Jasper Becker, who among other things wrote a pretty fine book on Mongolia and recently got published a book on North Korea entitled, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea, contributed a MUST READ op-ed to the NYT on South Korea’s dance with the dictator up North. Initially, I was going to raise a couple of issues with it, namely with some of the examples he cited, but my complaints are minor ones that I’d rather save for the comments section. Anyway, read the piece on your own — it’s a good one. Here’s the intro:
THERE are hopes that President Bush’s meeting tomorrow with President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea, coming on the heels of the latest North Korean overture on restarting nuclear-weapons negotiations, may lead to a breakthrough. However, anyone who expects the South to help us put pressure on the North hasn’t been paying much attention to what has happened between the two countries over the last five years.
Since South Korea’s president at the time, Kim Dae Jung, met with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il in 2000 (and pocketed a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts), Seoul has gone to remarkable lengths to gain the North’s trust. Unsurprisingly, the only real changes under this Sunshine Policy have occurred in South Korea. And efforts by President Roh, who was elected in 2002, to engage Kim Jong Il have led him to plunge his own nation into North Korea’s world of lies.
5 Comments
For a guy who knows so much about China, you would think he would factor the China factor into the equasion. SK believes it has to work with NK because it believes NK isn’t going to collapse and decades of confrontation got nowhere. Sure, SK could stop helping NK but China won’t, or won’t anytime soon, and with China keeping NK going the choice left SK is the same low intensity military confrontation of the last 50 years or being friendly with NK. It ain’t that simple, for sure, but China’s attachmnet to DPRK would make any attempt by SK to make a big deal of NK something of little more than rhetorical value. Even if you don’t agree with that, you’d think a long term China resident (Becker) might have something to say about it.
Are you by any chance in the Houston area, jtb?
Don’t answer, JTB! Kim “Ray” Jong-il is going to try to bio-nuke your ass!
Bush can ass-kick Rho into shape. The “sunshine” policy will start a war in Korean peninsula. The “sun” stands for “nuclear bomb flash”.
I’m as big a fan of righteous indignation directed at Roh and the Sunshine Policy as anyone else, but Mr. Becker does himself no favors when he includes something like this in his argument,
“Nor is Seoul necessarily correct to assume that the collapse of the North would lead to an exodus of desperate people to the South. After ridding themselves of the criminal regime, wouldn’t those in the North be just as likely to stay in their homes than to flee south as paupers?” Uhhhh….probably not, dude. Most NK’s would be acting irrationally not to flee South to displace the foreign labor that fills Southern factories.