Minjoo follows bad US precedent
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By Rahul Raj
Since South Korea announced its decision to host the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THHAD), there has been a great deal of discontent among citizens as well as lawmakers. The main opposition party, the Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) has raised concerns that deploying the American missile defense system would severely affect bilateral relations between Seoul and Beijing. China, South Korea’s biggest trading partner, has time and again raised its concerns about the missile system and also warned of serious repercussions, which some fear could take the form of economic retaliation.
However, the MPK finds itself divided, with some of its leaders supporting the system as a matter of national security and some asking government to reconsider its decision. In the midst of this internal bickering, the six lawmakers of the party took the unprecedented step of visiting China, arguing they were making an attempt to calm the situation.
President Park Geun-hye criticized the lawmakers, accusing them of "sympathizing with China" in a way that "will strengthen China's position." The President asked MPK leaders to reconsider their visit but she was rebuffed. The leaders made the trip anyway, with disastrous results. After their return, these officials claimed they had made a breakthrough with China, but the Global Times, part of Chinese state media, ridiculed their visit. Adding to the insult, China denied the claim made by Shin Dong-geun, a member of the delegation, who reported that Beijing had threatened to restore ties with North Korea in retaliation for the THAAD deployment. It seems no good came of the trip other than the embarrassment of the Korean government and its president.
The unusual decision by the MPK to visit China, in an affront to its own government, may be seen as akin to the invitation issued last year by Republican members in the United States Congress to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In an attempt to derail President Barack Obama's Iran policy, then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, John A. Boehner, invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of the US Congress. The invitation was offered without consulting President Obama or even informing him beforehand. It was the first time in American history that a foreign head of state was invited to speak before Congress without consulting the sitting president.
In effect, the longstanding role held by the executive branch of the American government to extend invitations to and host foreign heads of state was usurped by the legislative branch. Moreover, the Republican move was unprecedented in that it invited a foreign leader directly into an internal American political and foreign policy debate. Netanyahu fully seized the opportunity, using American disagreement over the Iran nuclear weapons agreement to stoke his own political agenda and Israeli national interests in his address.
The action of the Republicans over their political differences with President Obama made a mockery of the White House, obliging the president of the United States to accept the indignity of a public insult from his own countrymen, who appeared to show more courtesy, deference and respect to a foreign head of state. In the same way, the visit by the MPK lawmakers to China finds the same congruency, wherein their unusual actions have given ammunition to Beijing to exploit internal Korean political differences and invited China to insert itself into the debate over the future of Korean national security.
The party has set a bad precedent in the same way as the Republican Party in the US, and may also have endangered South Korean foreign policy goals. It seems that the visit to China by MPK officials was more to score political points over the Park Geun-hye government and exploit the sentiments of those opposing the THAAD deployment. Sadly, after so much political bad blood, the kind of statesmanship and cooperation required to make critical national security decisions appears in tatters, with both the ruling and opposition parties in a tug of war in which the Korean people might end up being the losers.
Rahul Raj is assistant professor in the Department
of Hotel and Tourism Management at
Sejong University and adjunct professor in the
Department of Korean Studies, Hanyang University.