By Lee Byong-chul
President-elect Lee Myung-bak's appointment of Kim Byung-kook, a professor in the political and foreign affairs department at Korea University, as his first foreign and national security advisor reinforced his well-known commitment to strengthening the Seoul-Washington relationship.
This move indicates a sharp departure from the previous administration's stance by Lee, who has described himself as a strong pro-American presidential candidate. Running against the progressive contenders, Lee won overwhelming support from both conservative and swing voters in the December election.
While not explicitly mentioning the failed foreign policies in the past of outgoing President Roh Moo-hyun, Lee offered an unmistakable putdown of the theme that has become so closely identified with Roh.
President-elect Lee's message was to ``restore" the South Korea-U.S. alliance as a pillar of his administration's foreign policies, which quickly captured the mood of the voters. He seems to believe that the alliance will be a backbone for future use and the South Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) would more firmly knit this bond.
Accordingly, Lee's ``Washington-friendly'' attitude has turned him into a household name in South Korea.
Alliance comes in different packages, and in different sizes. The qualities of the alliance also change, like the transition from cottage industry to factories.
The ROK-U.S alliance has been, in Lee's judgment, sliding into a so-called ``diplomatic recession''' or worse, since the demand for the alliance has sharply dropped during the left-tinted governments led by presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun.
The speed of breaking up the traditional alliance grows faster as well. The problem thus lies deeper. It is, according to conservative critics, the culmination of one decade during which the ``bad-leftist governments'' have gone beyond their capabilities.
While vowing not to kowtow to the Americans, President Roh once derided critics of his attempt to reduce South Korea's military reliance on the United States as ``clinging to the pants of the United States.''
His attempt was introduced with limited success. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's empty buzz word ``transformation'' enabled Roh to move Seoul-stationed American military base to a remote area as well as to agree to transfer the wartime operating authority to South Korea on April 17, 2012, although intense opposition from the conservatives tries to kill the agreement.
Indeed, South Korea feels the urgency of changing the bilateral alliance into multilateral one, gradually expanding the relationship with China in the field of trade. The volume of trade between Seoul and Beijing has increased 18 times since the diplomatic normalization in 1992.
In June 2004, the South Korean government made a politically difficult decision to dispatch the third-largest military forces to Iraq, after the United States and Britain.
Yet even by the standards of South Korea's ``politics of vortex,'' it was unusual to see the conservative mass media and elite opinion leaders in Seoul having forgotten Roh's grave decision so easily. A welcoming pitch from Washington did not last long either.
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, a shoo-in for the next U.S. presidency, recently claimed that the Korea-U.S. FTA awaiting the endorsement from their respective legislative branch did not meet the ``standard of reciprocity'' and at the same time, he touched upon the alliance: ``I do not think it is an overstatement to say that the U.S.-Korea relationship has been adrift in recent years."
A number of South Koreans on the street feel grateful that the United States significantly contributed to the postwar South Korean ``Miracle on the Han River'' with its plan to accelerate economic development and industrialization to ensure a cordon sanitaire of economic growth around the militarily expanding communist North Korea at the time.
Elected on a conservative platform, Lee said on February 13 that South Korea and United States alike need to make all the efforts to create a new framework of the alliance.
Given the fact that the lineup of senior secretaries (announced on Feb. 10) consists mainly of those who once studied in the United States, the Lee government's ideological color appears, by contrast, to be far more ``Stars and Stripes'' than in the past.
Yet temporary fixes like the earlier ratification of the ``Washington-friendly Free Trade Agreement'' that would satisfy the U.S. Congress won't get the broken alliance back to normal, because South Korean anti-FTA protests still draw millions.
The new government will likely embark on a very difficult diplomacy strategy in an effort to establish an updated version of the alliance, or, as Dr. Victor Cha put it, ``the creation of an asymmetrical alliance tie, unless the North Korean denuclearization, Bush's single diplomatic achievement, is accomplished before Bush leaves the White House.''
In short, the nuclear issue must be the test case to show that America' unilateral approaches, albeit there was the institution of the six-party talks, virtually failed.
Over the longer term, the currently botched alliance can be overcome through much of the discussion tracks, both on the levels of government and non-government.
It's time to discuss the multilateralism in Northeast Asia, which is the beginning of the hope for the denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.
Lee Byong-chul is senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Coopertion (IPC), a non-partisan policy advisory body based in Seoul. He can be reached at bcleebc@gmail.com.