How they see us: Did South Korea’s leader give too much?
Let’s hope President Yoon Suk-yeol had fun belting out his big karaoke number on his state visit to Washington, said The Korea Times in an editorial, because now the “party’s over.” On his weeklong trip, Yoon positioned himself as America’s best friend, singing “American Pie” at a White House state dinner and using the word “freedom” 46 times in his 43-minute speech to the U.S. Congress. The Americans loved it. Now that he’s back home, though, what has he brought with him? The Washington Declaration, the new agreement clinched with President Biden to mark the 70th anniversary of the two countries’ alliance, contains nothing earth-shattering. It merely spells out a U.S. pledge “to retaliate against nuclear attacks from North Korea in kind” and provides for the deployment of American nuclear-armed submarines to South Korea. Seoul also gets a new forum to provide “input” on Washington’s use of nuclear weapons. But that’s a far cry from “nuclear sharing,” the kind of cooperation that NATO partners have. And in return, Yoon promised that South Korea would not ever seek its own nuclear deterrent—something a majority of South Koreans favor. It looks distressingly as if he “gave almost everything and came back nearly empty-handed.”
Yoon also managed to anger both China and Russia, said Lee Jong-seok in The Hankyoreh. His talk of freedom and values seemed calculated to insult the two huge superpowers on our border—the very countries that “share responsibilities in the armistice system” that governs the peninsula. To cozy up to Washington, Yoon actually came out and said that the status of Taiwan was “not simply an issue between China and Taiwan” but a global issue. That infuriated Beijing, which sees Taiwan as Chinese territory. Did Yoon forget that we depend on China to enforce global sanctions on North Korea? After all, that pariah nation does nearly all of its trade with China. Now that Yoon has offended China, expect Beijing to “profoundly shake up the sanctions regime” against North Korea. Yoon is letting South Korea get “sucked into the new U.S.-led Cold War system,” said The Hankyoreh in an editorial. That will increase “the risk of a North Korean nuclear crisis—and even war.”
The Americans didn’t even seem grateful for Yoon’s slavish adherence to their policy line, said the Dong-a Ilbo in an editorial. Korean businesses expected Yoon to get some specific carve-outs from the “poisonous and discriminatory provisions” of Biden’s protectionist legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, excludes Korean companies from U.S. electric vehicle subsidies, while the CHIPS Act requires Korean chipmakers to reveal trade secrets and limit business with China in order to take advantage of subsidies. None of those problems were fixed. And while Yoon boasted that U.S. companies would invest $5.2 billion in Korea, Biden announced that Korean firms were going to pour $75 billion into the U.S. Sure, it was important to tend to our alliance with the U.S., said the Kyunghyang Shinmun in an editorial. But Yoon now faces new headaches in the fields of economy, diplomacy, and security. To many South Koreans, it’s not clear that his trip actually “advanced the national interest.”