[Abandoning my readers to the Western commentariat is like leaving a child standing on the edge of a well, to borrow a vivid Korean phrase, but I no longer have the time or inclination to blog regularly. My sabbatical is over, I have a book to work on, and those who haven’t yet grasped the ideological realities of the peninsula probably never will. Having sent this piece the other day to a few friends, I have decided to make it public in response to questions that journalists have been emailing me. Not that they will pay attention. Getting asked how Kim Jong Un is now going to sell denuclearization to the North Korean public — and asked in the tone of someone who expects it to happen — reminds me how futile it is to talk to a guild with no interest in ideological matters.
And no interest in helping readers exercise judgment, draw reasoned conclusions. The other day I came across such an obvious explanation for our media’s penchant for mutually nullifying soundbites that I feel embarrassed for having complained about it on this blog. Because the maximum number of consumers must be strung along from story to story, Christoph Böhr writes, “the only important thing is to leave everything undecided and noncommittal to the end…. This ritualized mediality is quite the opposite of deliberation.” (“Die deliberative Gesellschaft,” in Warum noch Philosophie?, ed. van Ackeren et al, Berlin, 2011, p.217.) This also explains why journalists print comments they know are nonsense, like the one about how we can’t hope to grasp Kim Jong Un’s intentions if we don’t know what he had for breakfast. But a nuclear crisis is serious. We need to deliberate.]
Americans should think twice before cheering on their South Korean ally in its chosen role as intermediary between Pyongyang and Washington. Whenever an ally is allowed to attempt such a function, the adversary is bound to benefit most.
Needless to say, an ally that acted as a truly impartial go-between would be a contradiction in terms. The Americans expect Seoul to play good cop to their bad cop. They assume the commonality of language, ethnicity and culture will help the South build trust with the North, so it can put the alliance’s demands over more persuasively. They also reckon the North Koreans will find it easier to yield to soft-spoken fellow Koreans than to the foreigners with whom they have been exchanging threats and insults for decades.
But to play such a role the South must overcome an exceptionally high barrier of mistrust. It gets no brownie points for Koreanness alone. On the contrary; from the North’s standpoint it’s precisely that co-ethnicity which makes the puppet state’s long collusion with the Yankees so heinous. Making any major concession to it in talks would mean a greater loss of face than doing so in direct negotiations with the US, which — as the North sees things — is at least its equal, a fellow nuclear power.
The only meaningful commonality between North Korea and the South Korean nationalist left is ideological in nature. The left virtually sprang out of the North’s loins in the latter 1940s. Both parties agree that Kim Il Sung was a guerrilla hero, and that Syngman Rhee cemented national division, thereby bringing on the tragedy of the Korean War. The left’s demonstrations and uprisings have all been glamorized in the North’s history books, as have many of its icons. When Moon Jae-in quoted Shin Young-bok to Kim Yo-jong and Kim Young-nam last month, and got both to pose with him in front of Shin’s calligraphy, it was in awareness that the North cherishes the long-imprisoned leftist’s memory too.
It is therefore misleading of the New York Times to say that the Moon Jae-in administration is “hungry for a diplomatic rapprochement” with Pyongyang. There is no bad blood or grudge between the two parties that must now be laboriously reconciled. Besides, they have the exact same short term goal of bringing off a North-South summit that is PR-effective enough to get a) the international community to relax sanctions, and b) the South Korean public to sign off on confederation. Their longer term goals are different. The North wants unification under its own flag, while South Korean progressives want the two states to coalesce over decades of mutually beneficial economic cooperation.
I see quite a few foreign Pyongyang watchers now quietly acknowledging Kim’s unification drive and Moon’s commitment to confederation. They’re even trying to assume the air of people who never doubted these things, in the hope that everyone has already forgotten their writings to the contrary. But to maintain their pose of worldly unflappability they now assert that the North could never get its way, Moon Jae-in being very clever and security-minded and in perfect control of the situation.
They need to start by reading Pareto; elites routinely do things that in retrospect look politically suicidal. (Just look at South Korea in 2016/2017, when advocates of a parliamentary system handed off power to the only sizeable political force that didn’t want it.) They also need to realize that confederation would entail some sort of council consisting of North Korean cadres voting en bloc and an equal number of South Koreans who, having been selected along democratic principles, would be certain to contain at least one pro-North delegate. The council might not give confederated Korea a President Kim Jong Un (which Takesada Hideshi considers a distinct possibility), but unless it is purely for show, it will effectively advance the North’s interests.
For that matter, the shift to a parliamentary system now advocated by the conservative opposition may turn out to be an even greater threat to the republic, as Byun Hee-jae never tires of pointing out. One need only imagine a pro-North splinter party playing the sort of role in a coalition that the DUP now plays in the British government.
Back to the issue at hand. Between radicals and moderates, trust tends to go in one direction only. The moderate regards the radical as highly principled, while the radical sees the moderate as opportunistic and weak-willed. Inter-Korean trust-building is thus largely a unilateral affair of the progressives trying to prove that they are at least ideologically and emotionally closer to Pyongyang than to Washington. This entails making much of their admiration of the North’s autonomy, and professing to maintain the US-ROK alliance more for economic reasons than anything else.
Understandably enough the dictatorship expects this talk to be backed up with action. It was not mere greed that made Kim Jong Il insist on an enormous illicit transfer of public funds from Seoul before agreeing to host the 2000 summit. It was among other things a test of how far his counterpart was prepared to go in deceiving Washington.
I hope I don’t sound indignant. Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee were in their own way just as duplicitous, and few countries in modern times have betrayed as many state and non-state allies as America has.
The simple truth of the matter is that no Blue House can win Pyongyang’s trust without distancing itself from the US ally to a significant degree. At the very least it must present itself as neutral in the nuclear stand-off, but even that probably isn’t enough. As Chamfort said, “Anyone placed at exactly the same distance between yourself and your enemy will always appear closer to your enemy.” The South Koreans can play go-between only if they restrict themselves to mediating with Washington on the North’s behalf.
The Americans listened benignly to Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine Policy rhetoric in the belief that he intended only to play good cop, which was how he always sold it to the world. (The Aesop fable from which it derived its name is the world’s oldest story of a good cop/bad cop strategy.) They were disappointed to learn after the Pyongyang summit that he had neither mentioned human rights to Kim Jong Il nor pressed him on nuclear matters. It took the South Korean president a few more years to acknowledge that the North had a nuclear program at all.
All the same, Washington appeared blind to the implications of the two Kims’ public pledge to work towards some form of an inter-state community, so as to solve the problem of unification “among our own people” and “autonomously.” In North Korea and on the South Korean left, the word autonomous means in such contexts: without Yankee meddling.
Kim Dae Jung’s more blunt-spoken successor Roh Moo Hyun left no doubt, however, that he was more interested in pleading Pyongyang’s case with Washington than vice versa. The Kim regime, he kept saying, was pursuing a nuclear program only in order to feel safe – he found this reasonable (illi ga itta) — and would abandon it “if economic support and the security of its system can be guaranteed.”
All this made Roh very handy to Kim Jong Il, who due to the collapse of the information cordon surrounding his state could no longer play the hawk at home and the dove in export propaganda. This way he could stay in Iron General mode while another power assured the world of his insecurity. And what more authoritative, trustworthy source could one ask for than the South Koreans? Whether Kim Dae Jung, Roh Moo Hyun or Moon Jae-in, the message to Washington has always been: “Trust us; we know these guys much better than you do.”
Nowhere in the transcripts of the 2007 summit does Roh express disapproval of the North’s nuclear program. On the contrary, he tells Kim he has been acting as the North’s “spokesman and advocate” at international summits. He also says that “the biggest problem is the US,” and that he would publicly oppose its position if not for the South’s economic interests and his desire to keep the Americans in the 6 Party talks. He also reports on the promising rise in anti-Americanism in the South, calling this “a change in the environment that makes it possible for our (Korean) nation to solve problems autonomously.” (The text is contained in, among other places, Yi Hae-sŏng and Yi Chun-gu’s recent book Pukhan ŭi pyŏnhoin No Mu-hyŏn, Seoul, 2017).
(Note: judging from how Roh’s people later falsely assured the public and the US ambassador that the maritime border in the Yellow Sea had not been discussed at the summit, they seem to have intended to keep the transcripts secret – and would likely have done so had the right not returned to power a few months later.)
Keep in mind here that while Roh Moo Hyun was to the left of Kim Dae Jung, which isn’t saying much, he was a moderate in comparison to the people around him, who included Moon Jae-in and many others in the current administration. The common claim that Roh personally exploited the US armored vehicle accident in 2002 to win the election is a rightist canard. It was the conservative presidential candidate who demanded George W. Bush personally apologize — and Roh who later sent South Korean troops to Afghanistan and promoted the KORUS FTA. A tax lawyer by training, with no roots in campus protests, he was at the very least more pro-American, more committed to liberal democracy and free markets, and more critical of the North than Moon Jae-in is.
True, he also gave billions in aid to the Kim Jong Il regime, but the 2007 summit transcripts indicate that close economic cooperation with the North was about all he wanted, even if he was ready to nullify part of the NLL to get it. Had he wanted confederation with the North he would have pushed for it when his popularity was at its height.
Moon Jae-in, on the other hand, is now prepared to abide by sanctions far stricter than those in force in Roh’s day, because he has a much larger goal in view than the re-opening of the Kaesong Industrial Zone, and knows he must project a certain image to Washington and his own public to reach it.
Few South Koreans in political circles would take issue with this characterization behind closed doors, though more might make a pretense of doing so in foreign earshot. The ideological difference between the aging Roh loyalists and the younger Moon followers now shunting them aside is even harder to overlook than the difference between the two presidents themselves. Everyone here with a serious interest in inter-Korean affairs now senses, with excitement or dread, that something very big is being prepared with Pyongyang.
There is also a sense that anyone who gets in the way of it will be in trouble. The main broadcasters are now firmly under the Moon camp’s influence, the unions having succeeded in hounding conservatives off the boards of directors. Nightly political discussion is conducted accordingly. Talk show producers sound out potential panelists and reject anyone who seems too critical of the Blue House, particularly in regard to North Korea. The other day a veteran of an earlier progressive administration complained to me that the government has begun making scolding phone calls to academics who contribute unfriendly soundbites to the Chosun and Donga (which are pulling punches anyway). It’s not exactly the knock on the door at 4 a.m., but the widespread perception is that anyone can suddenly find himself the object of prosecutorial scrutiny. This, and not the lack of decent candidates, is why the conservative parties can’t find people to run for office.
I am not unaware of a certain froideur myself. In my experience South Koreans are wonderfully tolerant of a foreigner with differing views when the discussion is in Korean, and no foreigners of importance are around. They lose their tempers when they see someone exporting information which — however widely discussed in the Korean press — is thought best kept “in country.”
[This goes for the right as well as the left. Tell an American in the company of South Korean conservatives how their camp boasts of a tradition not of pro-Americanism (ch’inmijuŭi) but of “use-America-ism” (yongmijuŭi) and you’ll see what I mean.]
For now only Americans seem naive enough to think that President Moon represents a new tendency in South Korean leftism toward more security-mindedness, more wariness of the North. Even if left unchecked this fallacy will not survive the summer, but that may be about all the time needed. Moon himself has said that the next few months will decide the fate of the peninsula.
Let’s not forget that one of the president’s first decisions was to appoint as his chief of staff Im Jong-seok, who not only led a radical pro-North organization in his student years, for which he did time after years of evading arrest, but was also given power of attorney by the Kim Jong Il regime in 2005 to enforce the North’s copyrights in the South. For several years he served quite literally as Pyongyang’s agent, in the commercial or non-espionage sense of the word, collecting royalties from broadcasters and educational institutions that made use of North Korean images, art, film and music. Before anyone suggests he might have reformed in the brief interim before his appointment: If there’s anyone the North Koreans loathe, it’s a backslider, a renegade. The fact that they are still happy to deal with Im speaks for itself.
Now, a president can fill almost any post with a view to settling a political debt, satisfying a domestic constituency, or projecting inclusiveness, but his right-hand man has to be the person on his staff he trusts most. (This is especially true in South Korea, where every outgoing president faces the threat of retaliatory prosecution.) One can therefore consider Im a wonderful fellow, and think his ties to the North valuable enough to qualify him for some position, yet still find him an astonishing choice for chief of staff. Apart from the presidency itself, there’s no other position, not even defense minister, in which an adversarial government would prefer to have an old friend of over 25 years’ standing.
Most of the Western commentariat overlooked all this, but we can be certain that the US government knew all about Im Jong-seok, and that Seoul and Pyongyang knew it knew. The appointment therefore makes no sense except as a signal to the North, one far more impressive than Kim Dae Jung’s coerced transfer of funds. “Look how far I’m willing to go here,” Moon was in effect saying, “I’m putting special trust in the very same person in whom you place special trust, the last man the Americans want to see in such a vital post.”
The foreign observer might well find it improbable that Moon would knowingly rankle the Americans in such a manner. But central to nationalist left orthodoxy has long been the belief that the US will cling desperately to the alliance until the South sends it packing. A recent and very typical expression of this:
America cannot overturn [the status quo] without abandoning the many benefits it now enjoys: the sale of weapons to South Korea and Japan, holding China down at the peninsula, hindering Russia’s new East Asia policy…. For geopolitical and geoeconomical reasons, America cannot abandon South Korea. South Korea has to exploit this to the full.” Prof. Jeon Hyeon-jun, quoted in the Joongang Ilbo, Jan 30 2018.
Hence also the confident hope of many that under the right sort of pressure, Washington will reduce USFK from bodyguard to chaperone: a force just high-tech and well-armed enough to reassure foreign investors, reward the US military-industrial complex, and discourage the North from doing anything crazy, but too small and averse to military exercises to frighten the neighbors. (Which may well be what is foreseen for the very first stage of a confederation, as a transition to US troop pullout.)
The same belief has informed the Moon camp’s readiness to offend the US government, though it’s careful not to impress this readiness on the dozing Western commentariat. This feat is only possible because our government — as the South Koreans know only too well — has a horror of publicly admitting to disunity in its alliances.
Last year the Moon camp publicly stated that it would not allow the North to be attacked; that the US should acknowledge it as a nuclear power, and abandon its “hostile policies”; that a freeze-freeze deal (the proposal for which originated in Pyongyang) is a wonderful idea; that a co-ethnic confederation with economic cooperation would provide a good framework to get the North in a denuclearizing mood; and that conservatives — read supporters of a strong alliance with the US — must be kept out of power for at least the next 20 years.
These points (which go far beyond anything said by Roh or DJ) have been made either by President Moon himself, by ministers and officials inside his administration, by the ruling party, or by Moon Chung-in, the president’s “special envoy for peace and unification,” who though not formally on the government payroll is known to be the silse or “real power” in the president’s camp along with Im Jong-seok.
[Digression: I should explain why I’m increasingly inclined to say “camp” instead of “administration.”
First, the president likes to present himself more as the head of a grass-roots revolution than as someone who got only 41% of the vote after the state impeached his predecessor. Thus does he lay moral claim also to the roughly 27% of the vote received by candidates of the other left-leaning parties. This is the only way he can claim to have more of a mandate than Park Geun-hye got (51%). In fairness to Moon I must add that opinion polls, whether reliable or not, indicate that he does indeed enjoy the approval of many people who voted for other candidates last year.
Second, the boundary between Moon’s loyal followers in the Minjoo and people in parties and civic groups further to the left seems fluid, more so perhaps than the line inside the ruling party between Moon’s faction and more moderate leftists. (By the way, “civic group” is South Korean media-speak for “left-wing group”; a conservative group is a “conservative group.”)
Third, much input into policy-making seems to be coming straight to the president from so-called mentors outside the government proper, as opposed to being solicited by relevant bureaucrats and percolating upward. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially considering how much vital information bureaucrats keep from American presidents even – or especially — in wartime. Still, it shows how little real indignation lay behind the condemnation of Park Geun-hye for allegedly relying on advice from a “civilian” without a security clearance. After all, the potential for influence-peddling and bribery does not disappear just because such a person has appropriate credentials.
To make things even more opaque, the Moon administration’s own organigrams seem at odds with the actual hierarchy and delegation of duties. During the Olympics we saw the chief of staff and the head of the intelligence agency play incongruously prominent roles in inter-Korean talks while the Unification Minister faded into the background. The North Korean delegates, their own formal titles belied by how the nominal head of state deferred to the nominal propaganda chief, must have felt right at home.
Fourth, Moon likes potentially controversial decisions to be preceded by proposals from non-governmental advisory committees or “task forces” chaired by people from the nationalist left. This allows him not only to present his administration as the humble executor of the candlelight will, but also to distance himself from proposals – like the one to delete the word free from the constitution – that result in too great an outcry. Habituation is hoped for too; ideas sound less radical after they’ve been bandied about a bit.]
It’s not impossible that Moon Jae-in and his associates could have chosen this of all times — when even many Americans are saying the North’s arsenal can be lived with! — to make denuclearization their number one priority. But it’s far more likely that they see the need to project to Washington and the South Korean public a firm commitment to the alliance in the short term. This is necessary if the Moon camp is to put over confederation when the formation of this North-South body — or some big step in that direction, like a formal conclusion of hostilities — is publicly agreed upon at the upcoming Kim-Moon summit. (Since both sides have far too much to lose to risk a repetition of the disastrous 2007 summit, it is likely that the main points have already been settled.) In the run up to the June elections, confederation will be sold mainly on economic grounds, perhaps also with talk of reducing terms of military service, and with nightly candlelight demonstrations of a pacifist-nationalist nature, but none of that will do much good if people are worrying about a US troop pullout. There is thus a good chance of the North-South summit resulting in some utterly non-binding indication that Kim Jong Un has reconciled himself to a permanent US troop presence.
It appears that the South is advising the North on how best to handle the US, and perhaps even rewording the North’s statements accordingly; conservatives here were quick to note how closely the uncharacteristic wording of Kim Jong Un’s statements as summarized by the South Korean envoys — in regard to military exercises, for example — resembled statements already made by Moon Chung-in.
The content of President Moon’s letter to Kim Jong Un was likely to have been a minor variant on what Roh (according to transcripts) said orally to Kim Jong Il in 2007:
If Chairman Kim would only open the door to the improvement of ties between the North and the US, I will keep pushing America to put on speed in taking appropriate corresponding measures to improve relations.
Whether that was said or not, it’s certainly what the South has done. Its services may even have extended (as in 2007) to misleading the US. I am thinking of how Jeong Eui-yong vouched excitedly for Kim Jong Un’s sincerity while conveying the latter’s alleged intent to denuclearize the peninsula. No South Korean government genuinely supportive of America’s main goal would have responded in such a manner to the reiteration of a stock North Korean line.
Recently the Chosun conducted a relevant interview with Kim Seong-min, the son of the North Korean poet Kim Seong-suk. Kim Seong-min defected to the South in the mid-1990s.
The interviewer asks:
Q: Some people are wondering if President Trump didn’t misunderstand the phrase “denuclearization of the peninsula,” which was conveyed to him by the South Korean delegation, as “the denuclearization of the North.” Why do you think Kim Jong Un spoke of “the denuclearization of the peninsula”?
A: That’s a swindle of the world that has been carried on from Kim Il Sung through Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un. He says the denuclearization of the peninsula is his predecessors’ legacy. North Korean people take this to mean that the US troops occupying the South must get rid of their own nuclear weapons at the same time. That’s what I thought too, when I was a captain in the North Korean army. Because of the US nuclear threat we have to develop nuclear weapons too, and if the US gets rid of them, we will get rid of ours. Time has passed but it’s how North Korean people still think. This is why Kim Jong Un can come right out and talk about denuclearizing the peninsula. What I’m saying is that the South Korean delegation should have asked for the denuclearization of the North….
Q: Did the South Korean delegation not know that?
A: As people [representatives] from the South, how could they not know it? Especially since it was the head of national intelligence and the Blue House’s national security chief. It was wrong of them to pass on those words while feigning unawareness. The more regrettable thing is that honest South Korean people also do not know the correct meaning of “denuclearization of the peninsula” and take it at face value. How scary this is. The Blue House and the president are going along with Kim Jong Un’s scary trick, so South Koreans are acting like peace has come….it’s sad that a considerable number of South Koreans seem to be falling for this.
The problem is that the North Koreans must assume that the US government knows what they mean by “denuclearization of the peninsula.” It has been hearing it for decades after all.
In all likelihood Pyongyang also assumes that if the Americans know the truth, yet still keep vowing that there is “no daylight” between Washington and Seoul, they must indeed be on more or less the same page, namely, looking for some face-saving way to let the North simply freeze its nukes.
Perhaps the South has persuaded the North that regardless of whether Trump yields during the summit, or angers the Chinese and Russians by not yielding, sanctions will end up relaxed to some significant degree. This may indeed be true. But Trump could well be viewing the summit as the North’s last chance to avert an American attack. The South also needs to keep in mind how dangerous it would be for inter-Korean relations to improve dramatically while the nuclear crisis goes unresolved; the chummier Moon and Kim get, the less Trump is likely to worry that the North might respond to a strike by bombarding Seoul.
If I may return to the language of law enforcement: As things stand now, the alliance is in effect engaging in the entrapment of the North, in the sense that one ally (whether consciously or not) is encouraging it to persist in stalling behavior which could result in terrible punishment from the other. It’s as if one policeman is in front of the house, giving the suspect a last chance to drop his gun, while another is telling the poor fellow through a side window, “Don’t worry, I won’t let him hurt you.” Can we blame Kim Jong Un for trusting the Blue House, when the White House professes to be in agreement with it?
UPDATE (25 April 2018)
Joshua Stanton has written an excellent blog post on the direction things are taking in South Korea. I see I’m not the only one exasperated by the US government’s reluctance to make its position clear.
But not to worry, Moon’s government says—Pyongyang has agreed to allow some U.S. troops to remain in Korea under this vision…. Those who’ve served within the range of North Korean artillery can clearly see why. The presence of 28,500 American hostages gives Pyongyang a coercive power over the United States that a full withdrawal would deny it. It also gives South Koreans a false sense of security as their government advances plans that might otherwise alarm them…. But these are not functions that serve U.S. national interests. We should declare our unwillingness to perform them, and it’s only fair to do so before South Koreans go to the polls [on June 13].
