President Park Geun-hye will visit the United States in mid-June to have a summit with President Barack Obama. It will be the South Korean president’s third visit to Washington and the fifth summit with her U.S. counterpart in little more than two years. So, there are few major issues left unsolved between the two allies, in addition of course to North Korea’s security threats which, despite the latest saber-rattling with alleged firing of submarine-launched missiles, are not entirely new.
All this makes for another run-of-the-mill visit and summit. Some critics even suspect that Seoul might have asked for Park’s upcoming visit mainly not to be outdone by Japanese and Chinese leaders, who visited the U.S. in April and will do so in September, respectively.
If that suspicion is correct, President Park’s diplomatic team seems to be looking for trouble. Many diplomatic watchers, both here and foreign, will be watching how the South Korean leader performs in America, especially compared with the “successful” visit there by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last month.
It’s a small surprise then that foreign ministry officials appear to feel such observations quite burdensome and deny the need for any comparisons.
True, one needs not regard the Korea-U.S. alliance and U.S.-Japan alliance as a zero-sum game. Enhanced military cooperation between Washington and Tokyo can also be helpful for Seoul, particularly in coping with the military threat from Pyongyang. Just because of that, however, Seoul may end up only receiving large bills for the visit, being forced to reconcile with its unrepentant neighbor for the trilateral alliance, in a worst-case scenario.
Nor can President Park afford to look like a pestering partner, begging for the U.S. to side with Korea, not Japan, in historical issues, not least because Washington appears set to put its present interests ahead of past grievances.
What should Seoul do to solve this diplomatic dilemma in just a month?
What’s needed now seems to be nothing less than a bold shift in foreign policy. President Park and her aides have no other choice but to modify their principle-oriented diplomatic policy by injecting more flexibility and pragmatism in it. The Korean leader, for instance, will need to remind her U.S. hosts of the need to rebuke Japan’s historical regression, as so poignantly pointed out by 187 world-renowned scholars, including experts on Japan, not for resolving Koreans’ pent-up grudges but for setting modern history right for the sake of Japan itself and the rest of the world.
Any further nagging will likely backfire, however. Like it or not, Seoul needs to learn to live with unlikable partners if that’s what the harsh reality of international politics requires of it. The nation ought to be a proactive, not reactive, player, and volunteer to change instead of being forced to do so. The government can call for the summit of three Northeast Asian countries or even a bilateral summit with Japan in a “two-track” approach, putting historical issues aside temporarily, but not permanently. It should be able to turn the disadvantage of being the smallest of the three nations into an advantage.
As this page has stressed a thousand times, all this can, and should, start by improving inter-Korean ties. And this is why the government, during the overnight stay here by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to prepare for the June summit, should not stop at issuing another joint announcement denouncing the North’s recent raising of tensions.
Seoul must be able to persuade Washington to resume dialogue to solve the North Korean nuclear crisis ― or at least push for it alone under the U.S. agreement.