extend the deadline for the
deal calling for a South Korean general to assume
war-time control from 2012 to as late as 2020.
South Korea has also objected to what the US sees
as its obligation to come up with several billion
dollars for transferring US troops from the
invasion route north of Seoul and from their
historic headquarters in Seoul's Yongsan district
to a sprawling base 64 kilometers south of the
capital.
The conservatives now in charge
in Seoul view any real decrease in US troop
commitment with alarm, especially while North
Korea goes on blasting Lee as a "traitor", an
"imposter" and "pro-US". They oppose US plans to
reduce the number of its troops from 28,000 to as
low as 20,000 in the next few years, and they're
not happy about US combat troops leaving their
bases between Seoul and the dividing line with
North Korea.
Bush will certainly assure
Lee, as every American president has done with
every South Korean president since the Korean War
in the 1950s, of the US commitment, but the
Pentagon wants to stand fast by the 2012 deadline
- and also wants Seoul to come up with a great
deal more money. Lee, smart businessman that he
is, may not want to commit himself on money or
troops for Iraq and Afghanistan until the
free-trade agreement gets ratified.
Bush -
and the people who brief him on what to say - may
find these questions more difficult to resolve
than that of cooperating with South Korea on the
nuclear issue.
South Korean officials deny
any real differences with the US on the list the
North was to have provided by the end of last year
on its entire nuclear facilities. Nor do they
think Bush will be stampeded into agreeing on a
waffling compromise with North Korea for the sake
of his "legacy" before he steps down next January.
US envoy Christopher Hill has upset South
Korean conservatives by getting overly cozy with
his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan. That
impression grew considerably when a North Korean
spokesman said on Wednesday night that the two had
agreed on a "declaration" under which the US would
come up with "political rewards" in return for the
long-awaited list.
A senior South Korean
official, however, belittled the whole idea of
such a "declaration" if it gives North Korea a way
to avoid itemizing its entire nuclear inventory,
including the enriched-uranium program that the
North steadfastly denies.
"The word
'declaration' brings a certain neatness," said the
official. "A declaration must have true substance,
something that will help us bring genuine peace."
He did not, he said, believe Bush would come to
terms "just for the sake of leaving a legacy", and
he "never imagined he will make a deal on North
Korean policy" for that reason.
That view,
however, left unanswered the question of whether
Hill and Kim had been massaging the wording of a
secret memorandum that would call for North Korea
to acknowledge having dabbled in enriched uranium
in the past - and provided Syria with some of the
technology for the facility that the Israelis
bombed last year.
"If there is a secret
agreement between North Korea and the US, it will
be a secret," said the official. "So I wouldn't
know about it."
Presumably Bush and Lee
will have nothing to hide when they face each
other, smiling and sport-shirted, after alighting
from that golf cart.
Journalist
Donald Kirk has been covering
Korea - and the confrontation of forces in
Northeast Asia - for more than 30
years. (Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
