A former intelligence officer for Czechoslovakia, discussing the East Bloc’s advantages in the Cold War, highlighted America’s tendency to react to developments rather than to anticipate them. I think our inattention to ideology is at least partly to blame. Pearl Harbor, the outbreak of the Korean War, the Iranian revolution, 9/11: each of those events came as a shock to us not because intelligence-gathering in the narrow sense had failed, but because we’d refused to take seriously an ideology with very clear goals.
Perhaps it’s because journalism and academia are especially Americanized walks of life that the Western Korea commentariat steers collectively clear of ideology, instead focusing on the most topical and front-stage developments: the missile just launched, Trump’s response, pending ROK-US exercises, etc. Rather than delve into a cultural context of which the most vocal experts know nothing, the discussion stays realpolitisch, nuclear- and economy-oriented (and therefore quantitative), and fixed on the Pyongyang-Washington axis.
In 2018, after Moon and Kim’s visit to Mount Paektu, I wondered aloud what it would take for the West to wake up to Korean nationalism. Now it’s 2020, and I still don’t know the answer. The commitment to a North-South league or confederation, which has been in school textbooks and on the Ministry of Unification’s website for quite a while already, continues to be dismissed by foreigners as a chimera of the paranoid right. Judging from a video on Youtube, a recent conference in Washington ostensibly devoted to the topic of “Building a Peace Regime on the Korean Peninsula” was about everything but that. The ROK was treated once again as an impatient bystander or facilitator of Trump-Kim talks, not as half of the “peace regime” in question.
Most people these days assume that Pyongyang is as furious at Moon as it makes out to be. I hear this asserted by South Korean experts as well (including one I respectfully differed with in a KBS World Radio discussion two weeks ago). But the main guarantor of the dictatorship’s security remains its ability to launch a devastating retaliatory strike on Seoul. If Kim Jong Un is to turn up the heat on the Americans while ingratiating himself with the South Koreans, it’s vital that the former consider him capable of such a horrible thing and that the latter do not. The outward aspects of North-South fraternization must be managed accordingly. Hence Pyongyang’s alternation of apocalyptic threats with assurances that the South has nothing to fear from its nukes. Anyone strolling around Seoul or Busan can see which of those two modes of expression is taken more seriously.
By responding to insults with goodwill gestures Moon shows he understands the position Kim is in. And he too must present inter-Korean relations in one way for the US, another way for South Korea. The Beltway must go on taking him for a good ally, albeit one with a bold new approach to effecting the North’s denuclearization. His own people are to understand that the “peace regime” remains under steady, ethnic-autonomous construction regardless of what happens on the nuclear front.
Although the ROK’s drift into the orbit of Pyongyang and Beijing is finally getting noticed overseas, most foreigners refuse to regard it as ideologically driven, or even as ROK-driven. To assert that nationalism is bringing the two halves of this divided nation closer together is still to be accused of a wild conspiracy theory. Never mind that Moon himself, in one speech after another since May 2017, has put his North policy in the tradition of the anti-Japanese struggle.
Like the other Korea the ROK is patronizingly regarded as an ideology-free, “reactive” state responding to stimuli from Washington. And like his northern counterpart Moon is seen, with the same ignorance of Korean hierarchies, as needing American concessions so as to keep his more extreme underlings in check. It’s therefore the trend among experts to suggest that whether Seoul goes its own way with Pyongyang will depend on Uncle Sam’s input in the short term. You see, while no sense of proud belonging to an ancient nation could bring these staunchly liberal South Koreans closer to a dictatorship, our arrogance may have that very effect if we’re not careful. Everything revolves around us.
I can’t fault the Moon camp for trying to encourage and exploit this guilty America-centricity, but our self-styled experts have no excuse for ignoring the very different tenor of its domestic discourse. Something tells me the US will go on being the most “reactive” player in the mix.
