South Korea isolating itself

By Stephen Costello

South Korea is isolating itself. In a tragic twist, the attempt by the last two presidents to involve Korea in everything, anything, except the hard business of talking to North Korea, has had the opposite effect. China is considering reducing its interest in Korea. Japan during the Shinzo Abe years can afford to deal with South Korea as a subcategory of managing its relations with Washington. Korea remains a vibrant market, and a resilient society, but most of the region and the world expect little of its leadership. Assessments of Seoul from Washington are particularly negative.

Controversy and domestic divisiveness have inevitably followed the South Korean government’s decision to agree to deploy THAAD missile batteries in un-populated areas. The decision has never been primarily about the defense of South Korean territory from incoming North Korean ICBMs. After all, the first missile fired by the DPRK into South Korea will spell the end of that regime, and possibly the end of the state. Among all the rationales confidently attributed to the Kim Jung Il leadership, suicide has never been one of them. The decision’s political usefulnessis now more clear. The anger of many residents of Seongju, the first site chosen to host a THAAD missile battery,is just the beginning of the public backlash. Foreign Minister Yun was reportedly not in favor of the deployment. It is unlikely these residents, as well as constituencies in the National Assembly and among the public opposed to the deployments, misunderstand the capabilities of the system, or its potential to do environmental damage. What theymay suspectis that the system makes them and Korea less secure.

Overall, missile defenses without diplomacy are a bad deal. Look at the US experience during the last 15 years. As a result of increased military spending, other necessities are neglected. The US has wasted $40 billion on an ideological symbol, according to a new report by the well-respected Union of Concerned Scientists. The missile defense project at Ft. Greeley, Alaska was known at the time to be impractical. Compare that to the $300 million the Clinton administration was forced by US Republicans to bargain and threaten for in order to support a deal that really worked. For that relatively small sum, the DPRK’s plutonium and missile production was halted for eight years, before the Bush administration ended it. In place of that working deal, the US under Bush based its new, post-Clinton foreign policy on missile defense, using the flawed July 1998 report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, generally known as the Rumsfeld Report, to support its case. This effort led to that $40 billion mistake.

The diplomatic repercussions are more important.

Sanctions and isolation as tools of policy are neutral. Sometimes they are appropriate. But for both the US and South Korea, it is the context of their government’s refusal to resume credible negotiations with North Korea that renders both military defense and “containment” actions, and sanctions and isolation policies, suspect. To state just one obvious anomaly, successful negotiations would be far cheaper, as we have seen during the 1990s. They could also deliver parties greater and more dependable security. The fact that the North Koreans and Chinese remember the deals that were made in 1994 by the US and in 2000 by the ROK, and were then unilaterally abandoned by the US in 2001 and by the ROK in 2008, is central to contemporary views in several capitals. That such memories are misremembered or ignored by today’s authorities in Washington and Seoul is a sad and telling data point, suggesting a lack of strategic understanding and political courage.

The diplomatic isolation of South Korea, and in parallel its being misunderstood and reduced to an anti-communist and anti-North Korea cartoon by policy specialists, is the real cost of miscalculations by the Park government. Korea’s relationship with China is complex and evolving, and it is long-term. Yet China has been treated by the Park administration as part of a badly-conceived effort to isolate North Korea. The larger trade, regional security and power relationships between the two have been eclipsed. The global diplomatic effort by Seoul to peel off various allies of North Korea has been equally misconceived. The Seouladministration may feel it must cast the Kim regime in the DPRK as “crazy” or “irrational” or immune to reason, but without contacts or an ROK interest in talking, such claims smack of an excuse to avoid diplomacy.

In Alter Egos, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power, the new book about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton by Mark Landler, there are detailed discussions about how policy was debated and steered regarding Libya, Cuba, Syria, Egypt and Israel. There is extensive detail on how the US President, beginning barely one month into his first administration, asked for broad reassessments and new thinking about how to approach Iran. Landler is a professional, and this is some of the best insight we are likely to have before the November election. But Korea is absent. It is referred to a handful of times as a point of disagreement, or leverage, in Obama’s relationships with Chinese leaders. But as a policy matter it doesn’t come up.And there Korea’s isolation is clear. If Landler thought there was a story to tell about Korea policy, he would surely have pursued it.

Among the best online journals of US foreign policy is ForeignPolicy.Com. It now features a well-written report by Dave Hazzan, but it could have been by many other specialists. The title is “Is South Korea Regressing Into a Dictatorship?” Although the answer is no, the fact that this is how Korea looks to policy professionals is a very disturbing sign.

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.