Month: August 2022

Even before his inauguration in May 2022 it became clear that Yoon Seok-yeol isn’t simply bad at politics; he lacks all interest in it. The former prosecutor gives every appearance of being mainly out to enjoy the perks of the presidency — from the freedom to leave work “like a knife” every evening, as Koreans say, to the privilege of dispensing key posts to people he met in the sauna.

Was the ruling party unaware of this side of Yoon when it nominated him? And could it really not keep him from abandoning the Blue House in order to work out of an office building? I doubt it. This is precisely the sort of self-diminishing, depoliticizing president the party hoped he would become, so as to smooth the way to a semi-parliamentary system.

Having made vote-getting noises to the contrary last year, Yoon now expresses support for such a transition (as I predicted he would). Last week, according to the Korea Times, he delighted the National Assembly Speaker — a Minjoo man who has long opposed the “royal presidency” — by stressing

the need for the Assembly to play a central role in managing state affairs even though the country has a presidential system.

Which is a remarkable thing for a newly-elected leader to say about a body in opposition hands. I feel like asking local conservatives what Johnny Rotten famously asked an American audience: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” But that’s not all:

Sound vague, opaque, boring? It’s meant to, those “reforms” being of the sort that only the 1% wants. (If you’re new to this issue, which my readers can hardly say I’ve neglected, see here among other posts).

Presidents tend to oppose the weakening of the office the moment they move in, naturally, but it’s easy to see why an apolitical one like Yoon might like the idea of becoming an integrative figurehead like Germany’s Bundespräsident, cutting ribbons and flying around the world while the Assembly takes the blame for a tanking economy.

The public, however, voted last March for a strong president and a weak assembly. Too fundamental and abrupt a change to the current system would require not only constitutional revision, but also new presidential and parliamentary elections, perhaps as early as next year — with Yoon likely to lose the former (unless a tomato can is winkingly chosen to run against him) and the Minjoo likely to lose seats in the latter.

The above-mentioned consultative body can thus be expected to focus on “underwater” ways of strengthening the assembly while the media spend a year or two softening the public up for formal change. Journalists are already po-facedly touting the advantages of a new system as if the main force behind it were disinterested social scientists. For a while there I hoped the Hankook Ilbo was becoming a world-class newspaper I could cling to, like Thomas Bernhard to the NZZ, but now I see it’s just like all the rest.

The foreign media have been ignoring this issue, as they ignore everything under the surface. When things go fully public, we’ll be getting their reactions — which, judging from Youtube thumbnails, are all people want from the media anymore. What position Western journos then take will depend on the one taken by their man Lee Jae-myung, whose legal woes they continue tiptoeing around. The Minjoo chairman, who has made conflicting statements over the past few months, is going to have to decide soon whether a) to go with the flow in the hope of favorable treatment from prosecutors, or b) to launch an impeachment push against Yoon on a crowd-pleasing, anti-naegakche platform.

If he takes the latter route his party may see pro-naegakche members defect to the PPP. On the other hand he can expect support even from some “asphalt” or extra-parliamentary conservatives, who argue that while a President Lee could usher in a kleptocracy, there’d at least be a chance to repair things afterward. Whereas the only way out of a naegakche would be a military coup. As happened the last time.

It’s to keep South Koreans from recalling the paralysis, president-PM tussles and runaway corruption of 1960-61 that the media try to associate the semi-parliamentary model with today’s Germany. The consultative body mentioned above is already being pitched as a counterpart to the Bundestag’s Council of Elders. But as economic historians know already, Koreans like to talk Germany while thinking Japan. Deep down each big party wants to become like the perma-ruling LDP.

Considering that the bedrock left comprises a third of the electorate, and the bedrock right only about a quarter, the Minjoo seems more likely to make that dream a reality. (I’d expect a President Lee to turn pro-naegakche himself near the end of a very “royal” term.) Unlike the Park-impeachers and Park-loyalists of the right, who still loathe each other, the “moderate” and “radical” left have been discreetly engineering electoral alliances for the past 20 years. A ruling coalition of the two forces — which blend into each other anyway — would be almost certain, with the smaller partner demanding and getting the North-relevant posts of intelligence agency boss and Unification Minister. If that sounds far-fetched, consider that Moon, unforced, appointed both Park Jie-won and Lee In-young.

A semi-parliamentary system would not only grease the rails to “North-South cooperation,” but make it far easier for Kim Jong Un, who would then be the only authoritative leader on the peninsula (if he isn’t already), to keep the ROK under his heel. All this is another reason why Pyongyang watchers, the circularity of whose commentary has become so apparent since the North closed its borders, should take a more inter-Korean view of things.

I was dining at a European ambassador’s house in 2017 when — ever the life of the party — I raised the possibility that President Moon might someday be prosecuted for abusing power. A younger diplomat there took stiff umbrage at the notion that such a fine man could end up like Park Geunhye. Not long afterward, at a reception on a naval vessel docked in Busan, I encountered another European envoy, NATO country of course, whose lapel button bore the blue peninsula flag beloved of North Korean poster artists and the nationalist left.

I wonder what those diplomats have made of Moon’s extradition of two fishermen back to North Korea, there to face certain execution on murder charges. I hope their reaction was of a higher order than that of local Moon supporters and an NK News contributor, which boiled down to the lynch-mob logic that people plausibly accused of a serious crime have no right to a fair trial.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the rush to extradition in November 2019 was the apparent motivation for it: to encourage Kim Jong Un, by this grotesque show of servility and shared values, to appear at an ASEAN conference in Busan later that month.

Now, I too expected Kim to carry out the promise to visit South Korea “in the near future” that he made in September 2018. I still think it would have been a smart move, provided he and Moon had met someplace suitably sequestered — on Jeju perhaps. What I don’t get is how anyone could have expected the Supreme Dignity to make his first appearance here in connection with an ASEAN conference. He was as likely to crash on my sofa.

A failure of nunchi, that unique ethnic gift for mutual mind-reading? Perhaps. Also a failure to grasp the chasm between the South’s victimhood nationalism, the main symbol of which is a statue of a little girl, and the North’s forward-looking, militaristic nationalism, the main symbol of which is Kim Jong Un.

In related news, the Monthly Chosun reports that the Moon government allegedly paid over a million dollars (in American terms) for a house in Paju, near the DMZ, and another half-million for a yacht now docked in Incheon, both being intended for Kim Jong Un’s use should he opt for that sort of visit. Allegedly some $50,000 was spent on a table for the house, chairs for which were presumably not picked up at IKEA. Almost 2o million dollars were earmarked for constructing facilities at which to host Kim on Jeju Island. (East Asia Research has the story in English.)

The source of this information is a former high-ranking NIS official, but it’s in keeping with a Moon aide’s cheerful statement to the press in 2019 that various possibilities of hosting Kim had been well prepared for.

Imagine, if you will, an American president promising to make his first visit to South Korea very soon, hinting that Air Force One could touch down at short notice, yet imparting neither a ballpark time frame nor a preferred itinerary. Now ponder the even greater unlikelihood of the ROK responding with the sort of scattershot buying spree described above. And now try telling me that the Moon government was not already — from its own perspective, never mind Kim’s — the happily subservient partner in a nascent confederation.

This becomes all the more obvious when one considers that Moon’s desperation to lure Kim here was primarily informed — as Nam Seong-uk explained in a recent article — by the desire to persuade America to relax sanctions. Moon was abasing himself before Kim Jong Un in order to help him. I suspect the outlays may also have been internally justified with a view to a more publicly confederated Korea, one better purged of southern troublemakers, in which Kim would be welcome to stay in his accustomed style at any of several properties.

Of course there’s more to the story than that. The other day, reading from my cell phone, I recited the above shopping list to a few Koreans. When I got to the $50,000 table they started nodding disgustedly, having already intuited the angle, the shot. And sure enough, it’s reported that about twice the market price of the Paju house was paid to the owner, an alleged associate of the very NIS chief who ordered the purchase. The chance that a harder bargain was driven for the yacht, or that no one in the Minjoo stood to gain from the planned Jeju construction, seems remote in the extreme. In this context I recommend another former NIS official’s book on the Sunshine era, the gist of which is that the vaunted southward benefits of northward aid came much earlier for some than others.

I suppose we mustn’t be too judgmental. Access to the intelligence agency’s enormous slush fund, plus the veil of secrecy thrown over all North-related expenditures and transactions — for “security reasons,” you understand — are bound to tempt people in a position to exploit them. Especially if they expect their party to stay in power for another ten or twenty years.

But it would be wrong to think merely in terms of an ad hoc skim here and there. The only reason the Moon-era takings seem to have been relatively small was because sanctions precluded the billion-dollar infrastructural projects the government couldn’t wait to get underway. In every oligarchy’s planning, pecuniary motives are just as constitutive as ideology, and contribute far more to the urgency with which plans are implemented, whether it’s environmental and energy policy in the US or North Korea policy here.

Those who think me too cynical should consider how many of Moon’s top officials spent the 1980s denying the legitimacy of the state, or cozying up (as many a former revolutionary has recalled) to gangsters in prison. Is it far-fetched to see a connection between this history and the conspicuous decline in prosecutions of organized crime under President Moon?

Not for nothing does the city of Seongnam have equally strong traditions of radicalism and gangsterism –and ever the twain shall meet, as witness the Eun Soo-mi saga. Besides, there’s only one plausible reason why the pro-North left now pins its hopes on scandal-ridden Lee Jae-myung, another former Seongnam mayor, who only narrowly lost to Yoon last March. If ideology alone can’t motivate a president to defy Washington, so the obvious logic, perhaps an insatiable — how to put it? — entrepreneurial spirit will.

To make myself perfectly clear: We mustn’t divide these people into well-meaning, true nationalists on one hand and cynical crooks on the other. The general state-disparaging nationalism encourages the general greed and vice versa; the two forces are as inextricable as the greed and ideological directionlessness — the keeping-open of all options — of the South Korean right.

Apropos of the latter: I remember well the Park administration’s impatience to do something about all that unsightly nature and wildlife along the DMZ. Proposals for peace parks and monuments abounded, complete with computerized images of northerners and southerners building trust on expanses of chaebol concrete.

But surely it’s harder, you think, for Gangnam leftists to square corruption with their principles? No. As I pointed out in another post, they have long touted a convenient pseudo-Gramscian line according to which they must thoroughly infiltrate the upper class, displacing all “accumulated evils” from it, for the revolution to succeed. You can’t serve God and Mammon, but serving the minjok and Mammon is the height of synergy.

This whole side of things is what Western pooh-poohers of the confederation drive never grasp. For all their economy-centricity they fail to see what could be in it for the South. Especially touching is their belief that no ROK government would dare implement such a set-up, because it would require too great a sacrifice from the middle class. Have these experts forgotten Obama’s bailout of the banking industry, or Merkel’s great migrant welcome? Perhaps they now overlook the inflation raging everywhere. Extracting involuntary sacrifices from the middle class is what liberal democracy does best.

The bigger and not unrelated story here involves the unaccounted-for flow of some 7 billion dollars out of the country during Moon’s presidency. How seriously prosecutors will investigate either that matter or the Kim-welcoming expenditures remains to be seen. As I predicted last November (countering warnings to the contrary), this administration hasn’t yet diverged greatly from the previous one’s policy toward North Korea. Some may think prosecutors’ new interest in North-related offenses a sign of hardline spirit, but it was softline Roh Moo Hyun who initiated an investigation into the illicit transfer of half a billion dollars to Kim Jong Il.

For their own reasons both left and right-wing media have misrepresented Yoon’s August 15 speech as a fairly uncompromising offer of aid for denuclearization. In fact (as the Joongang rightly reported) he offered to reward any early progress at the negotiating table. The ROK’s long tradition of conservatives striking stern notes on the campaign trail and softline ones in office continues. Some voters never learn.

The other day the Unification Minister suggested, in an obviously prearranged exchange with a ruling-party lawmaker (the North Korean defector Thae Yong-ho of all people), that America establish diplomatic relations with the Kim regime as an inducement to denuclearization. I interpret this proposal — which was surely run by Washington first? — as an implicit recognition of the problem of the Fraternization Trap that I’ve harped on here since the demolition of the liaison office in 2020. So far, then, the administration’s apparent position seems closer to Park Geun-hye’s Trustpolitik than to Lee Myung Bak’s stricter approach.