Yoon sets Korea-U.S. ties as a top priority

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Yoon sets Korea-U.S. ties as a top priority

President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol, left, and U.S. President Joe Biden, right. Yoon spoke with Biden over the phone within five hours of his neck-and-neck victory in the presidential race on Thursday. The two spoke of strengthening the bilateral alliance and working closely on North Korea affairs and the Korea-U.S.-Japan trilateral cooperation. [EPA/YONHAP]

President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol, left, and U.S. President Joe Biden, right. Yoon spoke with Biden over the phone within five hours of his neck-and-neck victory in the presidential race on Thursday. The two spoke of strengthening the bilateral alliance and working closely on North Korea affairs and the Korea-U.S.-Japan trilateral cooperation. [EPA/YONHAP]

 
Getting U.S.-Korea ties back on track will be a top priority, said president-elect Yoon Suk-yeol on Thursday at his first press conference after the election results were released.
 
“We will rebuild the Korea-U.S. alliance,” Yoon said in speaking with the press on Thursday morning at the National Assembly. “We will strengthen our comprehensive strategic alliance by sharing the core values on liberal democracy, market economy and human rights.”
 
The conservative People Power Party (PPP)'s Yoon, a political rookie with a public prosecutor background, officially won the election Thursday, beating his rival Lee Jae-myung of the liberal Democratic Party in the closest presidential race to date, with a margin of just 0.73 percent of the vote.
 
Rebuilding the alliance can take a number of different forms, including bringing the Seoul-Washington military exercises back to scale, which are held regularly every March and August.
 
The joint trainings, long criticized by the North as a threat to its sovereignty, have been scaled down since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Last August’s exercises were replaced with computer-simulated combined exercises, with only about 30 percent of the forces taking part.
 
“The trust between the Republic of Korea and the United States has deteriorated due to the reduction of the joint drills,” Yoon said during one of his campaign speeches. “I will work on brining the drills back to scale.”
 
Yoon has also emphasized pre-emptive strike capacity and the American extended deterrence over South Korea, including its nuclear umbrella, to address the military provocations from the North, something his rival Lee characterized as warmongering cries.
 
Pyongyang was yet to issue any statement on Yoon’s win. Five years ago when President Moon Jae-in was elected, it issued a statement within a day.
 
However, within five hours of clinching his victory, Yoon was on the phone with U.S. President Joe Biden.
 
The two spoke of the North Korean missile tests, the latest of which were on Feb. 27 and March 5 and were confirmed to have been part of a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system, and the importance of the Korea-U.S.-Japan trilateral cooperation in addressing them, according to the PPP.
 
Although he hails from the conservative PPP, Yoon’s views on Korea’s alliance with the United States align with the joint statement issued by the two liberal presidents of the allied nations, Moon and Biden, when they met at the White House last May.
 
“First, we will build a Korea-U.S. Comprehensive Strategic Alliance,” Yoon said during his first press conference after winning the PPP presidential primary in November. “We will join the global solidarity for liberal democracy, lay the foundation for peace and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region. […] We will seek cooperation in the new frontier and cutting-edge knowledge industry covering new technologies, space, cyber and nuclear power.”
 
His statement echoes the joint statement that heralded “a new chapter” in the bilateral ties and affirmed, in addition to commitment to the defense of South Korea and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, commitment to new partnerships on climate, global health, emerging technologies, supply chain resilience and civil space exploration among others.
 
Yoon’s North Korea policy also closely aligns with that of the Biden administration.
 
The Biden administration, four months into its administration last year, issued a North Korea policy that will not seek grand bargains like the Donald Trump administration or adopt the so-called strategic patience of the Barack Obama administration.
 
In finding a middle ground between the two, the Biden administration said it will seek a “calibrated practical approach that is open to and will explore diplomacy” with the North.
 
So far, this approach has resulted in Washington’s repeated statements via its top officials that the option for dialogue and diplomacy is always available, should Pyongyang wish to take it. But they’ve drawn the line when it comes to providing incentives, such as sanctions relief, to make the dialogue happen.
 
Yoon has done the same.
 
While his rival Lee said he will offer sanctions relief on the condition Pyongyang follows up with appropriate denuclearization efforts, Yoon dismissed the idea of offering the incentive first.
 
In his interview with the JoongAng Ilbo last month, Yoon said he will consider sanctions relief on the North only after the regime opens its door to international inspection in person, something that has not happened since the International Atomic Energy Agency officials were kicked out in 2009.
 
“We will deal with North Korea's illegal and unreasonable behavior decisively according to principle, but we will always keep the door open for inter-Korean dialogue,” Yoon said at the Thursday press conference.
 
Yoon’s hawkish policies on security is not an anomaly among the country's conservative presidents.
 
His policy on the Korea-U.S.-Japan trilateral relations, on the other hand, differ much more from the previous conservative governments.
 
During his campaigns, Yoon did not dismiss the idea of elevating the current trilateral ties to a military alliance, not unlike that between the United States and Korea.
 
The Korea-U.S. military alliance dates to the years of the Korean War (1950-53), after which the two countries signed a mutual defense treaty, providing the legal grounds for the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) and the United Nations Command to be stationed in the country. Korea has one of the largest U.S. Forces in the region, second only to Japan.
 
Other presidential candidates including Lee and Sim Sang-jung of the Justice Party balked at the idea of allowing Japan a say in security decisions concerning the peninsula, given the history of the 1910-45 Japanese annexation of Korea. But when the question was posed to Yoon during a televised debate on Feb. 25, he did not deny the possibility.
 
“There’s no need to promise China that such an alliance would never happen,” Yoon said during the debate. “In the case of a security emergency in the country, one could consider the possibility [of having Japan step in to defend Korea.]”
 
The Moon administration had pledged to China that it will not enter into such a trilateral military alliance, in addition to making pledges not to make additional deployments of the Washington-led Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) antimissile system in Korea and participate in an American missile defense network — altogether dubbed the “three nos” pledges.
 
Yoon is open to considering all of these options.
 
“We need to consider the best options for our national security, and that should include the Thaad system and deeper military cooperation with Japan and the United States,” Yoon said during a meeting with the international press last year on Nov. 12.
 
Thaad deeply dented Korea-China relations after its initiation in Korea in 2017. Beijing protested the system as an American scheme to spy on China, a claim both Washington and Seoul denied, and for years banned Korean cultural content and prohibited tourists from visiting Korea.
 
What might further agitate China, should Yoon follow through with his campaign pledges, is a possible alliance with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), an Indo-Pacific alliance between the United States, Australia, Japan and India. Beijing has slammed the Quad as a scheme to contain China’s rise in the region.
 
“We will pursue open cooperation with a Quad working group on vaccinations, climate change and emerging technologies,” Yoon said during his speech at the PPP headquarters in Seoul on Jan. 24.
 
Beijing is not in the dark about Yoon’s ideas.
 
“The 'three nos' statement is the result of China and South Korea implementing mutual respect,” read an editorial released by the Global Times, a pro-Chinese paper in Beijing, on Thursday. “It brought the bilateral relations back from the freezing point to the normal track. […] The Thaad system has exceeded the defense needs of South Korea, and it seriously undermined China's strategic security interests.
 
“South Korea should not regard deployment of Thaad as an internal or sovereign issue,” it said. “It is in essence a wedge that the U.S. wants to nail in Northeast Asia.”
 
China’s President Xi Jinping congratulated Yoon in a letter conveyed to him by Chinese Ambassador to Korea Xing Haiming on Friday.
 
Yoon spoke on the phone with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Friday.
 
In addition to stressing the Korea-U.S.-Japan coordination to address peace and stability in the region, Kishida expressed his expectations that Yoon’s leadership will help steer the bilateral cooperation to be “based on the foundation of our friendly and cooperative relationship that has been built since the normalization of our diplomatic ties in 1965,” according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
 
Yoon in return expressed his intention to work on improving the bilateral ties, and to cooperate closely with Japan to address the North Korea issues, according to the ministry.
 
In the debate on Feb. 25, Yoon said if he is elected he’d like to first meet with President Biden, then Prime Minister Kishida and then President Xi Jinping.
 
Yoon criticized the Moon government for allowing the ties with Japan to fall to a record low, and said he will work to improve the relations with its neighbor with a “future-oriented” outlook.
 
Ongoing diplomatic irritants between Korea and Japan include the issue of compensation for Korean victims of Japanese wartime forced labor and sexual slavery. After local courts in Korea ruled in favor of victims in 2018, Japan placed export restrictions on Korea targeting its semiconductor industry. Seoul at the time mulled over whether to end its military intelligence sharing pact with Tokyo, also known as the General Security of Military Information Agreement (Gsomia).
 
The last Korea-Japan summit was held in December 2019 when Moon met with then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Chengdu of Sichuan Province, China. Moon briefly engaged with Abe’s successor Yoshihide Suga on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit in June 2021, but it was not an official summit.

BY ESTHER CHUNG [chung.juhee@joongang.co.kr]
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