Poor Roh Moo-Hyun. The South Korean president’s popularity rating has dipped as low as 10% recently. His backers on the left have savaged him for pushing a free-trade agreement with the United States. With only a few months remaining in his term and the presidential elections coming up in December, he faces a likely victory by the conservatives.
And now he finds himself caught between Kim Jong Il and the Taliban.
The news that Roh will go north to Pyongyang for a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il at the end of this month has generated faint praise. At home, the South Korean media has chided the president for trying to boost his party’s chances in the December elections. “Summit of folly,” the centrist newspaper Joongang Ilbo has declared. A columnist in the more conservative Chosun Ilbo has called the upcoming meeting a “political deception.”
In the United States, news of the summit failed to make the headlines. The Bush administration has quietly voiced its concerns that Roh will give away the shop to the North Koreans. The multi-party talks to resolve the ongoing nuclear standoff are proceeding step by step. North Korea shut down its nuclear reactor in July and has received some heavy fuel oil in return. But Pyongyang has yet to give a full inventory of its nuclear program as the next step toward complete nuclear disarmament and Washington doesn’t want anything to preempt this process.
Roh promises to press Kim Jong Il on the nuclear issue. There may also be a compromise on the long-disputed maritime boundary. But most likely the focus will be on the economy. North Korea has a big wish list, and Roh Moo Hyun, as Santa Claus of the South, has a big bag of potential goodies: 2 million kilowatts of electricity, the renovation of a key highway going from the DMZ to Pyongyang, the construction of a 330,000-ton fertilizer plant, expansion of the Kaesong industrial zone, and so on. Some analysts in South Korea have put the value of this bag of goodies at $9 billion.
Leading up to the summit, North and South Korea have already been strengthening economic ties. South Korea has pledged to improve the North’s mining operations and light industry. In June, the first high-voltage power line began to connect the two halves of the Korean peninsula. In May, two trains made a test run across the reconnected train line between North and South.
But any major expansion of economic cooperation will require the support of Roh’s successor. Contrary to some U.S. analysis, the conservative party in South Korea has largely backed the same approach to North Korea as Roh’s party, so this might not be as difficult as it sounds. More challenging perhaps will be getting U.S. support for the international loans that any mini-Marshall Plan for North Korea will require.
Ordinarily, the upcoming summit would be the singular focus of the Korean government and the Korean media. But that distinction belongs to the hostage situation in Afghanistan. Last month, the Taliban kidnapped 23 South Korean church workers on a misguided mission to the country. The militants have demanded the release of their own prisoners. The Afghan government, with strong U.S. support, has refused to deal. So far the Taliban has killed two of the hostages. This Monday, as a good-will gesture, the Taliban released two. But 19 South Koreans remain in limbo.
For refusing to barter with terrorists, the United States has come under a lot of fire in South Korea. “Totally ignoring the Taliban will not help settle the matter,” editorialized the Korea Times. “The U.S. tacitly approved the swapping of an Italian female journalist for five Iraqi prisoners. The U.S. started the war in Afghanistan and induced South Korea to join it. So it needs to feel a strong sense of responsibility for this recent case. Saving innocent people is more important than ideologies or principles regarding war.”
If Roh can pull off a successful summit with North Korea and extricate the remaining hostages from Afghanistan, he will rescue his presidency. Ultimately, though, he remains dependent on Washington — to support any economic deal with the North and to show some flexibility toward the Taliban. After several years of demonizing Kim Jong Il, the Bush administration reversed its policy and has begun to negotiate in earnest.
The question is, after several years of strained relations between Seoul and Washington, will the Bush administration do a similar about-face and throw a lifeline to Roh Moo-Hyun?
Taking on the Military Budget
In the last World Beat, I wrote about the failure of Congress to stand up to the Bush administration’s enormous defense budget request. This week, FPIF columnist Frida Berrigan looks at the positions of the leading candidates for president. They, too, come up lacking.
“Of the leading Democratic candidates, only John Edwards has identified specific weapons systems he would red-line. In a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations on May 23, 2007, Edwards vowed to root out ‘cronyism and waste’ while ‘increasing efficiency in the Pentagon’ and investing ‘substantial additional resources into maintenance of our [military] equipment,'” Berrigan writes in The Candidates on the Pentagon. “Obama has not talked about cutting the military budget. In fact, when asked recently in Cedar Rapids if he would cut the military budget, he responded: ‘Actually, you’ll probably see an initial bump in military spending in an Obama administration.'”
As for Hillary Clinton, she “is proud to be the first New York senator to serve on the Armed Services Committee and tends to over-compensate for her gender and her husband’s reputation (deserved or not) as anti-military by being uncritically pro-military. She has also gotten behind the idea of increasing the size of U.S. forces.”
The Republicans, too, are happy with spending more and more on the military. Only mavericks Ron Paul — and Dennis Kucinich on the Democratic side — are courageously putting their heads above the parapet and calling for budget cuts.
Bridges not Bombers
There was perhaps no more dramatic illustration of misplaced budget priorities than the recent bridge disaster in Minneapolis that left at least nine dead and hundreds injured. Public infrastructure in the United States — roads, bridges, subways, levees — are all in shocking condition, considering that we are the richest country in the world. In his famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin argued that people will selfishly exploit common resources for personal gain. In the last few decades, we’ve seen a different tragedy unfold: federal and state governments have cut funding for public infrastructure as if to send the message that the commons are not worth preserving in the first place.
Meanwhile, the bill for the Iraq War, according to a study by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, will end up totaling $2 trillion. That translates into a lot of unfixed potholes and poorly maintained subways. In Build Bridges, Not Bombers, FPIF contributor Rubrick Biegon expands on this point.
“Contrast the $2 trillion for war with the $180 billion over 20 years that the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates is needed to ‘eliminate all bridge deficiencies’ in the United States, and it becomes apparent the degree to which our country’s priorities have grown seriously out of whack,” Biegon writes.
Middle East Deal
Last week, we did a mini-focus on the proposed U.S. arms deal to the Middle East. In Gasoline for the Fire, Matt Duss compares the U.S. government to a gambling addict who has to keep betting more to cover his previous losses. In The Saudi Arms Deal, Rachel Stohl explains that congressional opposition to the plan is growing.
Finally FPIF military affairs analyst Dan Smith, in Why Saudi Arabia, Why Now, gives the back story on why the administration thinks this deal makes sense even when so many others recognize it doesn’t.
“Washington has been insisting that there is no military solution to the region’s trauma,” Smith writes. “Yet it is proposing not only $20 billion in weapons to the Saudis but another $13 billion to Egypt and $30 billion to Israel — a total of $63 billion for weapons in a part of the world already awash in modern arms. And this total apparently doesn’t include $40 million in guns, bullets, rockets, missiles, small arms ammunition, night vision goggles, and spare parts for the Lebanese army this year and another $280 million for 2008. Nor does it include the $3 billion Iraq is spending on weapons and ammunition — all of which are contributing to the current mayhem in these two countries.”