Sunshine Policy died slow death
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By Stephen Costello
It is somewhat baffling to read that President Park Guen-hye’s speech to the National Assembly this week signaled the “death” of the Sunshine Policy. Certainly it signaled the death of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex (GIC), but that had become a stand-alone reminder of what could have been, largely orphaned by its South Korean creators. If it symbolized anything by now, the business park was a rebuke to all the anti-diplomacy and North-South absorption dreamers, because every day it demonstrated that there were, actually, some ways the two could cooperate for mutual benefit. In half a century, it is the only example where Seoul (with Washington’s help at the time) actually improved the lives of over 54,000 North Koreans in a deep and ongoing way. In a political and policy sense, the Sunshine Policy, and strategic engagement in general, died in six successive blows long before its final breath two weeks ago.
1. The policy began to die just as Sandra Day O’Connor intervened in support of the election of George W. Bush on Dec. 12, 2000. Two days earlier in Oslo, Norway, President Kim Dae-jung received the Nobel Peace Prize in the spectacular Oslo City Hall, in what must be one of history’s most bitter ironies. Both the Nobel Committee and Kim intended the prize to be a useful tool to continue the game-changing engagement project, knowing its impact on the region could be extensive and positive. Six weeks later, Bush, his Vice President Dick Cheney and their team arrived at the White House determined to scrap the clearly working KEDO (Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization) project and the hated Agreed Framework that spawned it. One has only to read their books for confirmation.
That strategic engagement, it should be remembered, was directly descended from efforts by Presidents Park Chung-hee, Kim Young-sam and other Korean leaders, North and South. It was also a fully and carefully multinational effort, with consultations and buy-in from regional neighbors and the U.S. administration at the time. The only problem in 2001 was that the engagement approach did not fit into a childish and perverse view of “good” and “evil” dreamed up by the new occupants of the White House. Because the North – logically – was primarily concerned with ending animosity with the rich and powerful U.S. before making substantial North-South Korea deals, the possible exit from the 1994 Agreed Framework and 1995 KEDO project by the U.S. could sink the whole decade-long project, and many observers understood this. Certainly the Bush team did. That was 16 years ago.
2. Sunshine then received another body blow in 2003, when new South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun turned on his party elders and attempted to look clean by criminalizing them, in a bizarre but deadly gambit that instantly crippled his presidency. His actions fatally split the broad democratic movement that Kim Dae-jung and a generation of pro-democracy activists across society had worked to build, in ways that linger, raw, to this day. Remember this when the progressives have trouble finding a leader acceptable to all of them.
3. On Oct. 9, 2006, North Korea detonated its first nuclear device. With that, it confirmed its insecure and fear-based view of the outside powers, and the current American administration in particular. No one knows the planning particulars of the DPRK, but the inability of the U.S. to make the North’s development central to deals over weapons has ruled out negotiations ever since.
4. Lee Myung-bak defeated progressive candidate Chung Dong-young for the presidency at the end of 2007. Had he won, Chung would have continued and expanded the Sunshine approach, most likely with far more sophistication and inclusiveness than President Roh. Instead, Lee returned the conservatives to power 10 difficult years after the first change of power groups. Lee began his administration with an attempt to eliminate the Ministry of Unification. The first mission he sent to Washington pronounced “contingency planning” the new primary goal of Korea-US discussions. It must have been crystal clear to the North Koreans that President Lee and his advisors would not be implementing many of the agreements of either June 2000 or October 2007, less than six months earlier. Taking a page from the George Bush playbook, Lee promptly undid as much of the Sunshine approach as he could.
5. Kim Jung-il died on Dec. 17, 2011. It is rarely acknowledged that one of the losses sustained by outside interested parties when Kim died was the experience, diplomatic history and institutional memory of the father of the current North Korean leader. On the issue of achievable deals to eliminate nuclear weapons and open a path to development of the North, much had been invested in him. With his son, the ROK and U.S. would thereafter have to exert more effort to establish basic trust.
6. Park Guen-hye defeated progressive candidate Moon Jae-in for the presidency in December 2013, with the progressive camp tearing itself apart right up to election day, still smarting from the Roh Moo-hyun purges of 2003. Park promised better North-South relations. Even at the time, however, the thinking and intentions behind the “Trustpolitik” slogan in her September/October 2011 Foreign Affairs article were pretty clear. Since taking office she has called for what can only be read in the North as surrender.
She has shown little interest in exploring a summit or meaningful exchanges about the larger issues with the North, instead pleading with outside powers to force it to accept her terms. The obvious meaning of her repeated calls for “reunification” was absorption by the South, just as her predecessor’s “contingency planning” was code for regime collapse. At a time when Koreans were occupying the top offices at the United Nations and World Bank, it seems never to have occurred to her that using them could be part of a solution.
So let’s be clear. The Sunshine policy died a while ago, and the Gaeseong complex was in some ways an embarrassment to those who did not believe in the value or the optics of mutual cooperation. Now we will see what kind of security can be produced by the proponents of what might be called the Dark Cloud policy.
Stephen Costello is a producer of AsiaEast, a web and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C. He can be reached at scost55@gmail.com.