US, China need South Korea to lead
“Let me be perfectly clear,” said U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Seoul last week, echoing the signal President Barack Obama had used to conceal the policy confusion and political timidity that has defined U.S. diplomacy toward East Asia since 2001. “The policy of strategic patience has failed.” But he wasn’t being clear about the Trump administration’s views. He was stating a fact that has been obvious to all in the region for eight years. Tillerson would have been more clear if he had offered a reason WHY strategic patience failed. Or if he had admitted that only the Bush and Obama policies failed, and that the U.S. and South Korea were pursuing successful policies toward North Korea 17 years ago.
20 years or 16 years?
His previous statement from Beijing that “20 years of U.S. policy have failed” reveals that he has either been told or has personally embraced myths like this, which deny or whitewash the period 1993-2000 when U.S. policy succeeded. In the words of Robert Carlin, the best U.S. analyst of North Korea, “What did not fail, however, was the diplomacy from 1993-2000. That period is barely understood by those who simply consign it to the same trash heap as the failures of the Bush and Obama administrations. That is a fatal mistake; it haunts us today and will haunt us even more tomorrow. To so misread the accomplishments of diplomacy of those years is to slam the door on probably the only course that will lead us away from the disaster we are facing now.” Carlin’s short article, “The Ultimate Failure in Korea” at www.38north.org is worth reading. It is the best on this subject in years, and it is under 900 words long.
Strategic patience was a clever substitute for paralysis from 2009 to 2017, but what about the years 2001-2009? More to the point, what was U.S. policy from 1993 to 2000? That was only 16 years ago. Not one journalist has asked Secretary Tillerson or any other U.S. official this question, but it is central to understanding the issues today. And why is recognition of the principles and national interests of those years the one policy option that has so terrified the U.S. administrations of Bush, Obama and now Trump, that it cannot even be remembered, much less considered? The answer may be that the fact at the center of all this is impossible for U.S. leaders to admit: North Korea did not walk away from the U.S.-DPRK agreements; the US did. Books by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others confirm it. With that correction the key rationale for U.S. policy since 2001 evaporates.
Closely linked to this record of the radical shift in U.S. policy are the parallel policies of the South Korean government. For five years during the 1990s the Clinton administration pursued a smart and complex engagement with North Korea without substantial help from the Kim Young-sam government. President Kim betrayed far more than his domestic democratic allies when he climbed into bed with the authoritarian/chaebol/anticommunist forces of the ruling party in 1992. He also abandoned the approach to the DPRK that was the natural outgrowth of democratization: some kind of practical engagement.
Clinton fought both YS and the majority anti-diplomacy Republicans in the U.S. Congress in order to cap the nuclear programs in the North. Therefore the new, progressive Kim Dae-jung government in 1998 was a huge relief to those efforts, because he finally had a full partner in Seoul. This is why the most successful period for either the U.S. or ROK diplomacy toward North Korea was 1998 to 2001. Unsurprisingly, this was the high point for the alliance.
Today the Trump administration faces multiple obstacles to any return to long-term and strategic deal-making surrounding Korea. It is probably incapable of the kind of long-game strategizing necessary to implement any new diplomacy. The requisite experts and both government and non-government expertise are not welcome in the White House. The diplomatic capability and personnel needed may never be created. Internal policy-making seems broken. By now we have seen the limitations of the President. He is allied with the most extreme Republicans, who are even less supportive than their predecessors of diplomatic solutions. The very best that can be expected is a return to the short-term and tactical deals of the Bush years, but we cannot even count on that.
In this environment the role of the next Korean president becomes more important than ever. He will need to appreciate that the domestic economy, the THAAD deployment, relations with China, Japan and Russia are all related to the North Korea issue. And that issue is unfortunately central to the U.S.-Korea alliance. For him, it will not be enough to respond symbolically to the candlelight protests and Park Geun-hye fatigue. The public has been quite clear: they want a return to working and accountable democratic institutions. And they want real, instead of fake and ideology-based, security.
Trump administration must be guided to support Seoul
If he is organized and gathers a broad and capable team, and if he has a process to take in the best advice from every corner, the new president can lead effective new strategies that pay attention to alliances, partners and neighbors. The only way he is likely to enlist the critical help of the U.S. Trump administration is by guiding them toward a supportive position in the region. He can only do that if he accepts that neither the U.S. nor China can take the lead. Both should be happy to have South Korea out in front when a new initiative is launched. Their endless bickering about their own efforts with North Korea shows why. Logically this makes sense, because it’s long been clear that the South has far more at stake than any other player except the North.