Moon and his neighbors

By Deauwand Myers

Literally, for centuries, Korea has been geographically and geopolitically stuck between implacable nation-states: adversarial and powerful. Whether it be the Mongolians, the Chinese, the Japanese or more recently North Korea, Korean society has endured being rolled over by wars and the rumor of wars for most of its existence.

Some 5,000 years of resistance and valiant attempts at maintaining cultural and geographical integrity has taught Korean governments, whether royalty (King Sejong), quasi-dictatorships (President Park Chung-hee) or democratic Korea, to negotiate national interests with those of its neighbors.

President Moon, particularly after the recent, dramatic election of America's President Joe Biden, is placed in a precarious, yet familiar, position.

What's new, by historical standards, is the injection of the United States into East Asian affairs. America has a rather complicated and bloody history with this region of the world. The United States' defeat of Imperial Japan, though unnecessarily brutal (the firebombing of civilian targets, and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are examples) ushered in an age of democracy for the second-largest economy on earth (this rank has been taken over by China, who, by some metrics, may have supplanted the United States as the biggest economy in the world. Though, per capita, Americans earn more income than their Chinese counterparts).

About half a decade after the end of World War II, the United States entered the Korean War, a sad affair bifurcating the Korean Peninsula and setting up the status quo in which President Moon finds himself.

The challenges facing Korea and its relationships with its neighbors are not enviable. How does the Korean government revitalize its economy and strengthen ties with a conservative government like Japan, one in which former Prime Minister Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) too often indulged in revisionist history or played apologists for Imperial Japan's atrocities before and during World War II?

Is Japan a good faith partner in the international community's pursuit of a peaceful and durable rapprochement with North Korea? Does Japan want a sustainable and thriving economic relationship with Korea, a seemingly natural fit considering both Korea and Japan's strongest and most important ally is the United States, wherein both countries host large American military bases and are covered under America's defensive nuclear umbrella?

Finally, and most importantly in regard to Japan's future diplomatic ties to Korea, is the newly elected Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga as stridently insensitive to Korea's and China's appropriate indignation at former Prime Minister Abe and company's penchant to romanticize Imperial Japan's behavior in Korea and Manchuria?

Prime Minister Suga, a strawberry farmer by family trade, is far less vocal on any issue, including Imperial Japan, than his predecessor. However, he was the longest-serving chief cabinet secretary (basically an amalgamation of chief of staff, vice prime minister and chief policy adviser to the prime minister) in Japanese history. Further, he served in this position from 2012 to 2020 under Abe and shares Abe's ideology, which would invariably include a refurbishing and reimagining of Imperial Japan's brutal conquest of much of Asia as something other than what it was: evil.

President Moon of the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) has deftly navigated his administration's relationship with the nation's biggest neighbor, China. Though the Moon administration officially calls on human rights reforms within Chinese society like its biggest ally, the United States, Korean foreign policy towards China has been fairly deferential, much more so than with Japan (obviously, for historical reasons).

President Moon has been exceedingly prudent in his and his administration's interactions with China, and with good reason. Korea must engage a country of 1.3 billion people, with a burgeoning middle class, a modernizing military and nuclear arsenal and an unabashedly assertive foreign policy (sometimes violently so, as with the recent and fatal skirmishes between India and China at the Sino-Indian border, near the disputed Pangong Lake and the Tibet Autonomous Region). China's unilateral and illegal claims of sovereignty over much of the South China Sea, claims made even more real after China constructed artificial islands throughout the area and had them militarized, doesn't make said engagement any easier.

Then there's China's leader. Xi Jinping brooks no political dissent even mildly different from his own, has committed cultural genocide to most of the minority Uyghur Muslim population in the northwest province of Xinjiang, all but annihilated democracy in Hong Kong (violating the treaty China signed with Britain when the city was returned to the mainland), constantly threatens to militarily take over democratic and independent Taiwan and has created a vast police state, surveillance network and a propaganda machine touting Xi within a cult of personality.

All this, and President Moon hasn't had much time to get to know President Biden. We should all wish President Moon the best of luck. He's going to need it.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. The views expressed in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.