The Dicey, Four-Sided Diplomacy of Northeast Asia

Diplomacy with the four major powers surrounding the Korean Peninsula is in shaky straits.

In Seoul's relations with the United States, cracks are forming, due to discord over the Bush administration's missile defense program and diverging views on the Pyongyang regime.

With Japan, the Action Plan for the New Korea-Japan Partnership for the 21st Century, signed in 1998, may lose effect due to conflict on the history textbooks that Seoul claims gloss over Japan's aggression in Asia, and due to strife over Korean fishing rights in waters around the southern Kuril Islands.

Moreover, South Korea is seriously challenged by China and Russia, which are trying to draw it into confrontation with U.S. strategies in the world.

The mounting tensions cropped up with the inaugurations of President George W. Bush in Washington and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Tokyo, experts said. The absence of personal connections with core politicians in both administrations to iron out differences is blamed for Seoul's difficult situation.

In the case of Japan, Kim Joung-won, a professor at Sejong University, criticized the government for having hurriedly opposed the endorsement of the textbooks at the last minute. Yun Deok-min, a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, a think tank of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, criticized Seoul's abrupt cancellations of civilian exchange programs as short-sighted.

Gong Ro-myong, head of the Japan Studies Research Institute at Dongkuk University, explained that Mr. Koizumi cannot possibly give in to South Korean demands to rectify the controversial textbooks nor compromise on the fishing rights, with parliamentary Upper House elections coming on July 29. "An anti-left movement is surfacing in Japan with 80 percent of the people supporting the Koizumi administration's aspiration for a 'normal nation'," he said.

Former Japanese prime ministers Noboru Takeshita and Keizo Obuchi, who used to play important background roles in relations between Seoul and Tokyo, as in the fishing dispute in 1998, have died, leaving a vacuum of influential Japanese politicians Seoul can resort to for informal negotiations.

As regards to U.S.-Korean relations, professor Palk Jin-hyun warned that the two countries had reached an abnormal level of distrust. "Restoration of trust in the alliance is most imperative," he said.

The Kim administration's apparent siding with Russia in February on the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty that the Bush administration wants to modify or scrap stoked U.S. distrust of Korea.

Washington endorsed Seoul's engagement policy toward Pyongyang and its lead in tackling the issue of North Korean conventional weapons, but the two sides have not formed a complete partnership. An expert said on condition of anonymity, "As long as diplomatic and security policies are dependent on unification policies, interests between South Korea and the United States cannot possibly converge."

No big problems have surfaced between Korea and Russia or China, but their attempts to use South Korea to counter U.S. world strategies and their equidistant diplomacy toward the North and the South are making it difficult for Seoul to select its diplomatic targets.

"If the United States attempts to contain China," said Park Doo-bok, professor at the foreign ministry think tank, "relations between China and North Korea will surely strengthen, which wouldn't be good for the reunification of the Korean Peninsula."

by Oh Young-hwan