The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  This concern about the balance of the US-ROK relationship became a cause for increasing tension within the South Korean government. A year after Roh took office, in early 2004, the Foreign Ministry was again the focus of Blue House attention when an intraministry feud broke out between two sections—the Treaties Division, which advocated that the United States should pay for whatever changes it wanted in the disposition of American troops in South Korea (the so-called pro-independence school) and the North America Division, which considered maintaining the US-ROK alliance as paramount and was less willing to make an issue of the expenses (hence its label as the pro-alliance school). In January 2004, chafing at the policies of the Blue House, which was leaning toward the “independence school,” some Foreign Ministry officials criticized President Roh during an internal staff meeting. Word reached the Blue House, and there quickly followed what some considered a purge. The term Taliban was used to describe the inquisitors, and in the uproar Foreign Minister Yoon Young-kwan was forced to retire, after less than a year in office. It was the sort of episode that reinforced Washington’s concerns that the alliance had entered stormy waters and that Roh Moo-hyun was an unreliable partner.

  PROBLEMS FOR DIPLOMACY

  In January 2003, as members of the incoming Roh administration had been preparing to move into their new offices, North Korean technicians were bringing the decadelong frozen nuclear facilities at Yongbyon back on line. During the 1994–2002 Agreed Framework freeze, portions of the nuclear center—notably the fuel-fabrication facility and the still-unfinished 50-megawatt reactor—had collapsed into unsalvageable disrepair. But the North had performed limited maintenance on the smaller 5-megawatt reactor and the reprocessing plant. Firing these up again, even in the middle of the cold of Korea’s winter, did not take long.

  While the technicians at Yongbyon set the dials on their 1950s-technology control panels, diplomats in Washington and the capitals of Northeast Asia scrambled to catch up. With considerable arm-twisting, Beijing got the North Koreans to agree to enter talks—first among three parties (US, China, DPRK) and soon after that with six (US, China, ROK, DPRK, Japan, Russia). Negotiations in these various configurations ground on for the next five years, producing countless official briefing papers and endless newspaper-column inches but few results. Public expectations for the talks exceeded anything they could possibly produce. As negotiations stalled again and again, bogged down by stubbornness in Pyongyang matched by that in Washington, for the first time since the end of the Korean War American influence on the peninsula waned relative to that of China, whose diplomatic rise was boosted by the remarkable performance of its economy.

  Despite agreement among the various capitals that diplomacy was the preferred option for dealing with the nuclear issue, significant differences persisted over ends and means. One senior Chinese diplomat noted that although all the parties agreed on the end point, no one could agree how to get there. To some extent, the problem was compounded because rather than building on an existing foundation, diplomatic efforts had to start from zero. The Americans did not want to be seen as signing on to anything that even looked like the Agreed Framework, with the result that terminology had to be reinvented and practical solutions discarded or bent into unworkable shapes.

  Most damaging, the US ability to deal with Pyongyang was constricted by President Bush’s personal, oft-stated loathing for Kim Jong Il. When it came to North Korea, frustration and distaste were nothing new in Washington. What was unusual was the public airing of these feelings at the highest levels. The personal animus toward the North ended up interfering with consideration of policies that, in the long run, might have produced better results. Over and over, Tokyo, Seoul, and especially Beijing advised Washington at least to tone down its rhetoric to create a more productive atmosphere for diplomacy, but to no avail. Each time the president or a high-level US official made a negative comment about Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang responded with a furious rhetorical broadside of its own. There was no way diplomacy could establish a foothold, however much Washington insisted that was its chosen path.

  At the same time, in misreading the history of the previous eight years of engagement with Pyongyang, the administration failed to take seriously that what the North wanted above all else was improved relations with the United States. This was probably Washington’s most effective leverage with the North, but it was never utilized because, notwithstanding the rhetoric, from 2001 to 2005 the administration was not effectively committed to a diplomatic process. Instead, barely hiding its aversion to the chore of dealing with Pyongyang, Washington seemed mesmerized by a preference—sometimes explicitly expressed but always clearly implied—for regime change.

  That option never reached the point of established or approved American policy, but Pyongyang could read between the lines.* No matter how often Washington stated for the record that it had no intention of invading, from Pyongyang’s vantage point the overall message was clear—Washington wanted North Korea to disappear. In his memoirs, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld notes that in 2006 he advocated a course that he hoped might encourage a military coup in the North. Other officials kept hoping for something along those lines that might solve the problem without their having to act. In late 2002, according to some accounts, Washington picked up indications of serious opposition to Kim Jong Il within North Korea, suggesting the likelihood of his overthrow had increased. In an atmosphere where such a development was the administration’s fervent wish, there was a temptation to believe what in the end turned out to be bad information.

  A widely held belief, from the president on down, was that by conducting bilateral talks with the North from 1993 to 2000, the United States had allowed Pyongyang to pit Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing against Washington. According to the common wisdom, the North had “immediately” breached with impunity the Agreed Framework that had resulted from the bilateral approach. A less ideologically tainted examination might have yielded different conclusions. In his memoirs, Vice President Cheney emphasized that “effective diplomacy requires our diplomats study and learn from our history.” His point was right on the mark; it was his history that was off target.

  There is no question that during Kim Young Sam’s administration, the bilateral approach had caused strains in US-ROK relations. Overall, though, the years of the Agreed Framework witnessed a high-water mark in coordination among Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington on the North Korea issue, especially through the TCOG mechanism developed in 1999 as part of the Perry process. Similarly, through KEDO the three capitals overcame obstacles and presented a common front toward North Korea. Perhaps most important, under the Agreed Framework the North’s plutonium production program at Yongbyon was completely frozen and subjected to constant IAEA monitoring for eight years, from 1994 to 2002.

  These were not lessons the White House wanted to study. Rather than admit that the bilateral approach had yielded results, the administration defined it as a failure and declared it out of bounds. In a few instances, this led to absurd orders that United States negotiators could not even be alone in the same room with North Koreans, especially not if the room had sofas where people might sit and talk. Unconcerned with furniture arrangements, all this time the North’s nuclear technicians at Yongbyon were operating without constraints, making more plutonium.

  SUNSHINE, BARELY

  It would be hard to imagine less propitious circumstances for a new South Korean president entering office than those that confronted Roh Moo-hyun in February 2003. Things were bad on every front. Relations between Seoul and Washington were in decline, the North Koreans were restarting their nuclear program, and a major US military campaign halfway around the world was only days away. Stepping into this unhappy scene, the fifty-six-year-old human rights lawyer-turned-politician Roh was completely unprepared either by previous experience or by personal temperament.

  Born in August 1946 in Kimhae, South Kyongsong Province, Roh was the first ROK president to grow up after the end of Japanese col
onial rule and the first to suffer the trauma of the Korean War as a child. Too poor to attend university, he did not take part in the student protests and street battles against the Park Chung Hee regime in the 1970s. Rather, with great determination, Roh spent several years teaching himself the law and in 1981 became a pro-democracy activist and human rights lawyer, a commitment that during the Chun Doo Hwan years took considerable courage and sacrifice. Eventually turning to politics in the late 1980s, Roh ran for the National Assembly several times, losing more elections than he won. In 2000 he served briefly as minister of maritime affairs and fisheries under Kim Dae Jung.

  Without the torrent of anti-American outrage that swept South Korea in the weeks before the country’s 2002 presidential elections, Roh might not have ended up in the Blue House. In late November, two US Army enlisted men were acquitted by a US court-martial in the deaths earlier that year of two teenage Korean schoolgirls, crushed by an armored vehicle on maneuvers. Gruesome photographs of the girls’ bodies on the roadside inflamed emotions, and clumsy handling of the incident by the US military in South Korea compounded the problem. Even the conservative party presidential candidate, Lee Hoi-chang, who would normally have been expected to show support for the United States during such a difficult period, backed calls for changes to the US-ROK Status of Forces Agreement to give South Korea more jurisdiction over such incidents. Lee’s position infuriated the US Embassy in Seoul, which noted that although Roh Moo-hyun’s campaign might be helping to fan the flames of the anti-American movement, at least Roh—unlike Lee—was not personally and visibly taking part in the demonstrations.

  Although they did not stem from deep-rooted anti-Americanism, the protests reflected a historical ambivalence toward the United States lying just beneath the surface in South Korea, a mix of emotions in the smaller country toward the larger patron and protector. Opinion polls cannot quite capture this pool of combustible nationalism, frustration, and resentment that from time to time ignites almost without warning, but has always burned out just as quickly. The situation in 2002 may have been especially volatile because of the coming of age of the so-called 386 generation—a phrase coined in the 1990s to describe thirty-year-olds, born in the 1960s, many of whom had gone to school in the turbulent years of the 1980s when the United States was seen as supporting the dictatorship of Chon Doo Hwan. Even before the death of the schoolgirls, Ambassador Thomas Hubbard experienced what he sensed was a dangerous upsurge in nationalist, anti-US sentiment during the World Cup soccer tournament held in Seoul in June 2002.

  To some extent, Roh himself reflected this deep-seated ambivalence. He accepted the importance of the US-ROK alliance—at least as he understood it—yet he also believed strongly that Washington did not fully comprehend Korea’s interests and could not be expected always to take them into consideration. Roh was brilliant, moral, folksy, and probably ill-suited to high office at any time, especially at a moment when South Korea faced such serious challenges. With neither extensive military nor long political experience, he lacked the seasoning of his predecessors in the Blue House, but also their pretensions. His was not the typical Korean imperial presidency, even if he sometimes succumbed to the temptation to use the considerable power of his office against those he considered not the “real” voices of the public. He engaged in a running battle against the country’s hostile press, and at one point even brought a lawsuit against South Korea’s major newspapers for printing what he said were false accusations against him.

  Roh had no familiarity with foreign policy—indeed, he had never been to the United States before becoming president—and he was burdened with terrible political instincts that left him poorly equipped to deal with many domestic issues. None of that was helped by the fact that he was the target of a South Korean press that relentlessly painted him as a radical anti-American working to undermine US-ROK security relations. Roh’s approach to North Korea was seen by many American officials and South Korean conservatives as Sunshine II, a continuation of Kim Dae Jung’s policies toward Pyongyang. Yet as one close observer put it, Roh “did not give a damn” about North Korea, and he certainly did not have Kim Dae Jung’s ideological outlook.

  According to Moon Jae-in, Roh’s closest adviser and an unsuccessful candidate in the 2012 ROK presidential race, Roh’s main focus when he entered office was to rid South Korea of the remnants of its authoritarian past and to firmly establish democratic habits in the government and the economy. What he cared about was changing South Korea’s political culture, with its embedded traditional approach to nearly unfettered authority. In the end, Roh was a tragic figure, a leader deeply offended by the injustices committed during the years of dictatorship, yet one who—in his efforts to right the wrongs and correct the historical record—ended up adding fuel to the political passions that had kept his country’s politics bitterly divided for decades. That legacy, and the lingering conviction among many both inside and outside Korea that Roh’s leadership was simply “weird,” largely obscured the role he played in encouraging institutions that would help the still young democracy in South Korea deepen its roots and develop a civil society. His suicide in 2009, after he appeared tainted by the very sort of corruption that he had pledged to banish from Korean politics, shocked the nation and only reinforced the impression of the tragedy of his era.

  Despite the adjectives tossed around in South Korean media, Roh was not a radical in any sense of the word. Above all, to those who observed him closely, Roh was a lawyer, with a lawyerly approach to problems. Too often, this technical approach left him seeming unmoored from the hard realities of South Korean politics. While conservatives attacked him from the right, his former allies complained from the left. In August 2005, at the midpoint in his term, the Hangyore Sinmun, a voice for liberal-leaning politics, sighed that Roh had been “trapped in the fortress called power and has lost his feeling for the real world.”*

  Where Kim Dae Jung, a politician of long experience, knew how to maneuver and cajole, Roh’s approach was to go at issues head-on. Roh told his advisers that he had a good relationship with President Bush, and even those American officials who observed the two leaders together agree that the personal chemistry was better than outsiders might imagine. The two were “straight shooters,” and in their own minds that was a major plus. On their first meeting in Washington, in May 2003, President Bush took Roh—who was a Lincoln fan—to see the Lincoln bedroom in the White House. The gesture got relations off to a good start. At another meeting, when he was working from briefing notes apparently prepared by aides who were skeptical of the United States, Roh would raise a point and Bush would answer it to the ROK president’s satisfaction. Finally, after several such volleys, Roh put the notes aside, saying, “Well, these are worthless.” Not every meeting went so well. On a few occasions, in public and in private, Roh pressed Bush to the limit. At a meeting in 2005, Roh would not let up in challenging Bush. After the South Korean leader had left the room, the president turned to his aides and said, “He’s pissing me off.” ROK officials who heard the remark hurried over to calm things down, and the atmosphere at the lunch that followed was fine.

  Whatever their differences and occasional scrapes, Bush seemed to understand that Roh “delivered” on issues important to the United States, sometimes breaking with his own supporters to do so. In 2004, despite considerable popular resistance, Roh sent three thousand ROK troops to join the US-led coalition in Iraq.* He even went ahead after a South Korean hostage was beheaded in Iraq by a group demanding that Seoul cancel the deployment decision. Roh also went against his party in pushing for the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, which was finally passed by the legislatures of both countries in 2011. Bush was in the minority in his views of Roh. Many in the upper ranks of the administration were utterly dismissive of the South Korean leader and his policies, reinforcing the general perception in both Seoul and Washington that the two governments were increasingly at odds.

  As different as he was in most respects f
rom his predecessors, Roh shared with them the stubborn conviction that Korean interests could not be advanced by always bowing to the priorities of a larger power. In 2004 and 2005, this conviction led him and his government into troubling internal debates over what, from Washington’s perspective, was a false and destructive dichotomy—the value of the ROK-US alliance versus the imperative of national sovereignty. In this case, “sovereignty” was seen as the need to weigh the alliance against the impulse for progress with North Korea—a balancing act that made absolutely no sense to Washington, which believed without question that the alliance was essential to the security of the South as well as the bedrock for its economic and political progress over the years. As a result, there came a point in the minds of US defense planners, not unlike that often reached during difficult periods in earlier decades, when they felt they had to look past the storms swirling around an incumbent ROK administration and craft policies that would eventually bring the alliance intact to a more stable future. Even those in Seoul who were largely sympathetic to US views, however, considered the tactical approach Washington took in pursuit of this goal to be flawed, seeming to ignore Koreans’ sense of vulnerability and exciting concerns about the country’s defense when, in their minds, the United States should have been calming them.