Diplomacy at its best?

In baseball, a slugger is someone who consistently sends the ball out of the park or reaches the fences. Think Rambo with a baseball bat. The slugging percentage is calculated as total bases divided by at bats. Until 2001, Babe Ruth’s slugging percentage of .847 was the top record, then Barry Bonds came along and put up a slugging percentage of .863.

If you listen to the stuff the Blue House is putting out lately, President Lee Myung-bak’s diplomacy slugging average must be a staggering 1! Every time he steps up to the plate it’s a diplomatic home run, or so the Blue House says.

To name just a few of the achievements he has won for South Korea: The country is hosting next year’s Group of 20 summit; it is seeking a big increase in its voting power at the International Monetary Fund to reflect its economic status, and President Lee’s recent visit to three Association of Southeast Asian Nations members - Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand - is being hailed as the beginning of his “New Asia Initiative.”

Needless to say, all the economic memorandums signed with those other countries are golden deals, too - but more on that later.

While there are without a doubt intangible benefits coming from those “achievements,” I would not paint them as a diplomatic cure-all as the Blue House has.

I would rather point to what Oh Joon, the senior Foreign Ministry official in charge of multilateral diplomacy, recently told my fellow reporter Kim Su-jeong in an interview that ran in this week’s JoongAng Sunday. According to Oh, South Korea is expected to become a member of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development later this month. It’s the only subcommittee of the OECD’s 25 committees that the country had not been a member of until now. Oh said that a fact-finding delegation has visited South Korea twice recently in order to finalize the details.

Last year, South Korea’s official development assistance stood at $800 million, which was roughly 0.09 percent of the country’s gross national income, an incredibly low figure and only about a third of the OECD average. It’s no wonder UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon bluntly called Korea’s international aid efforts “embarrassing” last year.

Meanwhile, South Korea has been running full-bore in an all-or-nothing effort to host international events. It wants to host the World Cup again because - dare I say it? - the last one, held just seven years ago, was cohosted with Japan.

That can’t sit well with Koreans. There will be always an asterisk associated with the 2002 World Cup in the country’s vault of international event-trophies. While foreign diplomats have watched with amusement how South Koreans are obsessed with hosting international events, they are also well aware of how stingy the country is in helping others.

Just to give you an example of how the Korean mind works when it comes to helping the less fortunate, here is an example: When a tsunami devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, the initial offer from the world’s 13th largest economy was a paltry $600,000! This figure, which my paper purposefully highlighted in its headlines, was all Korea offered when hundreds of thousands of people died and billions of dollars were needed to repair the damage. That amount would barely buy a single house in some areas of Seoul.

Perhaps after it became aware that this so-called aid was too tiny to be proud of, later that offer was finally bumped up to $50 million - still not enough if you ask me.

The biggest problem with South Korea’s foreign policy, apart from the fact that it has only rarely ventured outside the boundaries of “four powers diplomacy” (Russia, the United States, Japan and China), is that visits by the president to countries other than the four mentioned above are often used as publicity stunts to enhance his image.

Back in the old days, when the country had its own cadre of military dictators such as Chun Doo Hwan, a state visit was trumpeted as the event of the century. They even produced commemorative stamps that school kids were forced to buy. I still have my collection intact. And I think that mind-set hasn’t yet completely disappeared.

This is also why economic memorandums of understanding that have yet to materialize are packaged as done deals. In February, the Blue House was proud to announce that Seoul and Baghdad had inked an agreement that would allow Seoul to secure about 2 billion barrels of crude oil from fields in the Basra region - despite the fact that the Iraqi ambassador to Seoul told me that this was not the case and that the deal was blown out of proportion.

Seoul has made attempts in the past to carve out its own niche in the diplomatic world. The idea that Korea could act as a “balancer” of Northeast Asia is a good example. The brains behind this concept, former Blue House security adviser Lee Jong-seok, who later went on to become unification minister, had to fly to Washington, D.C., to explain to perplexed U.S. officials what exactly it was that Seoul had in mind.

Essentially, it was a plan that emerged from the left-leaning Roh Moo-hyun administration, which was looking for ways to distance itself from Washington, but it fizzled before it was implemented. A fiasco at best.

Perhaps I am too pessimistic. A new diplomatic course may indeed be a feasible idea. Talking to ambassadors from countries in the region, countries do look to South Korea as a model for economic development. They are also less suspicious of Korea compared to the region’s No. 1 military power, China. Japan is equally mistrusted, partly because, despite a constitution that prohibits the projection of military power abroad, it is actually the best military in terms of quality in the region, and partly because it has yet to reconcile with its neighbors over its past. Nobody is willing to accept either of these two as regional leaders.

While the region does have Asean, the Asian Regional Forum and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Group, there is no real multilateral framework that binds together countries in the region in the sense that NATO does in Europe. For a region that has become the main global economic engine, with so much potential for cooperation, the time is ripe to think about forming a true security framework - but that is another column.

Seoul’s dependence on Washington for its security and how that equation will change in case a unified Korean Peninsula emerges will always be a decisive factor in determining the country’s role in the region. But there are other things that Seoul can do in the meantime, and that is: giving more (free) aid to developing nations, contributing to UN peacekeeping forces and even undertaking proactive deployments to conflict areas.

Collecting the rights to host international events and posing for handshakes are not the answer.

by Brian Lee [africanu@joongang.co.kr]