By Jae-Jung Suh
For the past 10 years, asynchronous cycles of elections in the United States, South Korea and Japan have produced the crosscurrents of foreign policies that pull the Korean Peninsula in complex, unpredictable ways. In 2000, candidate George W. Bush won an election that had little to do with Korea throughout the primaries and campaigns. Consolidating his victory over the Clinton administration’s vice president, Al Gore, Bush launched his “ABC” (Anything But Clinton) policy. He wanted to distance himself from any policy that had to do with his predecessor, including President Bill Clinton’s engaging with North Korea. Even before Bush was sworn in, signs of trouble emerged in his relationship with South Korea’s then-President Kim Dae-Jung.
Three years earlier, Kim had won a close contest with Lee Hoe-Chang on a platform that adroitly combined his regional loyalty votes with support from various liberal sectors of Korean society. Heeding his electorate’s demand and the general public’s wish for peace on the peninsula, Kim had pursued the policy of engagement—called the “sunshine policy” after Aesop’s fable about the sun’s superior power over wind to have a man take off his coat—with North Korea. Kim’s sunshine policy culminated in the first-ever inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in 2000 and gained an international endorsement with the Nobel Peace Prize.
Harmonious with Kim’s measures, Clinton was blazing his own trails of engagement by holding a meeting with Vice Marshal Cho Myong Rok and sending Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to meet with Kim Jong-Il, the North’s “Dear Leader.” The dual track of engagement, on which the two allies pushed in lock step, seemed near the final destination of peace toward the end of 2000, when Clinton was considering a summit with Kim as a way to address all the remaining concerns about the North’s weapons of mass destruction. The two allies were in the same boat, enjoying the calm waters as they collaborated to engage the North.
All that came to a screeching stop in January 2001, when Bush became president. Engaging with the North was the last thing he was about to endorse. Republicans were upset that the Agreed Framework, the Clinton legacy on North Korea, rewarded the North’s “bad behavior” with a nuclear reactor that could give Pyongyang access to fissile material. Bush immediately ordered a review of America’s North Korea policies. He brushed aside Kim Dae-Jung when he tried to explain the virtues of engagement in a telephone conversation. “I can’t believe how naïve he is,” Bush said in the middle of the call, with his hand covering the phone’s mouthpiece. Kim’s subsequent visit to the White House only exacerbated the situation when the differences between Seoul and Washington were made public.
Kim, a statesman who had staked out his entire political career on engagement with the North since before President John F. Kennedy’s time, came home humiliated after his appeal for engagement with the North fell on deaf ears. His policy had been rebuked. He was the first, but certainly not the last, casualty of the strong crosscurrents created by the American election that had nothing to do with Korea.
Crosscurrents Turn Violent
The crosscurrents, which began with the American election, became more turbulent in 2002, when Koreans voted Roh Moo-hyun president. A relatively obscure lawyer who had risen to stardom with his stellar performance in a congressional hearing, Roh managed to stage an upset victory over Lee Hoi-Chang, who had been leading in all the polls. The election was a contest between the status quo and anti-status quo. Lee had everything: a degree from the best program at the most elite school in the nation (Seoul National University), a distinguished career as a public prosecutor, a blue-blooded family and roots in the most populous region; Roh had none of these. In a close race, the majority sided with the new face.
Roh brought a breath of fresh air into Korean politics, still stale with legacies of the authoritarian past. The fresh air in domestic politics, however, proved a whiplash that added turbulence to the crosscurrents in the U.S.-Korea relationship. Roh, after all, was a politician who took pride in the fact he had never visited the United States before his election and who made the campaign pledge that he would not rush to Washington, D.C., for a summit meeting. He painted himself as the candidate who could say “no” to Uncle Sam. Once sworn in, he tried to moderate his coarse rhetoric, but he put in policies that many in the Bush administration suspected were tinged with nationalistic streaks. His version of engagement policy, “peace and prosperity,” in particular began to create frictions, if not clashes, with the Bush administration’s “do not reward bad behavior with engagement” posture.
The crosscurrents, an unintended byproduct of the American and Korean elections, became violent in 2007, when the Japanese cast their lot with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Riding the wave of anti-North sentiment among Japanese voters who were appalled at the North’s abduction of Japanese citizens, Abe placed its resolution front and center of his policies. He succeeded in riding the anti-North wave into the prime minister’s office. Once in office, he reversed, as Bush did, his predecessor’s engagement policy and began to adopt hard-line containment policies.
Although these policies failed to produce any tangible outcomes in the abduction issue, they fared well for alliance politics so long as they flowed in the same direction as Bush’s policy. Abe never had the kind of uneasy moments that his predecessor Junichiro Koizumi experienced when he pursued his vision of engagement irrespective of, or even despite, Bush’s preference. Abe and Bush saw eye-to-eye on North Korea; both nourished and rode the strong antiengagement waves.
Now the combined force of the antiengagement waves clashed head-on with the Korean wave of peace and prosperity. Compounded by his own set of problems with the North, Roh did not make much headway in the first years of his presidency. For a few years since 2002, there were few official contacts between the two Koreas, and the two tangible legacies of Kim Dae-Jung’s sunshine policy—Mount Kumgang tourism and the Kaesung industrial park—were in serious trouble. The light water reactor construction project, the epitome of the engagement policy, was officially declared dead in May 2006. Five months later, North Korea responded by detonating an atomic bomb underground.
U.S. Voters Turn the Tide
The antiengagement wave seemed about to overwhelm the Korean wave in 2006, when a majority of American voters expressed displeasure with the Bush administration’s Iraq policy by giving Democrats control of both the House and Senate. The election created an opening in which the otherwise moribund Korean wave could survive. Following the electoral defeat, the Bush administration saw an exodus of the officials who had maintained the “we don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat it” posture. Secretary of State -Condoleezza Rice seized the diplomatic opening to put Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill to work. Hill held a series of tough but ultimately successful negotiations with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Gye Gwan, to produce in February 2007 an agreed plan to implement the 2005 agreement that committed the North to denuclearization.
Now that the Bush administration had shifted its course to test the engagement waters, the Korean wave began to gather strength. Bush and Roh seemed to converge on the same wavelength in seeking a diplomatic solution to the North problem. That, however, spelled trouble for Abe. He had boxed himself into the no-engagement cage and saw no way out. He continued to stick to his abduction-before-engagement policy, which quickly became a sticking point in the six-party talks process—formed by China, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and the United States to seek a peaceful resolution to security concerns stemming from North Korea’s nuclear weapons program—when everyone else was ready to move on.
A prime minister does not have the same level of political flexibility that a president has to respond to electoral outcomes; either he adheres to his policy or resigns. After his party’s crushing defeat in the 2007 election, Abe tried to stick it out until he realized his position was no longer tenable. He resigned in September. While it is premature to predict what policy the new prime minister, Fukuda Yasuo, will pursue, it is more likely now than before that he too will begin to tap into the engagement wave that is gaining force in Seoul and Washington. As chief cabinet secretary under Prime Ministers Yoshiro Mori and Junichiro Koizumi, he had consistently advocated engagement and normalization with the North, but he is now faced with the Japanese public, whose anti-North sentiments were piqued during his predecessor’s term.
The crosscurrents of elections and foreign policy seem to have come full circle. The 1997 election put Seoul and Washington on a concordant engagement wave, which began to diverge with the 2000 U.S. election. The Korean election in 2002 turned the crosscurrents of the allies’ foreign policies more turbulent, as did the Japanese elections. The violent turbulence began to moderate with the 2006 election in the United States and the one in Japan. The elections, driven by local politics, have managed to create clashing waves in foreign seas, only to calm them just before they turned into a tsunami.
South Korea’s December Elections
The cycle of elections never stops. And it reserves to itself the power to create ripples and crosscurrents in foreign policy.
Just when the three allies seem on the same wavelength of engagement, South Korea is about to hold its presidential election in December. Lee Myung-Bak, the conservative Grand National Party’s candidate who is leading in all polls, has been critical of Roh’s peace-and-prosperity policy. While he is in principle supportive of engagement—his so-called Vision 3000, for example, promises the South will help the North so that its per capita income will rise to $3,000 within a decade—his offer of aid is conditioned on the North’s giving up its nuclear weapons and opening up its economy. The candidates of the left-of-center United New Democratic Party and the progressive Democratic Labor Party are much more supportive of direct engagement.
If Lee wins with overwhelming conservative support, his preconditions are likely to serve as a bulwark against engagement; if Lee’s margin of victory is narrow, he will be caught between his Vision 3000 and conditions. On the other hand, if a pro-engagement candidate wins, that individual will try to join Washington and Tokyo to create a tsunami of engagement.
Whether the election outcome will reinforce the engagement wave or produce the surf that will complicate the engagement remains to be seen.
Jae-Jung Suh is associate professor, director of the Korea Studies Program and academic adviser for the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS.
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