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Most people are like Proust’s Duc de Guermantes, in that they assume all criticism of someone the critic knows personally must derive from personal resentment. Before I take issue for the second time in two months with something Andrei Lankov has written for NK News, let me make clear that he and I have never had a cross word, despite the fundamental difference in our perceptions of the peninsula.

This is the part of his newer article I want to discuss:

A number of right-leaning conspiracy theorists in South Korea honestly believe that their current President is a crypto-Jucheist of sorts, whose secret dream is to surrender all of South Korea to the North through some unequal “confederation scheme.” This absurd fantasy has a remarkable number of followers on the right-wing flank of South Korean politics.

Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, there is little reason to doubt President Moon’s sincere desire to improve relations with, and resume subsidies — both direct and indirect — to North Korea.

I realize that by the current standards of South Korea’s English-language press the above show of partisanship is nothing excessive. A few weeks ago an article in the Korea Joongang Daily started off with “Conservatives squawked Thursday about….” But the foreign historian writing for an inquiring Western readership has to hold himself to a much higher standard.

Here’s what I find odd. While South Koreans’ anti-Japanese sentiment gets taken at face value as the inevitable result of what happened well before most of them were born, conservatives’ fears for the security of the South, which was last subjected to a deadly military attack in 2010, tend to be treated as laughable delusions. Lankov’s tone is all too representative.

Let’s remember not only how many South Koreans were killed, injured or abducted during a war the North started, but also that one of the most shocking parts of that conflict for people who experienced KPA occupation was seeing neighbors emerge on day one as fully-formed, snitching supporters of the enemy. Many bore titles in the underground organizations to which, it turned out, they had belonged for years. In several recorded cases they denounced people who were shot on the spot. That trauma sits deep. South Koreans still use the term “people’s trial” (inmin chaep’an) in the sense in which we say “kangaroo court.”

Bear in mind also that since the truce it has been the North’s self-declared strategy to conquer the South not by out-and-out warfare but by inducing the southern masses, be it in elections or through an uprising, to effect the withdrawal of US troops and the end of conservative rule. All that time the North has publicly vaunted the enormous size of its underground network in the South. Soviet archives attest to the North’s guidance and funding of the “reformist” parties of 1960-61. The former student leader Kim Young-hwan has spoken of his own close ties to Pyongyang and meetings with Kim Il Sung in the early 1990’s.

For almost 60 years now the North has promoted an inter-Korean confederation with economic cooperation as the way to “peaceful, autonomous unification,” all the while publicly urging South Koreans to carry out a revolution. I can understand why conservatives worry when the same leftists who subscribed to this doctrine in the 1980’s still advocate confederation, economic cooperation and “peaceful, autonomous unification” today. The average foreign observer is blissfully unaware of the associations; someone who doesn’t know a country’s history is bound to chuckle at the things its people worry about. But at least the Beltway “experts” mocking the South Korean opposition on Twitter come by their ignorance honestly. It’s depressing to see the relevant context willfully disregarded by a historian of modern Korea.

Of course history must also be taken into account when discussing left-wing fears of a return to rightist dictatorship. Is it too much to ask that some effort at understanding both sides be made before the mockery starts?

As for “conspiracy theory,” consider the following information, much of which will already be familiar to anyone following this blog:

1. On 15 June 2000 Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il publicly pledged that the two Koreas would work together in the direction of the common ground between the South’s concept of a league and the North’s concept of a confederation.
2. On 7 April 2007 Kim Dae Jung publicly called for a 3 stage process to end the division of the peninsula: league, confederation and unification.
3. On 4 October 2007 Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Jong Il publicly renewed the two Koreas’ commitment to the June 15 2000 agreement.
4. On 16 August 2012 Moon Jae-in publicly pledged to bring about an inter-Korean league or confederation during his presidency.
5. On 25 April 2017 Moon Jae-in, asked in public by a rival candidate if he supported the North’s proposal for “low-level confederation,” replied, “I think there is not much difference between low-level confederation and the league proposed by the South.”
6. On 31 August 2018 Jeong Se-hyon, one of Moon’s mentors, told a journalist that inter-Korean economic cooperation must be raised to the level of a league. (Jeong is now Executive Vice-Chair of the National Unification Advisory Council.)
7. In September 2018 the mainstream-left Hankyoreh newspaper welcomed the establishment of a North-South liaison office in Kaesong by referring to it in two articles (here and here) as a first stage in the “systematization of a North-South league.” A Peace Party representative also spoke publicly of the office as opening the way to a league. Paek Nak-cheong, another of Moon’s famous mentors, publicly declared in a respected (offline) journal that the current goal of the two Koreas is a league; his article was approvingly reported on in the press (see here and here).  The Blue House saw no need to correct any of these statements.
8. On 27 October 2018 the South China Morning Post ran an article by John Power on the South Korean discussion of a “one country, two systems” transition to unification. Power wrote that “voices on the left, including figures close to the president, have been pushing to see such a union finally come to fruition.” Quoted among supporters of the plan was a South Korean professor of political science at Wonkwang University who predicted Moon would establish some form of union by the end of 2022. “Is there any other path to peaceful unification … than federation?”
9. In March 2019 the Ministry of Education published elementary school textbooks for “virtue” or civics class presenting North-South league as the second part — after reconciliation — of “the desirable unification process we must strive for.”

Before some skim-reader tries claiming that a league is much looser than a confederation, let me repeat Moon’s statement that there’s no real difference between the two. (The North itself has taken to promoting “league-confederation.”) Needless to say both words denote an alliance of some sort.

The only thing Lankov seems to find more absurd than the notion of a “confederation scheme” is the notion of an “unequal” one, but all partnerships between states are unequal. One of the two Koreas will get the upper hand; the only question is which. Considering that the North has got the better deal in each joint declaration dating back to 1972, and that the South has been the more passive side through the past four or five ROK administrations (including the “hardline” ones), it’s hardly absurd to expect the pattern to persist in a league or confederation. Wrong perhaps, but not absurd.

Note also the overwhelming consensus on the left that a) the center of such a formation should be in Kaesong in the DPRK, and b) that despite the South’s far greater population the two states must have equal votes in a North-South council. Such a body would inevitably consist of DPRK representatives voting en bloc, so that one supportive vote from the pluralist ROK side would suffice to tip things Pyongyang’s way.

In puncto “crypto-Jucheist”: Many right-wing commentators do indeed talk of the president’s having formed a “Juche Group” (chusap’a) government. Nobody, as far as I can gather, genuinely believes people in the Blue House are sitting around cramming Kim Jong Il’s On Juche Thought like they did in the old days. The word refers instead to Moon’s conspicuous habit of appointing veterans of the protest movement who saw prison time between 1985 and 1995. Chusap’a is thus shorthand for a distinct generation of leftists marked generally (not unanimously) by a much higher degree of pro-North, ultra-nationalist sentiment than the old-school Marxist generation directly before it, which the Moon administration is said to have been shunting aside.

From discussions on the street with conservative flag-wavers I can confirm that many of them do believe Moon wants to surrender the South to Kim Jong-un. This is not my assessment but I can see how someone could get this idea. Having repeatedly disavowed any desire for regime change in the North, the president announced last week that unification would take place by 2045, when Kim Jong-un would be in late middle age. The only benign way to interpret that is to assert that Moon didn’t really mean it.

For a long time now there’s been a cheerful debate here as to what a unified peninsula should be called, with some plumping for retention of “Republic of Korea” (Taehan min’guk) but many preferring the North-friendly term “Koryŏ” instead  (see here and here).  It’s by no means just the right, then, that believes unification-by-confederation would mean the end of the Republic of Korea.

But the hearings undergone by Moon’s cabinet appointees have given everyone quite an education into the extraordinary acquisitiveness and tax-dodging ingenuity of the Gangnam Left. (The manifold scandals now besetting Cho Kuk, Moon’s choice for Justice Minister, are illustrative.) Many conservatives I have spoken to therefore share my belief that most people in the ruling camp don’t want to see the North take over, but are instead pursuing confederation as an instrument with which to hold onto power here indefinitely.

Minjoo members seem adamant that power must not be relinquished for at least 20 years. The party leader has spoken of the urgent need — for democracy’s sake — to keep the Blue House for ten presidents in a row. That’s half a century. I can see why these people fancy their chances of framing each post-confederation election as a choice between maintaining a peace-friendly status quo and risking war by “turning back the clock.” The same threat could conceivably be invoked to criminalize conservatism as a danger to the peace. (Last spring over 1.8 million people petitioned the government to dissolve the main opposition party.)

The problem of course is that the North’s priorities are very different. It hasn’t attained to what it considers superpower status only to disarm itself during — let alone before! — a long period of symbolic parity with the South, a period destined to end at some stage in peninsular free elections. No personality cult can survive having an expiration date placed on it, however vague or far off it may be. And no, I don’t buy the common notion that if the US and South Korea promise convincingly enough never to topple the Kim dictatorship from without, it will let itself be toppled slowly from within. As the current leader’s grandfather said to Zhivkov in 1973, North Korea’s interest in confederation is in first disarming and then eliminating the rival state.

I agree with Lankov that Moon sincerely wants to improve relations with North Korea and pump as much aid northward as possible. But that’s not all he wants. Too many foreign supporters of this president fail to grasp the full implications of his pledge to create a whole new order on the peninsula, a Korea such as no one has experienced before, and so on. This is about much more than better relations and subsidies. It’s about going as far beyond the Sunshine Policy as Kim Dae Jung went beyond Nordpolitik.

I’ve repeatedly used the word “public” in this post for a reason. To count as a conspiracy, a plan involving two or more parties must be covert. Not even Alex Jones would talk of a Democratic Party conspiracy to field a candidate who can beat Trump. The term “conspiracy theory” is to be used and understood accordingly. Had Lee Harvey Oswald spoken just before his death of a second gunman on the grassy knoll, one would not be a conspiracy theorist for taking him seriously. The information could still be wrong, but someone disagreeing with it would have to engage in actual refutation. The same goes for all who seek to dismiss talk of the ROK government’s confederation drive as a conspiracy theory.

 

UPDATE (28 August 2019): Tread softly, nationalist left, for you tread on their dreams

Chŏng Ch’ang-hyŏn is director of the trendily titled Peace Economy Research Institute, which was established last March by Moon-loyal Money Today Media. It professes to be committed to providing a blueprint for North-South prosperity by analyzing things “from an objective and neutral perspective.”

A few weeks ago, at a venue in Gwanghamun, Chŏng gave the second lecture in a series sponsored by unification-minded Tongil News. The media outlet’s Kim Ch’i-gwan summarizes it in this week’s headline article, which is entitled, “We Have Already Entered the First Stage in the North’s Confederation-League System.”

Now there’s a headline you won’t see in the left’s English-language press anytime soon, eh? It’s a very enjoyable and substantial article, but I will skip the historical bit. Of the Panmunjeom Declaration (27 April 2018) Chŏng is quoted as having said in the lecture:

If you look at the articles in it, most of the systematic apparatus … that conforms to the first stage of the North’s  confederation-league system is in there…. Everything is emphasized in the form of peace and prosperity but the icon of unification is hidden here and there…. Through the Panmunjeom Declaration, North-South relations can now be regarded as having entered the first stage of a North-South league.

I like how Chŏng peels away glittering South Korean generalities like “systematization of North-South relations” to point out that things like the Kaesong liaison office, routine meetings of defense ministers, etc, tick boxes traditionally foreseen as belonging to the first part of a league or confederation process. The only step that hasn’t happened yet, he says, is the meeting of the legislative assemblies of the two Koreas.

But for the approving tone this might all have been said by one of those right-wing conspiracy theorists Andrei Lankov finds so ridiculous.

So again: If one wants to claim that the attribution to the Blue House of a confederation drive is fantasy, i.e. has no grounding in reality, one is of course free to do so. But one must first argue that point, a tall order under all these circumstances unless you’re Bishop Berkeley. Nobody who reads Korean should be conveying to Western readers the impression that this issue is only being discussed on the right. If anything, the left is more inclined to claim that confederation is already underway.

[Below are the opening remarks to a speech on history I gave last Thursday at the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Anam-dong. During the Q & A afterwards I was assured by a South Korean academic that most of his country-folk support North-South confederation. Keep this and the remarks below in mind the next time Andrei Lankov dismisses as “fantasy” the right-wing’s worries about a peace treaty — worries grounded in the fear that confederation will soon follow. Once so hard to imagine, some sort of meeting between the democratically elected National Assembly and the rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly already seems likely. As readers of my blog may remember, this is the event many leftists have long envisioned as one of the final two or three steps to confederation. 

So I’m curious: How much longer is the commentariat going to run from this topic? Or have I missed someone’s reasoned explanation as to how North-South confederation can co-exist with the US-ROK military alliance for more than a highly dangerous transition period? If it is “needless to say, a fantasy” to imagine US troops leaving, it’s one to which many on the left are also prone. 

All this conflation of the intellectual and parliamentary right with geriatric flag-wavers is getting a little geriatric itself. American readers are being cheated out of an entire half of a dramatic debate, one with direct relevance to their own security as well as their assessment of Trump’s performance. It’s a rare foreigner who can claim to know the nationalist left better than the conservatives who went to university with it in the 1980’s, when many of them were in that camp themselves. None of this is to imply that our press does justice to the local left-wing discourse either.] 

According to a poll published last month, 1 in 5 people here supports confederation with North Korea. If that seems negligible to you, note that only 1 in 4 South Koreans still identifies as conservative. You may wonder how so many people know enough about this plan to support it, considering how the Blue House keeps the discussion out of the headlines. The answer: a nationwide “consensus-building” campaign has been unfolding to this end since 2017. In schools around the country, children are routinely taught the advantages of the “peace system” on the way. At government-sponsored town-hall meetings, locals from across the spectrum are brought together with unification-minded “activists,” as they’re described in official texts.

And every few weeks another prominent member of the Moon camp lectures some civic group on how confederation is nothing to fear. The standard line is that the pro-American president Roh Tae Woo (1988-93) also wanted a North-South league, so it can’t be anything risky; conservatives are making a fuss about nothing. Never mentioned is the fact that Roh premised a league on the basis of shared liberal-democratic principles, which is to say that he never seriously thought it would happen.

Last week a former unification minister said cheerfully people should think of confederation as a marriage. Which has always been my analogy too. The danger is that when one spouse gets rough with the other, the neighbors tend to plug their ears. Now, it’s the Koreans’ peninsula, and having divided it we Americans can’t be telling them how to put it back together. But that goes also for Americans who like jeering at South Korean opponents of President Moon’s policies.

As an American what I worry most about is a transitional overlap between the alliance with the US and confederation. The Blue House wants that overlap so that South Koreans settle down into the new dispensation with a minimum of fuss. But if the electorate gets cold feet and votes for a conservative government in March 2022, which then seeks America’s help annulling the marriage, the North’s nuclear weapons will take on a whole new meaning. By that time at the latest Washington will realize why they were developed in the first place.

Meanwhile the White House seems intent on selling confederation to the South Korean mainstream, and not just by constantly asserting that Kim Jong Un can be trusted. Trump publicly praised the first Panmunjeom summit in April last year, thereby giving America’s blessing to the two Koreas’ renewal of their pledge to work toward confederation without foreign meddling.

As critical as our media usually are in regard to Trump’s diplomacy, they seem to have no problem with this part. I’ve seen only one serious article on Korean confederation in the world press, and it was in the South China Morning Post last year. The New York Times still shows zero interest, though its BTS coverage has been top-notch. And USA Today has taken to printing Korea journalism sponsored by the Atlantic Council, which is sponsored by the Korea Foundation, which in turn is sponsored by…. So you won’t get anything on confederation there either until the Blue House is good and ready. At which point our media will come out in support, and Pyongyang watchers will assure us that this is going to open up the North and hasten democratic reforms. Washington will get on board soon enough. Our State Department has a perennial weakness for “subversive engagement” strategies; that’s how we turned China into a superpower.

For a while there I thought NK News might twig to the confederation drive, but a few months ago it analyzed the last two years of inter-Korean relations without once referring to the only goal that each Moon-Kim summit has brought the peninsula closer to.

If you want to know the current level of expert discussion in Washington, here’s an exchange from a Senate hearing that took place on March 26. Victor Cha was there from the CSIS to assure a foreign affairs subcommittee that South Korea’s interest is in a mere “economic marriage,” the goal being to get the North to denuclearize.

South Korea is committed [….] to using economic incentives to bring North Korea to the table. I think the ultimate goal … is to try to create at least a one country, two systems approach for the time being. The current South Korean president hails from the progressive end of the political spectrum and there’s a long line of thinking …. that the goal is not unification but it is to try to create this one country two systems, where there’s an economic marriage between the two sides, but they would allow the North Koreans to maintain sort of a separate political entity at least for the foreseeable future.

(The South would “allow” the North Koreans: I especially like that part.) But in a flash of intuition Senator Todd Young (R) asks, “Sort of a confederacy?” Which is precisely what yeonbangje means.

Whereupon Cha repeats the word in reluctantly concessional tones while again framing the plan as a way to defuse the nuclear stand-off.

A confederacy of sorts that is sort of a non-conflictual political solution. There are lots of human rights issues that come up with something like that but I think that’s what they’re aiming towards.

In fact confederation is often called for on the left as a way to insulate the North from American pressures, military and economic. Some say this will lead to denuclearization, but the older tradition foresees confederated Korea taking the next step to unification as a nuclear power. When I said this to a US government official 2 years ago, he thought it an appropriate response to turn to his subordinates with a smile. American party politics are so transparent and predictable, and move in such a narrow ideological range, that the notion of a foreign political force espousing one platform for our consumption and pursuing a very different one in practice strikes Americans as ludicrous.

Did the Republican from Indiana ask any follow-up questions? No. Perhaps he suspected, as I did, that Victor Cha had already exhausted the CSIS’ store of knowledge on the subject. Even so: Can you imagine an expert at a Senate hearing in the 1980’s saying, “West Germany wants a sort of confederacy with East Germany,” and a Senator saying, “Fine, let’s move on to the next item”?

I shouldn’t have to say this, seeing as how the bloodiest war in American history was fought against a confederacy, but the word denotes an alliance. And whatever noises the two Koreas astutely make to the contrary, the alliance they are pursuing will, at some early stage, obviate the one the South is in now.

UPDATE: 9 December 2020

I don’t need to spell out the relevance to the above of this article, “Head of US think tank CSIS awarded S. Korea’s highest diplomatic medal.”

It was only a year ago that American observers referred to Moon Jae-in as “security-conservative,” and assumed he’d been “blindsided” by Trump’s suspension of war games. Since then it has dawned on almost everyone that the Blue House is well to the soft-line side of the White House. Yet most Korea watchers still believe Moon shares America’s commitment to denuclearizing the North. He just favors a different approach, is all.

The reason: Very little news that reflects badly on the ROK government makes it into the English-language press. Few Americans have so much as heard about its union-aided grip on broadcast media or the use of libel suits to silence its critics. Fewer still think freedom of speech suffers much as a result. Some of the staunchest American believers in Moon’s liberalism live here in South Korea — with their heads stuck firmly in US cyberspace. If they did a little channel surfing they would realize, even with the sound off, how rare the broadcast of fundamental political debate has become.

Application of the epithet McCarthyist to Moon’s domestic critics is a sure sign of someone uninformed or disinforming. It’s Korean nationalism, not communism, that the Chosun Ilbo warns against most often. The appeal exerted by Pyongyang on an influential minority here is correctly seen as nationalist. This is in contrast to the Western assumption of a failed communist state no sane South Korean looks up to.

The word communization (kongsanhwa, chŏkhwa) tends to be used here in the sense of what I call pro-Northing. When the pop singer Yi Hyŏk used it on Facebook recently he was complaining more or less apolitically about the creeping regulation and censorship of online media. (He quickly thought better of his frankness and deleted the post.)

Since 2017 several controversial appointments to top government posts have drawn attention to the Gangnam left’s fabulous wealth. South Koreans hardly bat an eye anymore on hearing that this or that candlelight-revolutionary owns a few million-dollar apartments in Seoul, or has a Porsche-driving son at university in (of course) the USA. Very few conservatives fear that this lot wants to put an end to private property.

I get the impression many American observers haven’t moved out of the Roh Tae-woo era, when the parliamentary right consisted mostly of former collaborators with the military dictatorship. The Liberty Korea Party’s warnings against the weakening of ROK security are mistrusted accordingly. In fact the LKP carries on the tradition of President Kim Young Sam (1993-98). Like him it has no firm political principles. Its strategy has always been to try to win over the leftward-drifting mainstream without losing the old-school conservative vote.

It was presidential administrations led and staffed by these people that got rid of the constitution day holiday, the only republican one in the calendar; that initiated apologetic commemoration of the 1948 Jeju revolt against the planned establishment of the republic; that popularized the slogans “economic democracy” and “balanced diplomacy”; that formally agreed South Korea should stop “slandering” the North. It was these people who helped impeach their own president in the hope of introducing a trough-widening parliamentary system.

This “phony right,” as Moon has perceptively called it, projects its own lack of principles onto his administration. Seeing him put veterans of the pro-North protest movement in every position of authority and influence, they assume he’s just rewarding old cronies. His endless purge of their people is seen as vindictiveness, his intolerance of criticism as touchiness. Except for a small minority the LKP’s members don’t seem to connect these things either to his confederation pledge or to the Minjoo’s professed determination to rule for 20 more years.

A few weeks ago a conservative lawmaker startled the ruling-party side of the aisle into an uproar simply by referring to Moon’s overseas reputation as a spokesman for Pyongyang. That shows you how mild-mannered the opposition usually is.

Which isn’t to deny that it’s harder on Moon than Washingtonians generally are. His few sharp critics in the Beltway are well outside the consensus view of a good ally committed to denuclearizing the North.

This although the ROK left has shown next to no urgency in regard to that goal. Since 2000 we have seen from it everything from denial of the North’s nuclear ambitions (Kim Dae Jung) to sympathetic understanding (Roh Moo Hyun) to outright support on the grounds that the nukes will end up in a unified Korea (“civic groups,” inner-track nationalist-left media).

What isn’t encountered is much argument between those who shrug off the North’s nuclear program and those who assure Washington they’re dead-set against it. Even more tellingly, the latter prefer the former to their own kind. Moon’s appointment of Im Jong-seok as chief of staff is a well-known case in point. The academic Kim Yeon-cheol, who has long advocated a much more appeasement-minded approach than Moon has supported in public, is set to be the new Unification Minister.

The great harmony in evidence on that whole half of the spectrum is quite a recent thing. Until five or six years ago three distinct camps were discernible: 1) the labor-centric socialists or social-democrats, 2) the pro-North nationalists, and 3) the “left-wing neoliberals,” to borrow Roh Moo Hyun’s term for his own ilk. The United Progressive Party was so called because it housed “3 families under one roof.” Then two of the families denounced the third as “North-obeying” and left the UPP, which soon ended up banned. (The People’s Democracy Party now carries the torch.)

Since then the protest veterans who attended university between 1985 and 1995, when the Juche Movement reigned supreme, have succeeded in sweeping aside their elders, who tended to be either more Marxist-minded or more liberal-democratic. What was once the nationalist Left is now the Nationalist left. The candlelight protests of 2016 are mythologized by Moon himself not as class struggle or anti-corruption drive but as the culmination of a long heroic fight for national liberation. The implication — kept tacit to let sleeping American dogs lie — is that by working with Washington against Pyongyang, Park Geun-hye betrayed the race, the minjok.

Nationalism is about putting the (ethno-)nation above liberal-democratic and leftist values alike. Once one takes that step, one is not separated from other nationalists by anything irreducible. Having sought out the porridge that tastes just right, one rubs shoulders with those eating from hotter or cooler bowls. Because the differences are merely of degree, the various groupings shade almost imperceptibly into one another, with plenty of interlocking personal relationships. And the “radical” knows that the “moderate” has an important role to play.

I use the one term as reservedly as the other. When I think radical American I think of the Weathermen and not AOC. By that standard there is no longer real radicalism in South Korea, though many people, including some judges, don’t greatly mind seeing policemen roughed up now and then. If it comes from a good place, you understand. (Weimar says hello.)

Such amorphousness is far from typical of the international left. As a student in West Germany in 1983 I signed a petition protesting the firing of a local mailman for membership in the communist party. A Young Socialist law student in my dorm took me to task, saying only suicidal states allowed anti-constitutional elements into their civil service. Comparable divides can be found left of the center of most Western political spectra. Firm principles, easily summarized, separate the liberal from the social democrat from the socialist from the communist.

If Moon’s popularity slips under 40%, things may change, but for now the South Korean left presents a more united front than the literal one formed under US military occupation. The Justice Party and (Jeolla-based) Democratic Peace Party complain when the Blue House nominates a particularly brazen scofflaw for a top post, but that’s about the extent of their opposition to a president most of their voters support. The Minjoo bowed out of the by-election that just took place in Changwon so as to facilitate a Justice Party victory, a front victory. South Koreans talk of the pŏmyŏgwŏn, the pan-ruling-camp, although no formal coalition exists.

Criticism of the government from extra-parliamentary left quarters is strident but sporadic. The Blue House doesn’t seem to mind it much. Tongil News scolds Moon for kowtowing to Washington, who in return congratulates the online newspaper on the 18th anniversary of its founding. The need to maintain the appearance of divided camps could explain why Lee Seok-ki is yet to be let out of prison – and why, for a while there at least, he seemed so understanding about it. (His sentence was recently added to for financial wrongdoing.)

In closing, let me forestall reductio ad absurdum by again conceding that the left’s discourse is by no means uniform. The “radical” praises the North. The “moderate” assails those who mistrust it. The one denies the legitimacy of the ROK founded in 1948. The other talks up the ROK-superseding legitimacy of an exile republic said to date back to 1919. But such differences are rhetorical, tactical. The point of the front after all is to appeal to all the constituencies it needs. One of them is the US government.

Having come up with the terms “inner track,” “outer track” and “export track” in the discussion of North Korean propaganda, I can perhaps be excused for insisting that the original distinction between the three be maintained.

There are more tracks and track-internal gradations than I need to deal with here. It is enough if the reader keeps in mind a distinction between a) the inner track, by which I mean propaganda intended for North Koreans only, b) the outer track, which is propaganda written for domestic consumption in the constraining awareness of outside monitors, and c) the export track, or propaganda for outsiders. This last, which includes statements made in negotiations, can in turn be divided into the kind aimed at South Koreans and the kind aimed at foreigners. (North Korea’s Juche Myth, 2015, 9.)

I see and hear these terms used my way, but not always; NK News, for example, seems to be settling into the use of “outer track” to mean North Korean propaganda for South Korean readers.

If this custom takes hold it will obscure the important differences of tone and content between the actual outer track (Rodong Sinmun, the nightly TV news, etc) and the inner track (party lectures, political novels, etc).

This in turn may contribute to an unfortunate trend in Western academic papers on North Korea: token quotation from the Rodong Sinmun or KCNA, and nothing else from the DPRK itself, as a way of ticking the primary-research box.

Last autumn I did an interview in my office with a regional Swiss (German) TV station. Having parked too far down Mount Ŏmgwang, the crew had to lug its gear the rest of the way. Seoulite journos who make this mistake need a good sprawl on the couch before they can talk in full sentences, but my Helvetians probably sang all the way up. The first thing they asked as they strode into the lobby was: “Why don’t more Koreans live on top of mountains?”

Anyway, this is what I said (at the 10 minute mark) as part of my response to a question on Methodik.

Like Goethe and Spengler I’m convinced that history has an inner, organic logic which can’t be grasped purely in terms of causality. For me, in other words, the peninsula isn’t a silver ball in a giant, geopolitical pinball machine, the trajectory of which can only be understood in terms of cause and effect. It’s more like a tree which, although influenced by external conditions, and tossed this way and that, still has an organic, inner directedness. Meaning that when you take an old homogeneous nation and cut it in two, as we did in the last century, you can take it for granted that that which belongs together, will grow together again.

In that sense Willy Brandt said something very profound when he made his famous remark [in 1989, that “what belongs together, is growing together”]; he practically expressed a natural law. For every biologist, every gardener — every surgeon even – knows what inosculation means, namely, the growing into each other of closely-related and adjacent organisms. Both Koreas will grow into each other, I’m sure of it, and provided war with the USA doesn’t come first, North Korea will –unfortunately — lead this inosculation process.

It was in the same long-term frame of mind that I followed the Hanoi summit. The US-ROK alliance’s position on North Korea has been inexorably softening, with only minor and temporary reversals, for over half a century now, while North Korea, arming steadily, has always held fast to its commitment to “final victory,” to unification under its own flag. One need only take a few steps back from the daily news to see where this is headed.

Donald Trump did the right thing in Hanoi, in a rare accession of good sense, but only because Kim Jong Un, in an equally rare lapse of it, tried to get too much at once. Conservative South Koreans on Youtube cheered the summit collapse as the end of America’s efforts to appease Pyongyang. They also mocked Moon Jae-in for having announced, on the very next day, that he will continue pushing for what I call the ethnic exemption from sanctions, namely, permission for some degree of inter-Korean economic cooperation.

In fact Moon understands the Americans far better than his opponents do. He knows the softening of our resolve has quite a way to go yet. If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption. If Kim is smart he will offer just enough to bring it about, and visit Seoul to help force the Americans’ hand.

But the Koreas do not necessarily have to work together economically to come ever closer together. This was made clear not just by South Korean media’s fawning coverage of Kim during the Hanoi summit, but also by President Moon’s speech on the 100th anniversary of the independence demonstrations of 1 March 1919. The key part:

The Japanese imperialists labeled independence armies as bandits and independence activists as thought offenders … The word “Reds” originated from them….. Hostility between the left and the right and ideological stigmas were tools used by Japanese imperialists to drive a wedge between us. Even after liberation, they served as tools to impede efforts to remove the vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators. They were also used to brand the public as enemies when it came to massacres of civilians, spurious accusations of spying for North Korea and the student pro-democracy movement….. Still now in our society, the word “Reds” is being used as a tool to vilify and attack political rivals, and a different kind of “Red Scare” is running rampant. These are typical vestiges left by pro-Japanese collaborators, which we should eliminate as soon as possible. The 38th parallel drawn through our minds will disappear all together once the ideological hostility that caused internal rifts are removed.

The view of history informing these words is the mouldy “revisionist” one which the declassification of Soviet archives rendered obsolete a quarter-century ago. We always knew anyway that there was no shortage of former collaborators in the North. The personality cult has long praised the Great Leader for giving them a second chance. In my own research I have shown that former pro-Japanese intellectuals of some notoriety made it with Kim’s blessing to the top of the cultural apparatus, where they exerted a formative influence on the North.

Considering the Soviet complaint that there were almost no workers and no peasants at all in the Korean communist party in North and South in late 1945 (see Tertitskiy’s superb new book),  and considering South Korean leftist testimony that in the weeks after the emperor’s surrender the yangban leaned far-left, while entire settlements of the working and peasant classes moved spontaneously to the right (Yun Hakjun, 1994), we can assume that the portion of landed people who had enjoyed Japanese college educations and cushy white-collar jobs under colonial rule was higher on the left. More leftists had done prison time, certainly, but almost all had “converted” by the late 1930s and begun working with the Japanese. The nationalists had a better record of standing firm.

More to the point, we now know that much of the bloody unrest in the South in the late 1940s, which involved orchestrated attacks on policemen and their families – attacks of a cruelty and brutality that even Cumings has felt compelled to comment upon — was indeed planned, funded and guided from above the 38th parallel, as Rhee and the US military claimed at the time. That was no “red scare” but a correct assessment of the reality. We know from Kim Il Sung’s archived account that he was funding the ROK’s “reformist” parties in 1960, and inviting key members to Pyongyang; on that point too the right-wing suspicions of the time proved correct. That many leading members of the ostensibly pro-democracy student movement of the 1980s and 1990s understood that lofty keyword in either the Marxist-Leninist or the North Korean sense is clear enough from their own strident testimony.

Nor can there be any doubt — to mention what the right is currently most worried about — that Moon and his camp are by their own explicit, public account committed to bringing about North-South confederation in the short term. I notice when reading the full spectrum of political commentary that it’s perfectly acceptable to talk approvingly of this matter. Only when the news is imparted in tones of alarm does it suddenly become “fake.”

Now, I have long argued on this blog that the Moon administration is ideologically and emotionally closer to Pyongyang than to Washington. I have predicted that the two Koreas will whip up anti-Japanese sentiment to rally public support around their “new peninsula system,” “peace system,” “peaceful unification plan” — the reassuring euphemisms for confederation are endless. I have been called McCarthyist for this, as if anyone ever saw less trace of communism on the peninsula than I do.

But the March 1 speech proves my point. In it Moon attributes anti-North, anti-left sentiment wholly to the lingering influence of Japanese propaganda. He forbears to mention that what really changed a generally pro-socialist South Korean public in 1950 to a right-leaning one was a brief taste of North Korean rule. (Kim Sŏng-ch’il, for example, writes in his diary of how the KPA occupation made him identify with the ROK for the first time.)

As far as Moon is apparently concerned, the main division on the peninsula today is between the great community of nation-loving North and South Koreans who do not use pejoratives like “commies,” and the minority of South Korean colony-nostalgists who do. Yes, Moon astutely pretended to criticize only language and not the users of it, but the notion that today’s conservatives are descendants of collaborators — that they have bad sŏngbun, to put it in North Korean terms — has been central to leftist myth here for decades. (Jeong Dong-yeong of the pseudo-opposition Peace Party invoked it a few weeks ago; Moon’s speech is uncannily similar to the points Jeong made.) Unlike the trivial differences inside the pan-Korean, trans-DMZ community of good democrats — so trivial that the 38th parallel has no real intellectual or ideological importance — the scare-mongering speech of the South Korean rightists cannot be lived with. It must be eliminated, purged.

I needn’t add that these are the staunchest supporters of the US-ROK alliance whom Moon wants to see muzzled.

Funnily enough, his line of logic could be used a fortiori to stigmatize criticism of the USA. After all, it was the Yankees and not Korean “reds” – a tiny force even in their 1920s heyday — whom the Japanese authorities were most intent on infamizing. After Hirohito’s surrender all the main tropes went straight into the agitprop of the South Korean left. Thus did the Workers’ Party vilify Yankees as “bloodsuckers” when agitating Jeju islanders, who had been subjected to especially intense Japanese propaganda during the war.

The more recent canards according to which US soldiers got out of their armored vehicle to laugh at the schoolgirls they’d run over, that Uncle Sam was out to poison South Korean children with beef unfit for US consumption – this nonsense wouldn’t have gone down such a storm had there not been a colonial tradition behind it, one that informed many an anti-American novel and movie under that former collaborator Park Chung Hee.

But enough of history; as I’ve said before, it’s what’s done with it to contemporary ends that matters. Plenty will be done in the months ahead, to harmonizing North-South effects that the Western commentariat will cheer, and polarizing ROK-internal effects it will continue dozing through. It’s not America’s place to meddle, but we should be aware of what our supposedly liberal-democratic ally is up to.

 

UPDATE (5 April 2019)

Above I wrote: “If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption.” Sure enough:

[Moon] laid out his approach in a speech he gave in Berlin in July 2017: first build a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula by improving North Korea’s relationship with South Korea and the United States and then pursue step-by-step denuclearization as trust is cultivated among the parties. Joint inter-Korean economic projects are a key mechanism for the parties to build trust, along with cultural exchanges and regular meetings of separated families.

The inter-Korean projects include the Kaesong Industrial Complex, tourism at Mount Kumgang, and an inter-Korean railway. As the two Koreas form an economic relationship, the repeated interactions arising from such a relationship would gradually lead to a measure of trust between the two countries. […..] Inter-Korean economic projects represent a compromise that both the United States and North Korea can accept [….]  The United States need not lift sanctions wholesale to have the inter-Korean projects progress. It merely needs to grant sanctions exemptions to those projects, allowing the sanctions to take effect once again if North Korea does not follow through with its promised denuclearization steps. (S. Nathan Park in Foreign Policy, 4 April 2019)

1

Imagining what will have to happen before the Western commentariat begins taking Korean nationalism seriously is an instructive exercise. I thought the two leaders’ trip to Mount Paektu on September 20 might do the trick. But foreigners are still talking only of Moon’s peace-minded pragmatism and Kim’s desire for security guarantees and investment.

Ideology, legitimacy, authority: Such topics used to interest academics no end. The mania for quantifying the social sciences and the attendant decline in foreign-language acquisition have changed things. I remember Sovietologists lamenting this trend when I was at school in the 1980s. It’s gone much, much further since. What cannot be researched with the proper statistical-numerical methodology is thought beneath serious analysis. On the rare occasions when a non-quantifier takes the microphone at a conference, the Gradgrinds lean back with an indulgent smile: Time for some light relief.

In North Korean studies the fallacy of a failed communist state renders this tendency more extreme. Attention focuses squarely on economic matters, as it doesn’t in discussion of the Iranian nuclear crisis. Despite the Koreas’ long competition for nationalist legitimacy (which the South abandoned in May 2017) the relative power of the two states is grasped in numbers of missiles, tanks, soldiers. As a result the South, or at least the ROK-US alliance, is assumed to enjoy a solid advantage over the North.

If you discuss not quantifiable power but unquantifiable authority and legitimacy, and assert that inter-Korean relations are informed not just by economic and security concerns but also by ideological affinity, and you back everything up with texts from both political cultures, you will be accused of taking a “literary” approach, or having no methodology at all. Rather than try to refute you, people will accuse you of “cherry-picking” texts, as a Redditer accused me the other day of doing.

Odd how these people never pick any countervailing cherries, let alone the bushel of them needed to prove I’m deviously seeking out the anomalous ones. Has the Moon administration ever expressed opposition to confederation?

I am also taken to task on Reddit for my “outdated” views on South Korea. This has become shorthand for “denying that the nationalist left is maturer and wiser, thus a better ally of the US, than it was in the naive Sunshine Policy era.” Call into doubt Moon’s commitment to denuclearization, and you’re behind the times.

My views were thus called outdated last January by one of two people who asserted months later that Moon Jae-in was more security-conservative than Kim Dae-Jung. I predicted a while back that this wishful myth would not survive the summer (which ended last Friday), but I’ve overestimated the commentariat before. In any case, nothing is more old-fashioned than all this complacency about the alliance.

Anger at my imputation of a league drive to the Blue House implies a moralizing rejection of league itself. Many Americans seem to consider the North too awful, too irredeemably a giant gulag, for the South ever to think of joining hands with it. Clearly they have an even lower opinion of the North than I do. By liberal-democratic standards too there are worse places. If I had to send my hypothetical teenage daughter to live somewhere else for a year as an average citizen, and had to rank all the countries in the world according to my preference, North Korea would not be in the bottom thirty.

More to the point: Researchers of the peninsula will get nowhere unless they take a break from their quantifying now and then, and enter into an imaginative sympathy with Korean nationalism, the way any sensible literary scholar assumes a Christian frame of mind when reading Bunyan or Blake. Having done that one begins to understand why the North appeals strongly to an influential minority in the South. They don’t want to live up there any more than a moderate Muslim wants to live under the Taliban, but they see it as the purer Korea in many ways, the real deal.

Some observers regard the word nationalism (now a pejorative in the West) as inappropriate for what they see as a natural, healthy yearning to make the peninsula whole again. But a distinction must be made between:

a) feelings of ethnic community, pride in a shared cultural tradition, and a sense of special humanitarian duty to one’s own people, all of which West Germans felt in 1989-90 despite being generally anti-nationalist, and

b) an ideological commitment to raising the stature of one’s race on the world stage.

What holds South Korean nationalists together is b) and not a). This can be seen by their inordinate horror of the financial and social disruptions of unification, which in the past has actuated deliberate exaggeration of the likely costs, and which still induces many Moon-supporters to propose maintaining a one-nation, two-state system indefinitely. We see it also in the general indifference to human rights abuses in the North, and in the great pleasure and pride the ROK’s envoys showed last week at being in the dictator’s presence.

To be fair to my critics on Reddit and Twitter, I can see how my comparison of the two Koreas to a betrothed couple might have seemed “hyperbolic.” But it was Moon Jae-in himself last week who recalled, in all seriousness, how he and Kim Jong Un had held hands in April “like warm-hearted lovers” (tajŏng-han yŏn’in ch’ŏrŏm).

2

In North Korea, government-directed campaigns tend to manifest themselves first in inner-track propaganda before moving with time into news outlets prominent enough for foreigners to be monitoring.

It’s getting like that here too. After several months of bubbling under the mainstream media, while the Blue House talked airily of a “peace system,” support for league-confederation is now expressed straightforwardly in the Hankyoreh newspaper, known to the West as a “liberal daily.”

The topic’s full-blown emergence in outer-track discourse began in late August. In Pressian, for example, Professor Yi Chae-bong of Wonkwang University could be found saying:

It is when discussing North Korea’s proposal for unification through confederation in the course of giving testimony at court that I get a little tense, while at the same time feeling the greatest sense of pleasure and reward. In South Korea someone who supports the proposal can easily end up excoriated as a “grade A, North-following leftist” or be punished for “treasonous behavior,” but in front of judges and prosecutors I unashamedly support and propagandize for unification by confederation.

He says he keeps up the propaganda work wherever he goes, so obviously it’s not easy to get in trouble for it after all. These days people like Yi are more likely to end up in the Blue House or KBS than in jail. But for over 20 years now the fun of moving up in the world while striking rebellious poses has been the great perk of being on the nationalist left.

August 31 saw Chŏng Se-hyŏn, a known mentor to the president, telling the Maeil Kyŏngje that only by raising a North-South economic community to the level of a league can the peninsula hold its own in negotiation with the US and China. The attitude to the alliance implicit in this matter-of-fact talk bears reflecting upon.

The ball really got rolling with the publication of the Fall 2018 issue of Ch’angjak-kwa pip’yong (The Quarterly Changbi, it calls itself in English), which contained a lead-off article on North-South league by Paek Nak-ch’ŏng, the editor emeritus.

A mentor to Moon Jae-in and an icon on the nationalist left, Paek was among the movers and shakers who joined the president on his trip to Pyongyang. At the start of his much-promoted, much-praised essay, which bears the title “What kind of North-South League is to be made?”, he says what I get called “conspiratorial” for saying:

The immediate goal of the Korean peninsula is “a low-level North-South league.”

A quick review of the terminology: Plain confederation was what the North called for in 1960, when it lifted the idea from Walter Ulbricht’s proposal for a German-German Konföderation. In the 1980s the South, eager to palliate Kim Il Sung, began proposing a league, a word which in Korean sounds much looser. The North then tried to reassure South Koreans it wanted a low-level confederation. And now the Moon camp speaks of a low-level league, thus implying something more reassuring still.

I will recur to Paek’s article below, but for the most part it repeats assertions of his that I have discussed in earlier posts.

League-confederation hype increased in September as the opening of the Kaesong Liaison Office drew closer. A headline in the Hankyoreh on September 12 read: “With Opening of Kaesong Liaison Office, North and South Take First Step in Systematization of North-South League.” Another Hankyoreh article two days later reiterated that “the systematization of a North-South league has begun, albeit on a beginning level.” On September 13 Pressian held a conference at which various professors called for a league.

On September 14 the Kaesong office opened. Ch’oi Kyŏnghwan, an assemblyman from the Democratic Peace Party, greeted the event with a press statement picked up by numerous outlets:

The opening of the Kaesong Liaison Office is historically significant in that it opens the way to a North-South league, the first stage of unification.

As seems to be standard in talk of this matter, Ch’oi hearkened back to Kim Dae Jung:

The peaceful-unification plan of President Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine policy foresaw North-South league as a first stage, North-South confederation as a second, and complete unification as a third.

For all intents and purposes the Democratic Peace Party is the Jeolla party, but Ch’oi’s reference to the region’s most famous son is meant to reassure the entire public that nothing radical is being planned. Ch’oi also said that the North-South league (nambuk yŏnhap) must pave the way for a Korea league (k’oria yŏnhap) — whatever he means by that exactly.

The many articles published this month attest to a good deal of confusion about what North-South league entails, and what must precede or follow it. Is it more or less the same thing as confederation, as Moon Jae-in said in 2017? Or is it a stage on the way there? Is it in de facto operation already? In other words, is the Kaesong office the first stage in the systematization of the league (as Paek and the Hankyoreh assert), or the starting point on the road to it (as the Kyunghyang Sinmun and Hankyoreh 21 put it)? And is league the first stage of unification, or just a step in that direction? How fast is the end goal to be achieved?

I can find no serious debate on any of these points. Perhaps this is the great strength of the nationalist left. Those who approve of current developments generally get along fine, regardless of how differently they interpret them. Moon can thus float above the supportive discussion without having to pin himself down to any plan in particular.

3

Focusing on denuclearization as always, the Western commentariat generally downplayed the importance of the third Pyongyang summit.

Washington is thinking, “Let them have their get-togethers; we’re going to maintain sanctions until the North has to yield.” Seoul and Pyongyang are thinking, “Let them maintain their sanctions; we’re going to keep coming closer together until America has to yield.”

Near the top of the summit declaration was the statement that the two leaders had “reconfirmed the principles of ethnic autonomy and self-determination.” Most of the other points can also be interpreted in the context of league-building or league-preparing. But all these things had almost certainly been agreed to in advance.

The main point of holding the summit and the attendant photo ops was to habituate the South Korean public to the notion of the North as a normal, legitimate state, one fit to be trusted and leagued up with. The right wing here was therefore wrong to gloat over the lack of public interest in the event. Normalcy is supposed to be boring.

There was method even in Moon’s fulsome expressions of gratitude for the welcome he had received. He was in effect playing along with Kim Jong Un’s pretense that the citizens of Pyongyang had come out in droves on a weekday because they wanted to.

Were the South Korean president the liberal our journalists think he is, he would have insisted in advance that he not get the welcome accorded to Kim Dae Jung in 2000, who had realized at once who the crowds were really cheering for, and who later publicized the Dear Leader’s admission that they hadn’t lined the roads on their own initiative.

Instead Moon professed to be thrilled that this time, people were waving even from apartment windows. Is this because he is more naive and vain? Not at all. Unlike DJ he has a league to help build, and a dictatorship to help legitimize.

He must now ensure a respectful reception for his counterpart in December. This next milestone in the process may serve as a pretext for “regulating” conservative Youtubers, something the Moon-loyal media have been agitating for with increasing stridence.

September has also seen a concerted effort to downplay the Kim regime’s resemblance to a monarchy or a chaebol clan, which is the one aspect of the North that rubs even sympathetic people here the wrong way. Appearing on TBS Radio soon after his return from Pyongyang, Pak Chi-wŏn of the Democratic Peace Party said in regard to Kim Jong Un’s sister:

It’s because she’s of the Paektu bloodline that she hasn’t achieved the prominence merited by her ability …. It’s completely different from Park Geun-hye, who achieved much more prominence than her ability warranted.

So although Park came to power in a free and democratic election with a majority of votes, the ROK’s system is more rigged and nepotistic than the North’s, where blood-ties to the leader are more of a hindrance than a help. Pak’s interviewer Kim Ŏ-jun, a prominent Moon-loyal journalist, chimed in with:

[Kim Yo-jong] is highly regarded in North Korea too. Not because she’s his sister, but because of her ability.

I especially like that “too.” We can expect much more in this vein as Kim Jong Un’s visit draws near.

4

Let me return, by way of a conclusion, to Paek Nak-ch’ŏng’s essay. In it he reiterates a point he has already made a few times this year: A league must precede denuclearization, since it’s the only true guarantee against the “great threat” now posed by the “very existence of South Korea.” I must repeat my clarification that neither the ROK-US alliance nor the ROK’s arsenal is meant. He means the political threat to the Kim regime posed by the subversive contiguity of an independent co-ethnic state, one that periodically elects North-critical presidents.

Paek says that in a league the Koreas will “arrive at a situation in which large-scale change becomes inevitable in South Korean society as well.”

Both sides will see big change all right, but on very different fronts. If the whole point of a league is to make the Kim dictatorship feel perfectly secure, the North will see little more than economic and technological change, a rise in its material standard of living. The large-scale change Paek envisions for the South, though he is discreet enough not to come right out and say so, can only be of the threat-nullifying, political-cultural sort.

Impossible to believe? I wish it was. While watching Moon and Kim disport themselves on Mount Paektu — the modern nationalist myth of the ancient iconicity of which mountain our media swallowed hook, line and sinker — I was struck by a sobering thought: It has already become easier to imagine Seoul with a Kim Il Sung statue than to imagine Pyongyang without one. Not a lot easier, but easier.

We may all disagree about what exactly a North-South league will mean, or even whether it will come to pass. But let’s stop the denials — the old-fashioned denials — that this is what the two Koreas are working on.

UPDATE (5 October 2018)

I must confess to liking Park Won-sun, the mayor of Seoul, who has done much to relieve the plight of stray dogs and cats over the past several years, thereby setting an example for Busan and other cities. When you take the animals’ side in the war being waged against them, as I do, you gain a certain emotional distance from inter-human affairs, which can be an asset when researching a foreign country.

But readers who think I underestimate the South Korean nationalist left’s interest in human rights and overestimate its admiration for the North’s political culture should find the mayor’s remarks in the English Chosun eye-opening. Having just returned from the North, he said:

“I thought that we must preserve Pyongyang. It took almost 10,000 people just a few seconds to flip from one scene to the next. This is something you can see only in North Korea.”

When one reporter pointed out that some people feel uncomfortable watching the eerily synchronized display of conformity, Park said, “That’s because it’s their first time. We should be able to resolve [differences] if we see each other more often.”

So resolving differences means that South Koreans must get used to the aspects of the North they now find problematic, like its exploitation of children to political and economic ends.

To repeat a point I’ve made often in the past: The North’s mass games and tile displays are not communist exercises in the grinding-down of individuality, as the West misperceives them, but ultra-nationalist celebrations of ethnic homogeneity and unity. This doesn’t make the Moon camp’s sincere enthusiasm for these spectacles — or their regret that they are not replicable in the South — any easier to reconcile with liberal-democratic principles.

In other league-building news, South Korea’s prime minister is strengthening my hunch that Kim Jong Un’s visit will be preceded by a crackdown on strong criticism of the Moon administration (and of its North Korea policy in particular).

Western Pyongyang watchers tend to outsource judgment to institutions, as the Tyranny scandal has shown; we mustn’t presume to judge the clear evidence ourselves, but must leave that task to Columbia University and Cornell University Press while we go on citing pages riddled with indisputably fake sources. The same mindset dictates that the opinions of people not degreed, titled, or affiliated to any swanky institution are beneath notice. (I was just sneered at on Twitter for having responded in the above blog post to criticism from anonymous Redditers.)

When the time comes, therefore, Moon’s foreign supporters will likely shrug off measures against mere Youtubers as a needed check on all the kooks shouting “Fire!” in the peninsular movie theater. In fact the most popular commentators were, until very recently, respected contributors to TV panel discussions and the op-ed pages of the Donga or Joongang. They are not extremists. Jeong Gyu-je and Hwang Jang-su have been subjected to foul-mouthed insults from the actual far right for their criticisms of Park Geun-hye and other conservative politicians.

I reject the conventional notion that all this crackdown talk marks at worst a return to, or a lack of progress from, the last administration’s alleged intolerance of dissident speech. At the very least those were more pluralist times than these. Has everyone forgotten that in 2014 Park Geun-hye appointed to her Unification Preparatory Council none other than Moon Chung-in? Has everyone forgotten how her Unification Ministry used to invite some of her harshest critics to an annual conference of Pyongyang watchers?

In fact we are seeing here something new: the first stage of the “large-scale change” in South Korean society that the nationalist left, by its own admission, considers necessary for the coming “peace system.”

UPDATE (28 October 2018): The Foreign Press Finally Takes Notice

Kudos to John Power and the South China Morning Post for what is by far the best and most important English-language article on Korea to have come out since Moon Jae-in took power in May 2017. I’m not going to pretend to wonder why it had to be written by someone outside the foreign press corps in Seoul. The Blue House’s astute bridling of that lot would make a great story in itself – but who would dare write it?

I only wish Power hadn’t described North Korea as a communist country. This fallacy is bound to obscure the inherent precariousness of the very un-China-like set-up which — to hear some on the nationalist left tell it — is already in the first stage of de facto operation.

It shouldn’t be long now before the rest of the Western press kicks in with flippant “A League of Their Own” headlines, and cocksure optimism from the same experts who refused for so long to believe that any of this was being seriously considered.

I expect to hear everything spun as our loyal ally’s bold but pragmatic effort at subversively engaging the North, and boosting the South’s own economy in the process.

But what we’re talking about here is a confederation between a proud, resolute, ultra-nationalist state and an admiring, avowedly pacifist, moderate-nationalist one. No great gift of intuition is needed to predict that Kim Jong Un, not Moon Jae-in, will be the gardener guiding and shaping the inosculation of the two states.

In the meantime even those in Washington who refuse to accept the ideological realities must ponder the grotesqueness of our having an ally that is now, or very soon will be, quite literally in league with our adversary.

And a nuclearized adversary at that. The Moon camp has made abundantly clear — even if the Blue House hasn’t — that league or confederation must come before the denuclearization of the North, for only such a union would give Pyongyang the security it craves.

1

At the family reunions in Kumgangsan a few days ago a North Korean official approached South Korean journalists with worried questions about President Moon’s approval ratings. Why were they falling? Did the trend seem likely to continue, or would the family reunions reverse it? What was the best way to get those numbers up again?

Clearly the Moon camp shares the fellow’s concern; a cabinet shuffle looms, and criticism of conservative Youtubers has taken on ominous shrillness.

Not that the president has shown much interest so far in securing a consensus for his policies. Consensus is a liberal democratic ideal. The Blue House’s loyalty is to the popular will or minsim, the whole point of which term is to assert that only one viewpoint matters.

Hannah Arendt has a relevant section in On Revolution (1962). An excerpt:

The word ‘will’ … essentially excludes all processes of exchange of opinions and an eventual agreement between them. The will, if it is to function at all, must indeed be one and indivisible….There is no possible mediation between wills as there is between opinions. (On Revolution, p. 76.)

Saying wills seems a bit odd, popular wills even odder;  you can’t pluralize the term in any language without pulling the reader up short. The popular will is monolithic. Anyone who differs with it is by definition an enemy of the people – in South Korea, “a force of accumulated ills” (chŏkp’ye seryŏk) – and to be ignored if not purged or imprisoned.

The popular will is not necessarily the majority view. South Korean historians lament the frequency with which the majority has been duped into opposing the minsim. To hear them tell it, every historical election of a conservative president resulted from red-peril-mongering.

Conversely, even 10% of the population can define the popular will so long as it consists of “awakened people,” as the left was saying here long before Americans hit on the clunky adjective “woke.” But the minsim isn’t PC in our sense. It can and does show anti-homosexual and anti-immigrant tendencies; it can laugh at a picture of a female politician in a gynecologist’s chair.

What it can’t do without ceasing to be the true popular will is disparage the DPRK. No sympathy for the regime in Pyongyang? No minsim.

2

Why then, if the next elections aren’t until 2020, are the Moon camp and the North Koreans so worried about the decline in his popularity? Because what he and Kim are planning for the nearer future is big enough to require the appearance of mainstream support, or at least the absence of mainstream opposition.

It’s precisely because the confederation plan exerts no broad appeal that the right-wing opposition has kept harping on it. This is also why the Moon administration has talked of a “peace system” instead, and apparently instructed the media to do likewise. (I don’t mean to equate the terms; “peace system” = confederation + a peace-minded US and China.)

Contributing to South Koreans’ placidity has been their assumption that if the Moon administration were taking the ROK in the wrong direction, particularly in regard to security, America would have raised the alarm. The White House’s strenuous assertions of the health of the alliance have thus done more than anything to convince people here that Moon is a centrist.

Meanwhile the US government sees South Korean middle-class tolerance of the “candlelight revolution” and draws the same conclusion.

If either horse balks the other will too, as Moon is aware.

Apparently he wanted to move the next North-South summit forward to August, while his approval ratings still bespeak a mandate. (If the current trend continues, they will sink below 40% in two weeks or so; one poll already has him at 44.4%.) I don’t know why Kim didn’t comply. Perhaps he gambled that Moon would agree to go to Pyongyang in early September, even if this meant appearing to pay tribute to the DPRK on the eve of its 70th birthday bash.

But it may already be too late. The conservative opposition has certainly toned down its criticism of Moon’s North Korea policy, hoping to make hay out of the bad economic news instead. But that news is bound to make South Koreans view the next summit more critically than they viewed the last two.

So far confederation has mainly been discussed in the Moon camp’s inner-track discourse and in the gatherings of “civic groups,” while the Hankyoreh and the broadcast media have howled down right-wing talk of it as fake news.

This is in line with the remarkable discretion Moon Jae-in has sustained since the start of his election campaign. Never does he speak more guardedly than when around foreigners critical of the North. Shortly after he took office I asked two Americans who had talked with him on separate occasions what impression they had got: “well-rehearsed,” said one, “well-drilled” the other. Had he given vent to the sort of anti-American, pro-North remarks Roh Moo Hyun went in for (though Roh was conservative in comparison), his policies would have encountered more resistance.

His base knows how he really feels. During the presidential election campaign in 2012 the novelist Kong Chi-yŏng, a prominent supporter, tweeted cheerfully that the Yankee-go-home candidate Lee Jung-Hee sounded “like Moon’s inner voice.” The conservatives pounced, and she had to do a quick Prufrock: It wasn’t what she’d meant at all. Since then the Moon camp has shown remarkable discipline. Professor Moon Chung-in is an exception of sorts, since it’s his job to send up trial balloons.

3

At a luncheon in the Blue House a few weeks ago, President Moon called on representatives of the opposition to cooperate in ratifying the Panmunjom Declaration of April 27, saying, “I think it might also help me push for a meeting between the North and South Korean legislatures.”

Why he assumed the conservatives at the table would share his interest in such an event I have no idea. The legitimacy it would confer on the North’s rubber-stamp assembly, and thus on the dictatorship as a whole, would take the pro-Northing of the South to a whole new level. (I’ve stopped saying finlandization, which in its original form was a strategy for keeping an overbearing neighbor at arms’ length.) But for that very reason the Blue House sees a meeting of assemblies as a necessary milestone on the way to confederation.

Moon also wants a few representatives of the opposition to accompany him to Pyongyang next month — another sign that something is in the offing for which he needs bipartisan support.

In grass roots news, a small but publicity-minded group calling itself in English the People’s Congress for Peace Federation (p’yŏnghwa yŏnbang simin hoeŭi) held a founding ceremony on August 25 in a detached building of Seoul City Hall. Pace the group’s English name I will continue translating the key word as confederation, so as to distinguish the planned North-South system from the separate drive to quasi-federate the ROK in its own right. A spokesman for the group says:

League-confederation is the method of unification agreed to by … President Kim Dae Jung and Chairman Kim Jong Il…. We must put aside anxiety about unification and first bring about ‘confederation’ as a low level of unification.

Naturally the group is beside itself at how well things have been going this year. The following is from a statement issued on August 15.

Heaven is helping us now. It has set up liberal, magnanimous Kim Jong Un in the North, and warm, prudent Moon Jae-in in the South, and got both to head in the same direction, complementing each other, while in the US it has brought to power Trump, a man of the minority [this word in English] who does not resemble mainstream forces in regard to the peninsula. It’s as if Heaven were opening the way for our nation.

Isn’t it though? I could instance more examples of the nationalist left’s astonishing good fortune. The conservative ruling party helped impeach Park Geun-hye in 2016, then tried to get the presidency back by running one of the least electable people in its ranks. The Liberty Korea Party’s current chairman is a former big shot from the Roh Moo Hyun government — a former colleague of Moon Jae-in.

Then there’s the uncanny unanimity with which the West’s Pyongyang watchers still hold to the notion of a failed-communist North, that fallacy which has done more than anything to obscure the nature of the inter-Korean relationship. And can the fortuitousness of the time and venue of the 2018 Winter Olympics be plausibly regarded as anything but predestined? It’s no wonder admirers of magnanimous Kim and prudent Moon are in a Gott mit uns frame of mind.

The following is from Kang Chŏng-gu’s article on confederation, which appeared in Tongil News on August 16.

Now that a post-Cold War era of peace has dawned, the biggest obstacles [to unification] are disappearing. Now is the time to give concrete thought to the method by which it should be carried out. [The answer is] a confederation in the style of China and Hong Kong….

On the Korean peninsula there would be one state, the central state of the confederation. In the southern region would be the south’s self-administrating regional government, and the northern side would have the north’s self-administrating regional government. The southern side would maintain capitalism, the northern side, reformed socialism of the Chinese sort. If there is someone the northern and southern sides could easily agree on, like the late Reverend Moon Ik-hwan for example, he could become the leader of the confederated state. Otherwise the leaders of the two states would take turns of two-years’ duration as leader of the confederation.

We see here how unhelpful the Chinese “model” becomes as soon as anyone gets down to brass tacks. Its only real function is to reassure people. Everyone is to believe that the inter-Korean relationship would be just as placid and mutually hands-off for years on end.

I would take this show of naivety at face value if it were coming from some think tank in Washington. But Kang knows the North’s ideology very well. He knows its main mission has always been unification under its own terms. He has also expressed sympathy with that mission in language frank enough to get him into legal difficulty (and that was in the Sunshine era).

So does he really believe Kim has dropped the motto of “Final Victory,” and replaced it with “Whenever You Guys Are Ready”? Does he expect the personality cult to let a South Korean president throne over it for years at a time, however nominally? Even a pro-American one?

He goes on:

The capital of the confederated state would be neither Seoul nor Pyongyang but Kaesong. The government of the confederation would handle things that North and South can advance together, such as Olympic Games and the Kaesong Industrial Zone. But other things would be entrusted to the relevant regional government. Doing things in this way, the proportion of things that north and south would manage together in the government of the confederation would gradually be increased…so that within 20 years full integration would be possible.

Recommendations of Kaesong as confederation capital are common here, despite the psychological and symbolic edge it would give the North, to say nothing of the potential for intimidation of South Korean officials. The record of detentions, expulsions and border rebuffs of ROK citizens working at the Kaesong Industrial Zone speaks for itself.

Why not Panmunjom? Well, for the same reason that Moon would rather see a third summit take place in Pyongyang than insist on holding even one in Seoul as per the joint declaration of 2000. The South must cut no pie straight down the middle. The only way to build trust is to give the North the better deal on everything. (The Korean word for appeasement carries none of the negative associations the English one does.)

North Korea would have to be downright averse to “final victory” not to walk all over such a partner from the get-go. But the word partner is perhaps too suggestive of separateness, or too unsuggestive of the sort of community Kang et al have in mind.

The southern side’s ahistoric results-orientedness, as in “the South’s present is now good and superior to the North’s, so its past was good too,” is a distortion of history that prettifies and justifies the past. The North’s spontaneous decisionism, which holds that “because the North’s beginning was good, the present is good too, and because the South’s origin and past was bad, it is bad now too,” is also mistaken…. The South and North must map out the future of the peninsula – the South while reflecting on and repenting for its past errors, and regarding the North’s past with respect and pride [!]; and the North, while priding itself on its past, should come to terms with the problems of the present, learning from and emulating the South where necessary.

This is the Kang whose occasional lectures and articles I have been reading for decades. He still believes — as most people on the nationalist left do — that the North’s formative years were better, prouder, less tainted and regrettable than the South’s. This matters so much because one’s political ideology is inextricable from one’s view of history.

It can be inferred from the above that in a confederation the South must accept the ultra-nationalist Kim Il Sung cult, whereas the North must acknowledge only the South’s superior prosperity and technology — and one of the main goals of confederation is to eliminate that gap as rapidly as possible. (It will be as much a matter of pulling the South down as the North up.)

Of course Kang’s view of confederation needn’t be congruent with Moon and Kim’s. My hunch is that everything would start off with just a North-South council, sans any single head of state. A confederation may go quietly into de facto operation before formally and publicly coming into being. Some say this has already happened, or will happen when the liaison office opens: a North-South council in embryo. But no doubt we will find out soon enough what Kim and Moon have in mind.

4

To assume that the two Korean administrations do not already see each other as confederates, and behave accordingly, albeit discreetly, is like assuming that a man and woman planning a marriage are not yet having sex. When we ask for Moon’s help in getting the other half of the peninsula to denuclearize, we are in effect asking this fervent nationalist to help remove the future guarantor of a unified Korea’s security and autonomy. Why should he comply? The only remaining point of the US-ROK alliance is to ease the transition to a confederation — which would obviate that alliance altogether.

The recent news of South Korean violations of sanctions (and of a presidential award just given to the main importer of North Korean coal) is merely illustrative. It’s trivial in comparison to the basic truth staring us in the face: No true liberal-democratic ally of the United States would think of leaguing up with an anti-American dictatorship, let alone one still in the thrall of a personality cult. I’m not sure whether the Trump administration is unaware of this or merely pretending to be.

At any rate a peculiar pattern has repeated itself every few weeks or so since Moon took office. It goes like this. First the Blue House is caught in some statement or act of disloyalty to the spirit of the alliance — like appointing an unrepentant former enforcer of North Korean copyrights to the second most powerful post in the government. (I don’t mean the prime minister.) South Korean conservatives then shout in chorus, “The Americans won’t stand for this!” Whereupon the White House rushes to say, in effect, “Oh yes we will!” It seems to revel in making pro-American, security-minded South Koreans look foolish.

The closest thing to criticism of the Blue House our government has issued in recent months has been the statement that inter-Korean relations mustn’t get ahead of denuclearization. Clearly the relations are not in themselves problematic from America’s perspective. This in turn implies approval of the many steps Moon has already undertaken to undermine the ROK’s claim to exclusive legitimacy and its commitment to liberal democratic values.

(By the way, the once-marginal myth that the republic came into existence in Shanghai in 1919 as a nationalist state has become orthodox with remarkable speed; a construction company is already invoking it in advertising.)

It’s therefore easy to imagine Trump or Pompeo expressing support for whatever “peace system” Moon and Kim happen to agree on, so long as progress toward denuclearization is made first. Any significant step in that direction — which we can expect the upcoming Pyongyang summit to announce with great fanfare — would then compel the US to sign off on  confederation, thus encouraging the South Korean public to do likewise. Before we know it, the ROK could be locked in an embrace it might eventually need American help to get out of.

1

A while ago a South Korean journalist called and asked if he could spin out my stalker-bodyguard story in one of his Youtube editorials. This got me thinking it could use an update.

As of last April, the stalker and stalkee are engaged. The former no longer seems so hostile to Sam, the bodyguard of his intended. The two even went to a restaurant for lunch.

“Let me have your guns,” Sam said on that cheerful occasion, “and I’ll help fix up your house.”

Although the stalker puts on an amenable front, he has less reason than ever to comply. He will need that arsenal to keep his intended from getting cold feet, and the bodyguard from intervening. He also knows that once the marriage has been consummated, if not sooner, Sam will be out of the picture.

Since the ceremony is to take place in the next few years, the stalker promises to relinquish his guns one by one within — the next few years. If Sam gets rid of his too.

“We understand each other,” says the bodyguard with a sigh of relief. “So take your time, there’s no great rush.”

You see, he’s only dimly aware of what his client and the stalker are planning. That it might have some bearing on the gun issue hasn’t sunk in yet. Nor has it occurred to the neighbors, who gossip only about the stalker-bodyguard relationship, as if Sam’s client were a mere go-between.

Not exactly Animal Farm is it, or The Pilgrim’s Progress? A good allegory makes internal sense whether you get the significatio or not, but my only plausible character is the stalker. The romance? Preposterous. Sam’s rapid cognitive decline goes unexplained. Most incredible of all is the neighbors’ indifference to the planned nuptials.

But look at what I have to work with. North Korea kept harassing the South, and one day they just clicked: Tell me that isn’t a stalker’s dream writ geopolitical. Tell me Trump is shrewder than Sam. If you think I underestimate American interest in what Pyongyang and Seoul are working on, go read the latest writing on the nuclear crisis.

I suspect that even analysts who’ve heard mention of North-South confederation try not to think of it, because they sense dimly what it will mean for the conventional wisdom, their wisdom.

There must be some people in our huge embassy here, I used to tell myself, who are not just devising new ways to make visitors feel unwelcome. Now I’ve begun doubting whether anyone is conveying home what needs to be conveyed. In DC not long ago I encountered a senior official who reacted skeptically to my mention of President Moon’s pledge to hitch up the two Koreas. “When?” he challenged, “When did Moon say that?” We goggled at each other for a moment. I think the incredulity was greater on my side.

2

Feel free to say league (yŏnhap) instead of confederation (yŏnbangje) if you want to believe the South’s term sounds more moderate. Just remember that Moon Jae-in himself sees “no real difference” between the two concepts. There’s certainly none from a security standpoint. No matter how loosely the Koreas are linked, the South will have to lower its guard in a big way. The presumably earlier event of a peace treaty or formal end to hostilities would itself eliminate the justification for a US troop presence, as prominent members of the Moon camp have admitted.

A few American pundits try to excuse their incuriosity about these matters by saying that league would at most be a fancy name for a heightened Sunshine Policy. Apart from an inability to read the relevant discussion in the relevant language, this betokens a failure to think things through. It’s like the refusal to consider how the North could survive for long as the poorer of two economy-first Koreas.

The reason intelligent yet unreflective people set the tone in this discussion is because that type dominates in the relevant walks of life. Reflection works against sociability, conformism and respect for received opinion, all of which qualities are prized as highly in journalism and government as in academia. Interrupting discussion of the week’s hard facts to question shared assumptions about North Korea is seen as trouble-making, polemicism. Anything beyond the next likely milestone in the nuclear crisis is imagined hazily if at all.

To keep the discussion flowing briskly, human nature is disregarded. Despite the contradictory message inherent in North Korea’s history, most Pyongyang watchers consider the regime to be so hungry for economic growth, progress and other goodies as to have no pride, no mission, and no commitment to victory, real victory. It’s all eros and no thymos. On this error rests our administration’s hope for denuclearization.

Well, on that and the belief — which Trump shares with our Track 2 set — that the presence of a sufficiently wonderful American works on North Koreans like a truth serum.

3

The progressives have prepared for confederation since the June 2000 summit if not earlier. A slow growth in South Korean interest in the concept can be traced back to August 1960, when Kim Il Sung first proposed it.

There’s no reason to assume that preparations have been made without the North’s input. The joint declaration of 2000 bound both parties to work together in this direction, though not necessarily in the public eye. Moon Jae-in probably had a solid plan by late 2012 when, confident of victory in that year’s presidential elections, he pledged to bring about North-South confederation during his term.

But he knew better than to shout his intentions from the rooftops a second time. On the campaign trail in 2017 he conveyed the impression of a man for whom inter-Korean issues were less important than job creation, chaebol reform and the war on corruption. He spoke more often of animal welfare — hollowly, it turns out — than of confederation, to which he renewed his commitment only in one terse response to a journalist’s question.

Then he was elected. Since day one his old pledge has clearly been the main thing on his mind. Why else would he have picked Im Jong-seok as his chief of staff, as no jobs-president would have done? Why else would he have launched so quickly into a reinvention of the very recent past? I don’t mean just his claim to have been swept into power by a street revolution; any of the main candidates would have struck that pose if elected. I mean the way the candlelight movement was assigned to the anti-Japanese and therefore nationalist tradition, and transformed into a fight against the “Cold War system” on the peninsula.

Prof. Ch’oi Chang-chip (Korea University) set an interviewer straight a few months ago:

The candlelight demonstrations resulted from the constitutional crisis created by Park Geun-hye, and contained no demands related to North-South relations. (Sisa In, 28 May 2018)

I have discussed other manifestations of a confederation drive in earlier posts: the obvious preference, when filling key positions, for people with records of pro-North radicalism; support for the purge of conservatives from the boards of major broadcasters; calls to keep the right out of power for 20 years; the cessation of the intelligence agency’s hunt for North Korean agents; the removal from school textbooks of references to recent North Korean attacks, and references to the ROK as a liberal democracy; the recommendation, withdrawn only after a public backlash, for removing the constitutional commitment to unification on a liberal democratic basis, and so on. None of this is explicable as a mere effort to take the Sunshine Policy up a few notches.

Nor, for that matter, is the new line that the Taehan minguk was not founded in August 1948, but instead came into existence when a provisional government was formed in Shanghai in 1919. I don’t need to remind anyone of the internationally accepted criteria for statehood. The Blue House seems more interested in downgrading the republic that fought the North than in making a serious case for the statehood of something else. The original modest budget for the 70th anniversary of the ROK’s founding has already been cut. The joint North-South commemoration of the March 1st uprising’s 100th anniversary next year is likely to make the festivities this August 15 look subdued in comparison.

Before I am accused of assigning impure motives to a heartwarming ethnic get-together, let me repeat that memory politics are by definition political and shift accordingly. There was a time when both the South Korean left and North Korea were more interested in good relations with Japan than the right here was.

Note also that the 1919 uprising is memorialized in the North without a public holiday as an example of how badly things go when a nation lacks a parental leader. This doesn’t stop propaganda from claiming the protests originated under the influence of Kim Hyŏng-jik, the father of Kim Il Sung, who himself impressed everyone at the age of six by … but never mind. The Blue House is unlikely to quibble with this version of history on the day itself.

With these meshing tendencies and measures the ruling camp evidently hopes to bond with the Kim regime over a shared anti-Japanese tradition, to present today’s ROK and DPRK as branches of the same Shanghai tree, put nationalism above liberal-democratic principles, and minimize opposition to all these things. No less obvious is the larger goal.

4

The growls with which teething Koreanists drag my every heterodoxy into their masters’ line of vision, then shake it vigorously from side to side, are not always fully felt. But my RAS speech last winter, in which I argued the possibility of a non-violent course to the North’s kind of unification, genuinely annoyed many people, and not just grad students.

My perception of the ROK’s vulnerability was desperately out of date, pyschobabble of an appallingly wrong-headed sort. Did I not know that South Koreans had long since abandoned their Sunshine-era naivety? That they had become more security-minded, more averse to unification? Why, they looked on North Koreans as foreigners if they thought of them at all! Even the left here had become conservative on that front. Opinion polls this, opinion polls that.

We see now who had a much better feel for where the peninsula was headed. Better, but by no means flawless; the relevant trends have since progressed faster and encountered less resistance than even I expected. By May things had already gone well beyond the stage reached at the height of Sunshine Policy euphoria in 2000.

Just the other day the premier praised Kim Jong Un’s commitment to improving the welfare of his people, and a former health minister, addressing an audience of businessmen, said chaebol heirs should emulate the young leader’s bold reform spirit. More notably, the new chairman of the Liberty Korea Party, the only non-left force of any importance, has just said that while security is all well and good, “it’s isn’t right to be too critical of efforts to construct a peace system.”

Granted, that airy term now favored by the president and his top officials sounds no more like an actual structure with an organigram than the “Cold War system” it will supposedly replace. Then again, I’m sure the LKP chief knows exactly what it means; he played a huge role in the Roh Moo Hyun administration after all. (All the right dares hope for now, it seems, is a return to the relatively conservative policies of those years.)

Average people, however, are as oblivious to what the Blue House is planning as it wants them to be — for the time being.

The other night, on my way back from the beach, I asked my cheery taxi driver how he felt about nambuk yŏnhap. “Ah, you’re conservative,” he said sadly, and although the car didn’t come to a screeching halt the conversation did. Many on the left refuse to believe that such a thing is really in the works.

But when “special envoy” Moon Chung-in starts talking publicly of a North-South league, you can be sure the Blue House is closer to speaking out itself.

“We shouldn’t think of unification only in terms of merging sovereignty, but rather think of peaceful coexistence and unification as running parallel in a league of sovereign states,” he said, adding, “This was President Kim Dae Jung’s will too. A North-South league is ‘de facto unification.'”

The actual merger of sovereignty, he said, can only come after plenty of contact between North and South Koreans.

“A considerably long time will be needed for this,” he explained. “Therefore (unification) is … a problem that must be decided by the generations after ours.” …. “If a vote [on a unified Korean system] were to take place in the North now, it would go 100% in one direction, so would that be a real vote? It would mean conflict with South Korea. Realistically speaking, there is a need for democracy to establish itself in North Korea too, and for its people to get to the point where they can freely express their individual opinions, before there can be simultaneous elections in North and South.”

I’m not so sure about 100%, but let that go. 97% of Gwangju and 95% of S. Cheolla voted for Kim Dae Jung in 1997. And we all know the southwest is the model of true democratic spirit.

So why must a 100% North Korean vote (for a northern leader of the peninsula, say) be considered undemocratic? Because South Koreans won’t like it? At what point, one wonders, will northerners be thought ready for simultaneous elections? When opinion polls reflect southwestern levels of pluralism? One wouldn’t need to wait decades for that to happen. Or must the majority view go under 95%?

A more fundamental question: Would a joint North-South council really agree to postpone the vote for such a reason?

We all know the theory that fear of US attack is not only behind the North’s nuclear program but its political system too. From there it’s a small step to thinking that if we promise not to work for regime change, Kim Jong Un will let his people work for it instead.

But the Yonsei professor strikes me as too intelligent to believe this. His statements here remind me of how the folk at Koryo Tours urge us to subvert the regime’s xenophobic propaganda by taking pricey trips around the North. If they really thought tourism had such an effect, they would know well enough to keep quiet.

As would the Blue House’s special envoy, if he really expected a league to crack the unity which the North prizes above everything.

In both cases what the dictatorship wants is presented as something we should want more. Most calls for subversion enrage the North. Not these though. Never these.

5

Let’s leave the ruling camp’s outer-track discourse for now. The inner-track stuff is more interesting, because more obviously heartfelt.

Lately prominent members of the nationalist left, including known friends and mentors of the president, have been calling for faster progress to unification. To this end they support rapid formalization of the league or confederation which, like the right, they regard as being already under construction. (The agreed-upon “liaison office” in Kaesong seems likely to take on greater importance soon.)

There is also impatience to safeguard the North against the American threat. In the following a reporter summarizes statements made by the SNU professor I quoted in an earlier post.

Prof. Paek [Nak-ch’ŏng] emphasized that North-South league is precisely the way in which to advance peace and unification simultaneously, starting with denuclearization. Forming a league with South Korea, America’s ally,  would make for the firmest possible military guarantee, which is needed if the North is to disarm. (Pressian, 15 July 2018)

The removal of all possibility of US attack is routinely described as a main advantage of confederation. (Cho Sŏng-ryŏl of the Institute for National Security Strategy [sic] speaks in similar vein here.) That such a framework would also preclude the enforcement of sanctions is, I think, to be taken as implied.

Supposedly the North would then denuclearize. This naivety too strikes me as disingenuous. I’m not convinced the nationalist left, having argued a different position for years, now badly wants the North to surrender its nukes. At a recent awards ceremony in Seoul City Hall, put on by a Moon-friendly “civic group,” two schoolgirls won a prize for their video on the benefits of unification. These included the whole peninsula’s entry into the nuclear club.

But this is the more interesting part of the article:

Also, a North-South league would be the best possible method of managing the “threat posed by the very existence of South Korea” which North Korea secretly fears.

I welcome Prof. Paek’s frank statement (assuming it’s accurately reproduced here) of a truth I keep trying to get across. The North knows it cannot enjoy true security so long as the South is enjoying itself next door, be it ever so harmless in military terms and even free of US troops.

Every Pyongyang watcher should reflect on the obvious implications. That goes for the professor himself, though he must already know that “management” of the threat would not satisfy the North for long.

South Koreans who think like Professor Paek are in a minority I would now assess at about 10-15% of the general population. But they appear to be the constituency President Moon has in mind when talking of the minsim (public mood) he represents.

Which is why my critics’ focus on opinion polls last winter led them astray. This was never about what the majority wants, but what it will let the minority get away with. Hence my eight years of stressing that the main threat to the South’s security is the general lack of public identification with the ROK and its values, as opposed to any widespread vulnerability to the personality cult.

The word minjung (the masses, the people) is also being used to refer to the committed few — like those in the tiny eponymous party — though in some contexts it seems to include the monolithic citizenry of the DPRK. The other day the Jaju Sibo published a poem entitled “Taking the Road to Autonomous Unification.” A particularly telling part:

“Because the Minjoo Party’s overwhelming victory in the last election / Thwarted the overwhelming victory of the minjung / We are even now / Walking a desert road.”

The poet concludes with the threat that the masses or inmin (a North-sounding word once taboo here) will reckon harshly with the human “trash” now impeding unification.

This anger could be taken as a sign that the president is charting a centrist course, were it not for the fact that he isn’t mentioned. He must still be well liked among forces more radical than the Minjoo, or he wouldn’t keep polling about 20% higher than it does.* Many representatives of supposedly more radical civic groups participate in the “task forces” consulted for policy advice, especially in regard to inter-Korean issues.

As a result, supporters of a much more gradual if North-friendly approach to unification, though still a majority, have begun expressing themselves in defensive tones. A recent headline in the Seoul Sinmun would have seemed very odd before Moon’s takeover: “We Must Abandon the Fixation on a ‘Hurry-Hurry Unification’.”

6

In the inner track, the North’s authorship and constant promotion of the confederation idea are often invoked as selling points and predictors of success. The logic: Because this is something Pyongyang has wanted all along, it will finally be able to relax, and we can all live in peace.

No one mentions Kim Il Sung’s statement to Zhivkov in 1973 about how the South would be “done for” if it went along with the plan. In line with that statement is Hwang Jang-yop’s summary of Kim’s thoughts on the subject.

When confederation is realized, and the ideologies of North and South are propagandized in the course of free intercourse between the two sides, the Republic [= DPRK] will not be affected in the slightest, because it is a unified state. But the South is an ideologically divided, liberal country, so if we extensively propagate Juche Thought and the superiority of our system we can win over at least half its citizens. As of now South Korea is twice our size in population terms. But once we win over half the South’s people in a confederation, we will be two parts to the South’s one. We would then win either a general election or a war. (어둠이 된 햇볕은 어둠을 밝힐 수 없다, 2001, p. 222.)

A league would destabilize the North to a greater extent than Kim seems to have thought likely, especially if it lasted long enough to cast internal doubt on the regime’s commitment to real unification. But he was right that the South would be far more vulnerable. If Kim Dae Jung were still president, I might feel differently; he seems to have foreseen a league coming about on some sort of liberal democratic basis, or not at all.

In contrast, this Blue House has carried out no endeavor with more apparent foreplanning, orchestration and single-mindedness than it has shown in dismantling the ROK’s claim to being a) a liberal democracy and therefore b) the only legitimate state on the peninsula.

Whatever “Cold War system” there might once have been here is already defunct. There was never such a system in the minds of the opposed leaders, despite the peninsula’s tragic importance to Moscow and Washington. It might have been better if there had been.

I’m not being flippant. Germans in East and West benefited from how each system tried to prove itself more compassionate and democratic, more conducive to its citizens’ realization of their potential than the other. The relevant standards could hardly have been more different, but still. In contrast North and South Korea slid quickly into mutual nationalist recrimination, with each side accusing the other of subservience to a foreign power.

This (not the over-weighted fact that Ossis and Wessis had never clashed on the battlefield) is the main reason Bonn and East Berlin were able to maintain a coldly civil working relationship, routinizing mail service, family reunions, transit, etc, even at the height of Cold War tension.

Since Moon’s takeover the peninsula has become less like divided Germany than ever. The ROK has abandoned the competition for legitimacy, instead ceding the North’s superiority on nationalist grounds while reaffirming that these matter more than liberal democratic ones.

I’m not sure a league will ever come about, but if it does, it will hitch a proudly radical nationalist state to an unloved, moderate-nationalist one too shamefaced to celebrate its own founding. If the South is already unwilling to criticize the North, or to renew a commitment to its own constitutional values, it’s hardly likely to mount a strong defense of human rights later on.

“Freedom of speech is the freedom to shout Long Live Kim Il Sung”: This has been a commonplace here since Kim Su-yŏng’s famous poem to that effect in 1960. It’s not to be taken too literally or narrowly; one gets the larger meaning. But it’s not that much larger. When dissidents and demonstrators called for freedom of speech in the past it was usually nationalist, anti-American and pro-North speech they had in mind.

Americans are therefore wrong in assuming — and this was another line of argument against my RAS lecture — that South Koreans have struggled too long and too bravely for human rights ever to knuckle down to the North. There was no significant opposition here to the prosecution of Professor Park Yu-ha for criticizing the orthodox history of the so-called comfort women, and that took place under Park Geun-hye.

We must also consider the obvious ramifications of the Moon camp’s push to decentralize or quasi-federalize the ROK itself. Germany is often invoked as a model. The apparent hope is that this would happen before a North-South league.

Keep in mind that until the colonial period Korea had one of the world’s longest histories of centralized rule; that the ROK is about a quarter of Germany’s size; and that the likelihood of Kim Jong Un devolving any of his power to mayors and governors is zero.

Already the left-wing discourse is going on about how provinces here could make use of autonomy by embarking on their own exchanges, trades and sister-relationships with various regions in the North.

The security implications of such a development are sobering enough, but nothing compared to the thought of how a decentralized South could possibly hold its own in a league with a dictatorship.

“What belongs together, is growing together again,” Willy Brandt said in 1989. The formulation implies a more balanced and grass-rootsy process than actually ensued in Germany — or is likely to take place here. Koreans belong together and will someday grow back together. But if the South doesn’t take the upper hand in training and guiding that growth, the North will.

In closing let me repeat myself one more time, with apologies to those of my readers who have been paying attention since last year.

If South Koreans want a league with the North, we Americans can only wish them well. The problem is that the current military alliance may embolden them to take this step without proper thought — and then embolden them to nullify the framework as soon as they sour on it. How the North is likely to respond can be imagined, considering the two deadly acts of aggression that followed the South’s abandonment of the Sunshine Policy in 2008.

But the US-ROK alliance was not established with a view to protecting moderate Korean nationalists from radical ones. The Trump administration should therefore make clear as quickly as possible that the alliance would have to end — completely — before even the loosest form of an inter-Korean league came into formal effect. Our diplomats must also grasp the central relevance of this issue to the nuclear talks now underway.

* Update: Sure enough, although the “far left” Justice Party is ostensibly in the opposition, 77% of those who support it say that President Moon is doing a good job, according to a survey made public on August 3.

Pyongyang watchers have always found reasons not to discuss ideology. According to the first consensus, North Korea was just a mindless satellite of the USSR. The second consensus was that it had a unique doctrine of solipsistic communism no foreigner could hope to penetrate. The current consensus: The North is a “reactive” state where ideology no longer matters.

Although observers still talk of a Juche / communist / Stalinist state, they always mean a failed one, with only enough ideology remaining to hold the economy back.

Thus has the regime’s nationalist commitment to unification been ignored or even denied. Conferences on North Korea took place, have taken place this month – are probably taking place as I write this — without anyone mentioning its ideology. You know you’re at a North Korea conference when you can’t tell the political scientists from the I.R. people.

Meanwhile Korean nationalism has not only energized the North’s march to nuclear armament, but also exerted a growing appeal on people in the South — the ideological discourse of which republic has received even less attention than the North’s. The average American knows only that in the 1980s liberal democracy replaced authoritarianism here.

Academics are not influential enough to deserve all the blame for this. The press talks to us, sure, but the press will talk to anyone. The government is much less keen on hearing our point of view. I bet it’s especially wary of consulting scholars when they say a regime’s ideology is beyond our knowing, or that fabricating sources is nothing to criticize a colleague for, but fields less obviously dysfunctional than “North Korean Studies” get passed over too.

Generally our bureaucrats reach their own conclusions among themselves, and then seek just enough external expertise to cover their rear ends. This was done most notoriously during the Vietnam War. In War and Politics (1973) Bernard Brodie writes:

If there is one practically unvarying principle about the use within the government of outside experts as consultants, it is that they must be known to be friendly to the policy on which they are being consulted. They may be critical of details … but not of the fundamentals. (p.214.)

We may scoff at this, but it’s human nature, and academics are no less prone to it.

In any case, the same tendencies that have made Koreanists shirk discussion of the North’s ideology seem to have induced our government to do likewise. An intelligence community with a serious interest in the subject would not have contented itself with any of the three consensuses summarized above. (The CIA’s research helped shape them all anyway.)

I was mindful enough of Brodie’s words not to get carried away last year when the Washington Post reported that US officials were reading The Cleanest Race. I assumed that the government had come around to a similar view of the North for which it sought external confirmation. I was also encouraged by a few official references to the unification drive.

But when the NSC’s H.R. McMaster spoke of this in December 2017 he described it in terms of an urge to unite the peninsula “under the red banner.” If there had been any change in perception, it was a reversion to the notion of a virulent-communist adversary.

This spring, however, the State Department took center stage again, and with it the more conventional misperception of the North. When Pompeo showed Kim Yong Chol the Manhattan skyline he did so with an air of Cold War oneupmanship, like Henry Cabot Lodge taking Khrushchev around town.

According to a senior State Department official, Pompeo was motioning to “a brighter future” that could be possible for North Korea, in exchange for it ending its nuclear program. (ABC News, 31 May 2018.)

To judge from the North Korean’s high spirits after the meeting, he knew just what fallacy our people were laboring under, and how to turn it to advantage.

No less telling were the photos of Sung Kim’s meetings with Pyongyang’s “diplomatic warriors.” Choe Son Hui looked more relaxed and cheerful than ever. She too must have known what was in the offing: the myth of a failed-red North was about to give the real, ascendant North more time and stature with which to attain its nationalist objectives.

Considering how much of the agreement was obviously worked out before the summit — and with how many portents of American weakening — it’s wrong to blame Trump for what happened on the day itself. His buffoonery was mortifying, yes, but edifying too. All he did was act out the hoary conventional wisdom as if on a pantomime stage. The spectacle was a devastating caricature of all our wishful dealings with the North.

As the day unfolded it became clear that, once again, our side had devoted far more attention to event-planning than to ideological reconnaissance. We saw the usual indifference to the question of how the North could justify its existence after disarming. We saw the lie given to our tough-guy rhetoric. We saw a familiar American combination of credulity and condescension.

All this was as old as the nuclear crisis itself. But for once we got it without any dignifying sheen of sophistication. I suspect many observers who professed to be appalled by Trump’s performance were really only lamenting the lack of that sheen. Their criticism of him for not getting more from Kim in writing makes little sense. Either the regime has changed fundamentally or it hasn’t. If it has, it would indeed be counter-productive to impose a series of hurdles that must be jumped over within a certain time. If it hasn’t, no concessions it might commit to paper are going to have any more value than the last ones.

As for that much-ridiculed video Trump had made for the occasion, what was it, if not a dramatic rendition of the failed-communist model? The moment I realized what I was watching, I waited for that satellite photograph, the nocturnal one we never hear the end of. Sure enough, it appeared at about the 2-minute mark. For how can a country without lights not be failed, broken, looking for a face-saving way out? And America can help.

[How typical that the one source of information on North Korea that requires no reading or background knowledge should be invoked more often by Americans than any other. I get reminded of it when I talk of a unification drive: “How could such a backward country possibly,” etc, etc. But would a satellite shot of divided Vietnam in 1974 have looked all that different?]

Even those who mocked Trump for setting the mission of denuclearization back a step or two said they were glad the summit had taken place. Why? Because talk is always better than war, even if our adversary derives far more benefit than we do. Without debating the merits of appeasement per se (and there were merits even in Chamberlain’s kind), let’s at least acknowledge that such an approach is appeasement.

Pompeo says we can expect major progress toward denuclearization “in, what was it, two and a half years.” That he had to jog his own memory shows how little thought he has given to what Kim and Moon plan to accomplish in that time frame. If we don’t see what we want by the winter of 2020-21, our options will be far more limited than they are now.

For years the American press gave us sporadic reports on how blasé South Koreans were about the threat from the North, and how indifferent they had become to the welfare or human rights of the people up there.

Yet early this year the commentariat suddenly had to explain the dramatic change in North-South relations without resorting to meta-ideological discussion, which it hates above all things.

At first we heard from our leading newspapers how the South Korean public had been turned upside-down by the immense charm and fashion sense of Kim Yo-jong, of all people. This talk was so obviously trivial and false as to incur a backlash.

Since then the press has pushed the line that Moon’s outreach to the North reflects South Koreans’ yearning to be free from the sleep-robbing fear of nuclear war, free also from fear of a US strike on their brethren above the DMZ. (No one acknowledges the contradiction to the line we used to get.)

In accordance with this new consensus, the lumpencommentariat dismisses all talk of ideological affinity between the Blue House and the Kim regime as “McCarthyist” ravings or “fucking John Birch shit,” to mention a few epithets on Twitter directed at my ally-as-intermediary piece.

Much as I want to put this blogging stuff behind me, the upcoming summit compels me to draw attention, if only for the record, to how the nationalist left’s own discourse backs me up.

A few months ago I predicted the ruling Minjoo Party would begin agitating for a league or confederation before the June 13 elections. I said that in doing so it would focus on the economic benefits.

Last week I received the various parties’ campaign materials in a big envelope. (As a permanent resident I am eligible to vote in local elections.) Sure enough, the Minjoo pamphlet has a slogan in big brushstroke font at the top of one page: “Peace Equals Economy!” Underneath, next to a photo of President Moon, is the somewhat coded but still urgent pledge to “construct a permanent peace system this year.”

Of course his base knows what this means. To quote an approving headline in the nationalist-left Hankyoreh on April 29:

The plan for unification via a North-South league is hidden in the Panmunjom Declaration.

Indeed it is, and in plain sight. But the Hankyoreh was quick to drop this talk, being mindful of the need to get the Americans to Singapore in as blissful a state of ignorance as possible. This is why street demonstrations for the “peace system” have so far been rather small and sedate affairs (though with a higher proportion of young participants than conservative rallies).

A less prominent, therefore less constrained source of Moon camp discourse is Tongil [Unification] News. In a recent article Paek Nak-ch’eong, an SNU professor emeritus of some influence, is quoted as saying that the leaguing-up or confederating process has in effect already begun.

The stage of a North-South league, in which North and South maintain their own constitutions, governments and militaries while forming a league of the two states, can be said to be already underway.

Such remarks are becoming common. On May 29, just after the second Kim-Moon summit, the head of a research institute had his presentation summarized as follows:

The ‘Panmunjom Declaration’ has effectively opened the door to the stage of a North-South league. In less than a month, North-South summits have become routine and regular, and if a formal structure for North-South cabinet meetings is created, and meetings on the parliamentary level take place this year, a ‘North-South league’ will be complete.

South Korea is an unpredictable place, but at present I see no pressing reason why things couldn’t unfold in the way described. After all, the main reason the ruling party has been touting its plan for a “peace system” in the run-up to local elections — in contrast to the shrewd downplaying of North-South issues during Moon’s presidential campaign — is in order to claim a mandate on June 13 to gallop towards it.

(Yes, gallop. After Kim Jong Un said that North-South relations must progress as fast as a “10,000 league horse,” the ROK Unification Minister allegedly said in the earshot of reporters: “We need to make a faster horse.”)

The conference that produced the last indented statement above was hosted by Tongilmaji, a civic group run by the ruling party’s own Yi Hae-ch’an. (Many groups that seem more radical than the government itself would be considered astroturf organizations by American standards.) The published proceedings offer valuable insight into the mindset of the sort of people the Moon administration likes to see on its advisory “TF” or task forces.

In the front matter is a warm letter from the “Committee of National [minjok] Conciliation” in Pyongyang, complete with North Korean orthography and Juche calendar date, and talk of a shared “patriotic movement” (aeguk undong). To North Koreans the obvious implication is that the South Korean friends share their love of the DPRK.

Whether the folk at Tongilmaji realize this, I am not sure; they may well think reference is to the North-South league (one country or kuk, two systems) which in their minds is already a done deal.

Either way, the events of the past few months have had quite a disinhibiting effect. Not since the Chang Myun era (1960-61) has the National Security Law been so loosely enforced. One encounters increasingly casual invocation of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il or Kim Jong Un as an authority on whatever is being discussed. For example: We Koreans are too easily fooled by others, so we must read Kim Il Sung’s memoirs With the Century, and learn how he always kept his guard up. (The irony! But I know a few foreign Koreanists who swallow the “memoirs” too.)

While there is great affection for “Inny,” as the South Korean president is sometimes called, there is more solemn respect for the three Kims. This is only natural, for by nationalist standards they are far superior.

Still, it’s obvious that the left is consciously holding back until after the Singapore summit. As Ko Sŭng-u of the Citizens’ League for Democratic Media put it in a recent talk:

Some people are saying that to make sure the US-North Korea summit goes ahead, it is better not to mention the problem of the withdrawal of US troops.

I get the logic. If Trump realizes how quickly low-level confederation will come about, and what is bound to ensue, he might be less impressed by what Kim Jong Un refrains from demanding. And less inclined to reward this forbearance.

But take it from me, Moon camp: You can talk as loudly as you want, and the Americans won’t pay the slightest attention. Least of all Trump. As far as they’re concerned, the North Koreans are communists, and you’re liberal democrats.

Ko himself doesn’t need my encouragement. He comes right out and says that the construction of a “permanent peace system” must lead to the abolition of the Mutual Defense Treaty in its current form. Which is of course true. (Ko believes it already violates the ROK constitution.)

To return to the Tongilmaji gathering: A paper by Yi Hyŏk-hŭi, chairman of the group’s steering committee, confirms my hunch — as expressed in the ally-as-intermediary posting — that political power is now being exercised not by an administration in the full sense, but by a clique answering to a popular movement.

In the current situation the executor known as ‘government’ does not appear very different from the public [min’gan]. It is known that for reasons related to security, urgency and importance a very small group inside the Blue House is making policy decisions, and shaping the current state of affairs. When you get right down to it, the worrying reality is not so much the ‘bypassing of the public’ but the ‘bypassing of government.’

Sounds a bit like the Trump administration, doesn’t it? But Yi isn’t worried for the reasons you or I would be.

While the president is racing along, the offices directly and indirectly responsible for implementing policy are not doing their work. Worse, they are causing ‘mishaps’….. Inside ‘government’ there appear to be no bureaucrats who understand the Moon government’s philosophy. A second fundamental reason appears to be the lack of a purge of accumulated ills [cheokpye]. Expecting bureaucrats who worked in the Unification Ministry and other offices under the Lee Myung Bak and Park Geun-hye governments to correctly understand the current situation and correctly do their work is in itself nonsensical.

So many North-critical people to purge, so little time. After local elections generate the appearance of a mandate, this endeavor will pick up pace in a big way.

As it must. April 2020 is not far off.

Let me explain: Judging from cyclical trends in ROK political history, and the international track record of economic policies like Moon’s, there is a strong likelihood of the conservatives taking back the National Assembly in the 2020 legislative elections, whereupon they would move to nullify North-South agreements, and restore whatever US troops and weaponry might have been sent home by that time.

The many apologetic Pyongyang watchers who attributed the twin military attacks of 2010 to Lee Myung Bak’s abandonment of the Sunshine Policy will have to agree with me that the dictatorship would not take a much greater reversal of its fortunes lying down.

No doubt the same people who jeered at me last winter for thinking confederation possible will now find me crazy for suggesting that the South Koreans might get cold feet at the altar of this eminently sensible “peace system.”

But the scenario in question certainly looms large in the Moon camp’s own thinking. This is why it wants the legislature to compel future compliance with all summit agreements — regardless of whether the North violates them, it seems. It has also, as I have said before, expressed a commitment to keeping the right out of power for the next twenty years.

Unfortunately the US government shows no awareness of how dangerous the “peace process” is likely to be. Trump has given his blessing to inter-Korean dialogue of which he clearly understands nothing, and praised Kim Jong Un as an “honorable” person, while making clear that US troops will remain here for as long as they’re wanted. In this manner he has encouraged the South Korean people to sign off on risks they may well balk at later. Our troops could end up paying the price.