Party's over

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Mon, December 4, 2023 | 05:58

Editorial

Party's over

Posted : 2023-04-30 16:50

Updated : 2023-04-30 16:50

Time to settle the bill and pick up the pieces

President Yoon Suk Yeol's six-day visit to the United States last week reaffirmed how different diplomacy can be on the inside and on the outside.

After the summit with President Joe Biden, the South Korean leader sang "American Pie" in a carefully staged state banquet. During his 43-minute speech at the U.S. Congress' joint session, Yoon mentioned the word "freedom" 46 times, drawing 23 rounds of applause.

Now it's time to review what Yoon, or Seoul, gained and lost.

As always, there are two principal points ― national security and the economy. In conclusion, South Korea earned a more extensive and closely knit U.S. nuclear umbrella, if in form only, and got little ― if any ― in the economy.

The Washington Declaration contains the U.S. pledge to retaliate against nuclear attacks from North Korea in kind, even if the latter hit the U.S. mainland with long-range missiles at the same time. Its concrete implementing tool, the Nuclear Consultation Group, will reflect Seoul's opinions on America's possible use of atomic weapons.

But there is nothing else. The presidential office and the ruling party hastily ― and presumptuously ― identified these accords with "nuclear sharing." However, even before Yoon left Washington, ranking U.S. officials made clear that is not the case. "So let me be very direct. I don't think that we see this as a de facto nuclear sharing," said Edgard Kagan, senior director for East Asia and Oceania of the National Security Council.

Instead, Washington put to rest Seoul's ambitions to develop its own nuclear weapons or bring back U.S. atomic bombs to the peninsula permanently. Except for a written pledge, one could hardly see any substantive changes in the U.S.' nuclear policy on South Korea before and after Yoon's visit. Nothing shows this better than the coarse but subdued response from Pyongyang, by its standards. Kim Yo-jong, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's sister, called Biden "a futureless old man" and Yoon "an ugly guy."

Besides countering a hypothetical North Korean nuclear attack on the South, Yoon made a more serious commitment in a global context. By moving excessively closer to America, he turned China and Russia into de facto adversaries. Moscow showed a willingness to give arms to Pyongyang if Seoul provides lethal weapons to Kyiv. Beijing was more direct, warning against "playing with fire" by intervening in the China-Taiwan relationship. If the war in Ukraine escalates and armed conflict breaks out in the Taiwan Strait, Seoul cannot avoid involvement.

That will lead to enormous adverse effects Yoon's U.S. visit will have on this country's economy. Contrary to expectations that closer ties with Washington will help ease Korean computer chip and electric vehicle makers' concerns about doing business with China, Yoon failed to induce any reassuring remarks from Biden.

The South Korean leader should have seen the true concerns behind the smiling faces of the chaebol tycoons in his entourage and won more than a pledge to "continue the discussion." A U.S. journalist had to ask a thorny question about the matter on behalf of her excessively polite Korean colleagues and a bewildered Biden obfuscated.

Yoon calls himself "Sales Representative No. 1 of the Republic of Korea." However, the businesses must add the "presidential risk" to their list of corporate uncertainties. Yoon boasted U.S. companies would invest $5.2 billion in Korea, but Biden said Korean firms are to pour $75 billion into America. The business community's concerns will become a reality when the two estranged powers retaliate in business arenas.

Once again, Yoon gave almost everything and came back nearly empty-handed.

What Seoul expects to get from Washington and Tokyo in return will be hard to compare to what it loses from Beijing and Moscow. South Korea should not, and cannot, be the 51st U.S. state. It must be a balance of power in Asia and the world, however imperfect it may be.

The "global freedom crusader" and his administration are going in the diametrically opposite direction.