U.S. policy ‘breakthroughs’ in Asia hit a series of reality walls

Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

WASHINGTON — Call it a matter of conflicting — or colliding — messages. South Korean conservatives have forced a free-trade agreement with the United States through a fractious National Assembly. A U.S. Congress “supercommittee” has demonstrated the weakness of the American system of governance by abject, humiliating failure to come up with a deal on taxes and the multi-trillion-dollar American debt and budget deficits. And North Korea says it’s got another reactor under construction and other countries had better pay attention.

The divisions in the U.S. and on the Korean Peninsula raise the basic question of the security of Northeast Asia at a time when President Barack Obama was just in Australia talking up the American “pivot” toward Asia. Wasn’t the idea that the U.S. would get away from perpetual war in the Middle East, getting out of Iraq and scaling down in Afghanistan, while focusing on the threat posed by China in Asia?

President Barack Obama, wearing traditional Indonesian attire, attends the East Asia Summit gala dinner in Nusa Dua, Bali on Nov. 18. /PressTV

The U.S. and South Korea may be looking ahead to a bonanza of dividends from the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORU.S. FTA), but they won’t be worth much if the U.S. has to go with a much reduced defense budget as a result of the wrangling in congress. Much as Obama may want to stand fast against Chinese claims to the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea, the U.S. has probably never been in a worse position to back up its vision of power in Asia with a convincing display of force.

In addition, South Korea’s pro-American leadership faces rising protest from liberal and leftist foes who will go on using the FTA as an issue in National Assembly elections in April and the campaigning for election of a new president eight months later. The dream of Korean liberals is to return to the “Sunshine” policy of reconciliation with North Korea as engineered by their hero, Kim Dae-Jung, during his presidency from 1998 to 2003.

Members of the opposition signaled their strategy in a wild National Assembly session in which South Korea’s ruling Grand National Party called a hurried vote before foes of the deal had time to block the doors to the chamber as they’ve done many times over the years. The best they could do was to have one assembly member toss a tear gas grenade — enough to guarantee a few moments of global TV coverage but not enough to keep the conservative majority from quickly voting to approve the K.O.R.U.S. FTA.

That’s hardly the end of the debate, however. The leader of the opposition Democratic Party, Sohn Hak-Kyu, blasted the hasty vote as “a coup” while saying the goal now is to bring about “nullification” of the FTA. Predictably, farmers, as they have been doing for years, shouted their opposition to a deal that they believe will bring about an influx of U.S. farm products — though rice, the most sacrosanct farm product of all, was scrupulously omitted from the agreement.

On that discordant note, one can expect the protests to go on — though not on the same levels as the turnouts against import of American beef in the summer and autumn of 2008.

The real common denominator of the U.S. beef protests that year and this FTA spat are that they broke out soon after President Lee Myung-Bak had returned from lovey-dovey meetings with U.S. presidents — George W. Bush in 2008 and Obama just last month. Each time, no sooner had Lee been seen and heard billing and cooing with the American presidents than his foes got together to thoroughly embarrass him.

This time, though, the embarrassment will not spring so much from the FTA, which after all was negotiated during the presidency of the liberal Roh Moo-Hyun, as from the faltering American commitment to Korea. Strangely, that commitment was barely mentioned when the congressional “supercommittee” was haggling over Democratic demands for an end to the Bush tax cuts on big business and the Republicans were saying nothing doing.

More or less automatically, it now seems, the Pentagon will have to figure out ways to cut back drastically on U.S. military spending.

It all seems a little unreal, to be sure — almost as unreal as the persistence of North Korean escalation of the nuclear standoff at a time when the North is simultaneously demanding six-party talks on getting rid of its nuclear program. North Korea, it seems, is sending one message while the U.S. and South Korea, not to mention a rising chorus of human-rights advocates, are sending another, and each side is ignoring the other.

The message from North Korea is “Do not ignore us”, said L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Foundation in Washington. “They are claiming they are building their own reactor” — in addition to the aging five-kilowatt reactor that’s produced enough plutonium for a dozen warheads.

“The day is near,” North Korean rhetoricians are saying, when that reactor will go into operation, and the U.S. State Department has acknowledged “concerns” about construction of the reactor for producing highly enriched uranium.

The fact that North Korea should publicize its budding reactor shows the impossibility of rapprochement at a time when both North and South have been emitting signals of a willingness to talk things over.
While the North was bragging about the reactor, South Korean officials again are saying no way can the South give aid to the North, despite confirmation of the North’s desperation and the North’s eagerness to present a benevolent face to the world during celebrations next April of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Great Leader Kim Il-Sung.

Under the circumstances, no one is quite ruling out another surprise attack by North Korea one year after the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea that killed two South Korean marines and two civilians. South Korean forces marked the anniversary this week with military exercises, memorials — and disturbing speculation that new cemeteries visible inside North Korea from an observation tower on the island may actually be a cover-up for new North Korean artillery emplacements.

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