It’s time for Seoul to get real

President Lee Myung-bak had some face time with the public last week when he had his second TV town hall meeting.

Granted, it was a meeting held to quell the fires of dissent over domestic issues, but when it came to foreign policy he didn’t impress.

When asked about dispatching troops to Afghanistan, the president talked about how virtual strangers had fought in the Korean War. That may resonate with the older generation, but he is talking to a young population that is more than half a century removed from the war and fighting for jobs rather than in foxholes, so he has to do better than that.

And he (or his advisers) again made the mistake of pointing out that the deployment of South Korean troops to Iraq was concluded without any casualties. Is Defense Minister Kim Tae-young the only sane person here who is providing a realistic assessment of the situation and telling it like it is?

To think that the South Korean troops and personnel working in Afghanistan will escape unscathed is wishful thinking. For a sustainable victory there, you need to build up the infrastructure and do what you can for the people. Meanwhile, the Taliban will do everything they can to disrupt such operations, and that includes non-combat missions. After hypnotizing the public by saying that all will be well, how are you going to weather the storm if people start coming home injured or in body bags? And how are you going to play a bigger role in peacekeeping operations in the future if all you’re doing is cherry picking the safest missions?

A case in point is Japan, which with its financial clout has always had the potential to attain some sort of regional hegemony. One of the main reasons it hasn’t is because of its self-imposed restrictions on its military deployments abroad. It’s no coincidence that Washington has been asking Tokyo to take on a bigger role internationally as it looks for a strategic partner in the region. That indicates that a different mind-set is needed if South Korea ever hopes to be taken seriously. It’s time to look into the cold eye of the truth.

On the inter-Korean front, the president didn’t deviate from the initial stance he took at the beginning of his presidency. Lee punched his presidential ticket on the back of a conservative policy towards the North in which he emphasized that real progress needed to be made on the humanitarian front and the nuclear issue. That signaled an end to the unconditional aid that had flowed from South to North for a decade.

What he said on Friday echoed that, because the only visible olive branch he extended to Pyongyang was the possibility of another inter-Korean summit, though not necessarily in Seoul (even though the past two inter-Korean meetings took place in Pyongyang and a previous agreement stipulates that the North Korean leader should come down to the South for a summit).

Kim Jong-il must have scoffed at that suggestion. There was absolutely nothing for the North to interpret as a change in Seoul that would make it politically acceptable for the leadership in the North to give it a try.

I applaud the president for sticking to his principles. I do believe that it is important to press Pyongyang on humanitarian issues such as the fate of South Korean prisoners of war and the abductees still held in the North. But frankly, when it comes to realpolitik, the way that one ambassador - who has spent considerable time mulling the inter-Korean relationship - spoke about the North Korean humanitarian issue is something we all need to consider. The gist of it was: “When has such a policy ever worked?”

With that in mind, the government needs to stop confining itself to its post-sunshine policy and explore more realistic approaches to engaging the North - and I am not talking about a “grand bargain” here, which the president stressed in his TV appearance as a measure designed to give the country more say in the nuclear negotiations. The trick is to lure Pyongyang out into the open by putting a concrete, long-term plan in place. Two times the world was wrong about the North’s supposed demise. One was during the famine of the mid-1990s when everyone believed that the North would collapse. The other was more recent, when Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke last summer and some started to hope that circumstances on the Korean Peninsula could change very quickly. The common logic was that some form of military junta or collective leadership would emerge with one of Kim Jong-il’s sons as a figurehead.

Cheong Seong-chang, a researcher with the Sejong Institute, recently wrote that what is really needed is a policy to strengthen the position of the doves in Pyongyang (though identifying them would be the first step) so that an internal policy change in the North could be made to facilitate more sweeping changes in the country. One thing I’ve learned from talking to government officials who think that aiding the North is the best way to bring about anything like perestroika there is that they often overlook the reality on the ground. What they often forget is the fact that unlike with East Germany, where the Soviet Union provided the guns and refused to use them for the East German leadership in the 11th hour, North Korea has its very own military deeply embedded in every aspect of the North as part of the regime’s hold on power. That and the fact that the imbalance in information asymmetry between the ruling elite and the masses is too big, makes a revolution unlikely at this point.

When U.S. President Barack Obama met with his South Korean counterpart in Seoul this month, both talked about the need to break away from past patterns - but the thing about negotiating with a party that has mastered the art of brinkmanship is that the other side is always on the defensive.

The problem with a nuclear-armed Pyongyang is that it has time on its side. As the clock ticks, its nuclear stockpile continues to grow, which fuels the North’s logic that it can drive up the price of forfeiting its nuclear ambitions even more as times goes by. Pyongyang can afford to wait out the Lee administration, which it will probably do if Seoul continues on its current course. One way or another, the time for engagement is now.

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