Few people in the world would want a peaceful, cooperative relationship between the United States and China more than Koreans. After all, it was on the Korean Peninsula six decades ago that the two military giants clashed the last time.
Which also explains why many Koreans felt ill at ease watching the U.S.-China war of nerves in Hawaii and Bali last week, and the expressions of hasty commentators here describing it as a ``New Cold War” or even a ``Second Pacific War.” It was little comfort the stage of their rivalry seems to have moved from Korea to all of East Asia this time.
During his eight-day stay in the Pacific-rim area, U.S. President Barack Obama made clear America’s ``return” to East Asia, and Washington’s foreign policy ``pivot” from the Middle East to the Far East. One thing seemed certain from the weeklong duel between the U.S. spear and Chinese shield: the offense and defense might change when China grows further, economically and militarily.
And this means most East Asian countries will soon have to recheck their diplomatic priorities in ways to maximize their strategic interests. It also becomes clearer what is behind the Korean people’s vague uneasiness: the Seoul government’s too premature choosing of sides and reducing its own diplomatic leverage.
President Lee Myung-bak has recently asked for more U.S. engagement in East Asia at the risk of estranging the already sullen Beijing further. The Lee administration’s policy seems to be based on two assumptions: Korea cannot avoid becoming the pig in the middle in the escalating U.S.-China rivalry and that Seoul should take sides between Washington and Beijing. Korea should not necessarily regard both as inevitable.
This country is no longer what it was a century or even 60 years ago.
And this is all the more so if South and North Koreas end mutual hostility and reconcile with each other. Divided, the two Koreas will remain as pawns of America and China, respectively. United, they can not only become the masters of their own fates but also emerge as a regional, if not global, balancer. The current leaders in both Seoul and Pyongyang can hardly avoid blame in this regard for prolonging the self-destroying antagonism and sharply undermining the Korean people’s potentials.
The Lee administration, bent on differentiating from its progressive predecessor, and alienating incompliant North, has been conducting inter-Korean policy based on an excessively moralistic, ideological and economic approach. It has long past the time that Seoul switched from this shortsighted, partisan and internal diplomacy to farsighted, suprapartisan and external policy that takes the interests of the entire 75 million Koreans into account.
Upon inauguration, President Lee vowed to conduct a pragmatic diplomacy, by taking neither pro-U.S. nor pro-Chinese line unless it served Korea’s national interest. Like many of his broken promises, however, the Lee administration has narrowed its own room of diplomatic maneuvering too soon.
As this page did four years ago, we once again urge Lee and his diplomatic team to turn willing to be both pro-U.S. and pro-China by expanding their perspective wider and longer.