South Korean President Park Geun-hye may have avoided walking into a potential minefield in postponing her recent Washington visit due to the MERS outbreak in her home country. Following the highly successful Washington visit of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, there is a growing sense of “Korea fatigue” among American policymakers – a narrative being vigorously promoted by the Japan lobby. And with even Tokyo’s regional rival, Chinese President Xi Jinping, relenting enough on history issues to meet twice with Mr. Abe, President Park’s continued avoidance of ally Abe is being denigrated by some as not befitting a true alliance “team player.” Thus the current scramble in Seoul to convey the message that South Korea is moving forward with strategic issues of vital importance, such as cooperation on the North Korean nuclear threat. And there was President Park’s own recent comment in a Washington Post interview regarding “considerable progress” with Tokyo on the historically contentious comfort women issue (a view not necessarily shared by Japanese negotiators.)
South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se recently made the first visit to Tokyo by a foreign minister of his country since 2011 in order to attend a June 22nd ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the signing of the South Korea-Japan normalization treaty. In an interview with the South Korean wire service Yonhap upon his return to Seoul, Yun stated that, “We can say that there is certainly a difference before and after this week in terms of the will for improved bilateral relations.”
Yet history will rear its ugly head repeatedly this summer threatening to upset the proverbial applecart. First, there will be the June 28-29 meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Bonn where committee members will consider Tokyo’s controversial bid to have Meiji-era industrial sites registered without mentioning the POW, Korean, and Chinese slave labor that was utilized at a number of them. Then there will be Prime Minister Abe’s statement on the 70th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War in August. A number of questions surround this statement: Will it be official or private? And will Abe repeat former Prime Minister Murayama’s wording in 1995 that Imperial Japan, “through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.”
Further, it is even possible that Abe, having determined that he satisfied the Americans and Australians with his past parliamentary remarks, will decide to again visit the Yasukuni Shrine to honor his maternal grandfather and others from the Tojo war cabinet. The visit of Mrs. Abe to Yasukuni soon after her return from Washington this spring could be seen as a testing of the waters. Washington’s muted response over “just another Japanese housewife’s” visit to the controversial war shrine could be taken as a green light (many American political leaders demonstrate the same tone deafness to Yasukuni’s historic symbolism as they displayed until recently with regard to the Confederate flag.) Finally, there will be Xi Jinping’s VJ Day parade in Beijing in September, which South Korean President Park may well attend. This event will likely be more about chauvinistically displaying Beijing’s military muscle than about commemorating the end of the Second World War.
South Korea and its president, involved in a series of diplomatic pirouettes, are caught smack dab in the middle between what is perceived as a disengaging American ally and a rising China. Certainly on the economic side, Seoul knows full well where its bread is buttered. The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported on March 24th that Seoul agonized over the “diplomatic circumstances” involved in its decision to become a founding member of Beijing’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) against Washington’s wishes. The fact is that money talks and that at present 25 percent of South Korean exports go to China and only 12 percent go to the United States. Seoul’s Joongang Ilbo newspaper said that South Korea’s decision to follow along with other European allies of the U.S. and Pacific ally Australia in signing up for AIIB was “a no-brainer.” Interestingly, Tokyo stuck with its American ally in isolation from the 57 AIIB founding members although it did not rule out the possibility of eventually signing up.
An even bigger squeeze for South Korea as it is caught between Washington and Beijing involves the issue of Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD). THAAD is a U.S. Army anti-ballistic missile system that the U.S. wants to deploy on the southern half of the Korean peninsula to meet the North Korean missile threat. In June 2014, General Curtis Scaparrotti, the commander of United States Forces Korea, was quoted as stating at a forum hosted by the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses that, “there was consideration being taken in order to consider THAAD (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense) being deployed here in Korea. It is a U.S. initiative, and in fact, I recommended it as the commander.”
In remarks this past May to U.S. military service personnel in South Korea, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “nobody quite knows what America’s first line of defense in Seoul will do…This is why we need to deploy ships, forces … and we are talking about THAAD.” Kerry’s mention of THAAD, in turn, led to a highly unusual – for an allied country – partial rebuttal by South Korean’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to South Korea’s KBS News, “The ministry said there have been no discussions between the two governments regarding THAAD, including at Kerry’s meeting with Minister of Foreign Affairs Yun Byung-se.“ The ministry spokesman added that “South Korea has been reviewing whether a U.S. advanced missile-defense system will help boost its defense capabilities against North Korea” — the word “reviewing” in Asia at times is a euphemism for “stalling.”
Beijing had earlier rather heavy-handedly weighed in on a US-South Korean bilateral treaty alliance relationship issue by sending its Defense Minister to Seoul. The Diplomat magazine reported that “on February 4, Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan delivered China’s first official response to ongoing speculation about the prospective deployment of the U.S.-developed THAAD to South Korea, during the bilateral ‘cooperative’ defense ministers meeting. General Han Min-koo, his South Korean counterpart, attempted to allay Chinese concerns by reiterating that there has been no agreement between South Korea and the U.S. on this issue. Nevertheless, Beijing is exerting heavy pressure on Seoul to speak out against any such deployment, claiming that it would endanger their bilateral relationship and threaten regional peace and stability.”
Beijing’s reported warning was that while the United States might claim that a THAAD deployment in South Korea was directed against the North Korean missile threat its hidden agenda is to further contain China. On June 3rd Beijing seemed to be gaining ground in this tug-of-war. China’s Xinhua news agency carried a report that “South Korea will develop its own missile defense system to intercept missiles at a higher altitude instead of adopting the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), a military source confirmed local media reports on Tuesday.” The New York Times reported the same day that South Korea test-fired a missile “that can reach anywhere in North Korea” in a show-of-force demonstration personally witnessed by President Park. Such an indigenous system of missile defense (Korea Air and Missile Defense or KAMD) may serve, from Seoul’s point of view, to both meet its security needs while allaying Chinese concerns about the deployment of a U.S. Army anti-ballistic missile system.
Given the decision on AIIB and the latest reports on THAAD, the score seems to be China 2, United States 0 in Seoul. Yet American policymakers seem caught in a Korean War era time warp where the shared spilling of blood by allies in the crucible of war is seen as an eternal guarantor of fidelity. In this regard, they have forgotten the dictum of British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston that “we have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies” but only permanent interests.
South Korea has been increasingly hedging its bets even as a nationalistic Abe pushes Seoul further into Xi Jinping’s waiting arms. Seoul, despite championing human rights for the comfort women and North Korean refugees, has refused to allow the Dalai Lama to visit the main Buddhist temple in South Korea out of concern for offending Beijing. Seoul immigration authorities have also consistently denied the asylum claims of Falun Gong practitioners from China who have a justifiable fear of persecution if repatriated to the Chinese mainland – as was reportedly done to some during the administration of former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. (They then faced ill treatment and incarceration in labor camps upon their return.) 56 Falun Gong practitioners from China currently in South Korea have so far been denied protection under international refugee statutes.
The long shadow of Beijing is thus increasingly casting a pall over the U.S.-South Korean alliance. If a slow erosion of mutual trust is unchecked, Washington’s newest parlor game, in a decade’s time, could well become: “Who lost South Korea?” After all, in China’s golden age of the Ming and early Qing dynasties, Korea was a compliant client state that annually sent tributary missions to the Son of Heaven in Beijing. Will history repeat itself?
Dennis P. Halpin, a former Asian affairs advisor to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS (Johns Hopkins) and a consultant with the Poblete Analysis Group.
