Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

SEOUL — North Korea’s promise to give up or at least suspend its nuclear program clearly forces the end of the seemingly tough policies enunciated by South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak after he took office four years ago.

No way can Lee appear as the strong leader who reversed a decade of the “Sunshine” policy of reconciliation first enunciated by Kim Dae-Jung, the president who flew to Pyongyang to meet Kim Jong-Il for the first North-South Korean summit in June 2000, and won the Nobel Peace Prize six months later.

On Thursday, Washington and Pyongyang announced that North Korea had agreed to suspend nuclear weapons tests, uranium enrichment and long-range missile launches and submit to international monitoring, all in return for U.S. food aid.

With the South Korean opposition gaining strength while Lee’s popularity sags perilously low, the immediate priority for Lee and his “ruling” party was simply to save face after the U.S. and North Korea simultaneously presented their deal to the outside world. In that spirit, the foreign ministry said North Korea had “agreed to implement the pre-steps” called for by South Korea “in an effort to create an environment conducive toward resumption of six-party talks,” last held in Beijing in December 2008.

That choice of words made plain the view that North Korea’s suspension of tests of nukes and missiles was less than a “breakthrough” — the word of choice in the global media — considering that the North could resume them any time. From a practical view, the provision under which the International Atomic Energy Agency can send inspectors back to the Yongbyon nuclear complex may be more significant since they’ll then know what North Korea is really doing on its nuclear program and how far it’s gone toward producing a warhead ready for use.

The agreement to halt firing of long-range missiles is meaningless, since South Korea is within easy range of short and mid-range missiles, which North Korea produces for export. North Korea has test-fired only two long-range Taepodong missiles, first in August 1998 and again in April 2009 shortly before exploding its second underground nuclear device in May 2009.

The next question is likely to be whether the U.S. will go for removal of sanctions imposed after those missile and nuclear tests. South Korea’s government is not expected to favor their removal and will be hard pressed to decide whether to resume food aid, shipped in massive quantities to North Korea before Lee Myung-Bak took office in February 2008.

Worries about the declining popularity of Lee’s government means he’s got to forget about the approach that helped to make him popular at the time of his landslide victory over a liberal foe in December 2007. The ruling party, which holds a majority of seats in the National Assembly, has even changed its name from Hanara, Grand National, to Saenuri, New Frontier.

Certainly the announcement from the White House and the State Department seemed to bear out the view that South Korea was basically left out of the deal. The agreement calls for the U.S. to send 240,000 tons of food in the form of “nutritional” stuff for kids and expectant mothers, not rice and grain for military food rations.

The U.S. doesn’t like the deal referred to as food-for-nukes, preferring everyone to believe the fantasy that handouts are “humanitarian,” nothing to do with the nuclear issue. In return, however, the North is to shut down its nuclear facilities and forswears any intention of testing nuclear devices — or long-range missiles that in theory could carry them to targets as distant as the U.S. west coast.

The South Korean government, briefed on the deal last weekend by the U.S. envoy on Korea, Glyn Davies, after he had spent two days in talks in Beijing with North Korea’s long-time envoy, Kim Kye-Gwan, stressed the need for North Korea to “resolve the nuclear issue in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner”.

The use of that phrase suggested that President Lee would like to stick to his guns amid mounting criticism for his inability after four years in office to get North Korea to back down at all.

Far from getting North Korea to tone down, Lee has had to wait and watch in frustration as North Korean rhetoric has escalated to fever pitch. The North has refused to talk to South Korea — and, in 2010, staged two bloody incidents in the Yellow Sea. The North continues to deny torpedoing a South Korean navy corvette, killing 46 sailors, and claims that its shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, killing two marines and two civilians, was retaliation for the South’s marines firing first.

Lee ordered much improved defenses and promised to strike back if the North attacked again, but his failure to get anywhere vis-a-vis the North puts his policies to a severe test in National Assembly elections in April and then in the next election for president in December.

Differences between conservatives and liberals and leftists are clear from the remarks of two of South Korea’s most powerful women as they confront one another in bitter disagreement over North Korea’s nuclear program.

One of them Park Geun-Hye, leader of the conservative party, declared bluntly, “North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons will not be tolerated” while stressing “unequivocally that military provocation cannot be tolerated under any circumstances”.

Park’s arch-foe, Han Myong-Sook, leader of the opposition Democratic United Party, at the same conference blamed the “hardline stance” of President Lee for having “reduced the role of the Korean government to that of a bystander in the resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue.”

Under Korea’s “democracy constitution,” adopted at the height of massive demonstrations against military rule in June 1987, Lee cannot run for a second term. Park, daughter of the long-ruling South Korean dictator Park Chung-Hee, who was assassinated by his intelligence chief in October 1979, is expected to be the ruling party’s candidate for president.

Park Geun-Hye, who turned 60 this month, visited North Korea nine years ago and met the North’s leader Kim Jong-Il. Since Kim’s death in December, however, she’s been the target of criticism for having displayed what the ruling party paper Rodong Sinmun called “the dictatorial spirit” of her father.

As the U.S. and North Korea announced the deal for getting the North to give up its nukes, she and Han Myeong-Sook offered their opposing views at a conference on nuclear security issues.

Park said North Korea was “insisting that possession of a nuclear arsenal was the greatest achievement” of Kim Jong-Il and that “it would be very difficult to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.”

Park acknowledged that much depended on the outlook of the new North Korean “supreme leader,” Kim Jong-Un, third son and heir of Kim Jong-Il.

“The new leadership in North Korea is standing at a critical crossroads,” she said. “They have to make a decision whether they will pursue a policy of coexistence and cooperation with the international community including South Korea.”

As far as Han Myong-Seok is concerned, though, Lee bears the blame for a policy that “has failed miserably”. She called for a return to the engagement policies initiated by Kim Dae-Jung, who was president from 1998 to 2003, and Kim’s successor, Roh Moo-Hyun, the president from 2003 to 2008.

Both Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-Hyun died in 2009 — Roh in a suicide leap during an investigation of corruption, Kim of natural causes in a hospital here surrounded by his family. The former remain a revered figure while Roh, who met Kim Jong-Il at the only other North-South summit in October 2007, is regaining retrospective respect.

Han, who is 68, won a reputation as liberal if not a leftist while serving as prime minister under Roh and then lost narrowly for mayor of Seoul in 2008.

At the nuclear conference, Han shocked some observers by appearing to blame the South as well as the North for the shelling by North Korean gunners of Yeonpyeong Island while neglecting to mention the sinking of the Cheonan.

“During the past four years of the Lee government, shells have showered the two Koreas as they bombarded one another,” she said. That’s a view that conflicts with South Korean claims that North Korea fired during military exercises in which South Korean forces carefully fired in the opposite direction from the North.

Han promised that her Democratic United Party, if it takes power, “will start improving relations between the two Koreas with the aim of resolving the North Korean nuclear issue”.

Park instead proposes a “Korean Peninsula Trust-Building Process.” The idea is to encourage North Korea to build trust with South Korea and other neighboring countries as a responsible member of the international community — a stance that clearly holds North Korea responsible for the decades-long nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula.

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