Tale of two patterns

The victory of Moon Jae-in in the presidential election last week was met with joyous relief both at home and abroad.

It was as if after months of going round in circles, the Korean ship finally had a captain on board and a firm hand back on the rudder.

Even North Korea joined in by calling for an end to animosity.

Now that we’ve savored this sunny Seoul spring moment, let me hand out a figurative handkerchief. Because, dear readers, this will end in tears.

Here’s why. For anyone who has been around long enough, when you say the words “President” and “North Korea,” two patterns come immediately to mind.

The first concerns negotiations with North Korea. The pattern for the last 30 years has been very consistent. It was well laid out in a recent column in this newspaper by Steve Tharp (“Knowing when to flinch,” uploaded May 2), so I won’t go into it again here. But the broad picture is: North Korea calls for talks, we agree, it argues over pre-conditions, we agree, we talk, it has a hissy fit, we make a concession, it has another spasm, walks out and starts doing target practice with its guns. The pattern has been interrupted in the last decade by our side’s understandable lack of interest in talks. And now, as the North plays with its guns, the new policeman on the beat, Donald Trump, has called in a SWAT team.

That’s where we were the night before Moon’s victory. But the next day, North Korea called for talks. Here we go again. My guess is, after a summit, by late 2018, we will back at this point again.

There is logic to this cynicism. North Korea’s leadership is stuck. This behavioral cycle is its only option.

The other pattern concerns the Korean presidency. Every democratically elected president — Moon is the seventh in a row — has started with high approval ratings.

At the inauguration, for example, the press widely applauded when the new president promised sweeping economic reforms to bridge the growing income gap and address youth unemployment as well as reduce the country’s dependence on the chaebol. The president also said, “I urge North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions without delay and embark on the path to peace and shared development.”

Actually, I just took those two sentences from a 2013 story in The Guardian about Park Geun-hye’s inauguration. But they could apply to Moon. He is saying pretty much the same, but it all feels fresh and good, like the absence of yellow dust after rain.

But soon, the slow descent will start. Journalists writing about this will link lower approval to scandals or unpopular policies, as if it’s the president’s fault. They will miss the real culprit — the people.

It’s a more difficult story to get your head around, but the beloved people don’t like leaders. I have a friend — a Korean, I hasten to add, because what I am about to say shouldn’t come out of the mouth of a foreigner — who raises Jindo dogs and who recently told me this: “In a group of dogs, one will emerge as the leader and the others will accept him. But Jindos are different. The weaker dogs never accept the stronger and every so often will let him know. They’re always fighting. We Koreans are like that, too.”

Honest, I tried to report this anti-Korean pro-Jindo racist to the Thought Police, but they were all busy on Facebook.

Right now, Moon is like the star who scores the winning goal in the World Cup semi-final. But once he gets presidential, the knives will come out and he’ll get blamed for everything.

If Moon can break the curse, God bless him. But if the pattern holds, five years from now he is going to be really unpopular.

A new twist is that he might not even make it to the end, because we have in Korea discovered a new weapon — impeachment. Normally, a leader is impeached for treason, gross corruption or some such crime. In Korea, though, the risk after the Park Geun-hye case is that it will be used as a way to unseat someone for the crime of no longer enjoying full popular support.

Once public sentiment is on their side, his opponents will look for a pretext. Actually, believe it or not, this idea is already doing the rounds online among some supporters of some of the candidates he beat.

Perhaps the solution for a leader with regard to this pattern number one is to solve pattern number two. If that North Korea pattern breaks and reconciliation happens under his watch, Moon will break the curse and forever be a hero.