By Andy Jackson
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent trip to Korea can be seen as little less than a complete success. While some progressives bemoaned her apparent hard line on North Korea, her reception here was as positive as anyone could have reasonably hoped.
Aside from the normal diplomatic decorum of her Korean government hosts, students at Ewha University, where she spoke on women's issues and received an honorary doctorate, also warmly received her. The students welcomed her with rousing applause as she came on stage. I cannot recall Korean college students being so welcoming to an American official.
She even briefly met with Yi So-yeon, South Korea's first astronaut.
Clinton's substantive business in Korea continued the love.
She was well aware of worries by the Lee administration that Clinton's boss would leave Lee as the odd man out while dealing with Pyongyang, much like her husband froze out Kim Young-sam in the early 1990s, and sought to reassure Seoul on that score. In a press conference after meeting Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan Friday, she told reporters that North Korea is ``not going to get a different relationship with the United States while insulting and refusing dialogue with the Republic of Korea.''
If the Obama administration sticks to that position, Pyeongyang's hope of once again playing Seoul and Washington off against each other will be dashed.
Clinton's earlier visit with Japanese officials was aimed at shoring up relations strained over the Bush administration's removal of North Korea from the State Department's state sponsors of terrorism list. The Bush team removed Pyongyang from the list, despite a lack of progress on the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents and Pyongyang's continued harboring of members of the terrorist Japanese Red Army organization, as part of a deal to revive the stalled six-party denuclearization talks. The talks have since stalled again.
While Clinton's meeting with the families of some of the Japanese abductees may have reassured some Japanese, it would have been better if she had signaled her intent to seek the return of North Korea to the terror sponsor list until the abductee issue and several others are addressed.
Clinton said all the right things during her Tokyo and Seoul visits. Of course, there is often a world of difference between saying and doing.
It may be some time before we know the Obama administration's real intentions toward the two Koreas. Policy reviews are still being conducted and President Obama is understandably concentrating most of his efforts on Afghanistan, Iraq and domestic issues.
One source of worry is that that Obama administration's conduct during the recent stimulus debate in Congress exposes a modus operandi that will crop up in its international dealings.
Obama ran for president as a post-partisan candidate who would change how things are done in Washington. He claimed that he would reach across the aisle to work with Republicans.
Instead, he and his allies in Congress rammed through a package so partisan that it only managed to gain the support of three Republicans in the Senate and none in the House of Representatives.
Then there is the disingenuousness.
A case in point is the way Obama is framing how the stimulus will affect employment in the United States. Obama has not set a of goal of reducing the American unemployment rate from its current level of 7.2 percent in the next two years, something that could have been objectively measured to assess the success or failure of the stimulus plan. Instead, he and his administration have stated that their measure of success will be ``creating or saving four million jobs.''
As Harvard economist Greg Mankiw observed on his blog: ``You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the president can say that there would have been four million fewer jobs without the stimulus.''
In short, we now know the Obama administration will declare the stimulus a success in time for the 2010 mid-term elections, based on criteria that cannot be measured, much less refuted.
Despite those concerns, Clinton's first visit to Korea, like the rest of her Asian trip, went off without any major hitches. That is about as good as anyone can reasonably expect from such an introductory tour.
Let's hope that the good feelings continue once we have a better idea of the Obama administration's intentions towards Seoul and Pyongyang.
Andy Jackson teaches American government in the Lakeland College bridge program at Ansan College, Gyeonggi Province. He can be reached at andyinrok@lycos.com