The Marmot’s Hole

Some links for your reading enjoyment:

• In the WaPo, Nick Eberstadt wonders whether the Bush foreign policy team will be adept enough to seize the opportunity presented by the defeat of the 북한퍼주기당 in South Korea’s presidential elections. I, on the other hand, wonder if there’s any real opportunity at all. Unlike Dr. Eberstadt, I’m not all that sure the South Korean electorate was all that unhappy with the way intra-Korean relations were going, especially after the US seemingly got on board. Sure, Lee will probably be more pragmatic with the North, and it will be interesting to see if the North Koreans respond in kind, but will this give Washington the green light to start leaning on Pyongyang over things like Syria? I don’t know. I do know this, however — Lee got elected to jump-start the economy, and a crisis in North Korea would not be good for business. And that would not be good for Lee.
• The Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klinger thinks Lee’s election is good for the United States, and Washington should embrace Lee’s efforts to repair the damage done to Korea-US ties during the Roh administration.
• Well, CSIS’s Frank Cossa is happy Lee got elected. He writes, “The landslide victory of conservative Grand National Party (GNP) presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak is good news for South Korea, for the United States, for the ROK-U.S. alliance, and, if responded to wisely and appropriately, for North Korea as well.” That should send shivers down anyone’s spine — when is the last time North Korea responded “wisely and appropriately” to anything? Nevertheless, I’m inclined so far to agree with Cossa when he warns, “Make no mistake about it, had the Bush administration followed this more hard-line path, had it not become more flexible in its own approach toward the North over the past year, it would have found itself almost as out of step with the new South Korean regime as it has been with the current one… I say this because there will no doubt be some in Washington who will see a conservative victory as an opportunity to once again revert to the more confrontational (and largely ineffective) policies of the past; this would be a huge mistake.”
• In the IHT, Victor Cha has a well-balanced piece on South Korea’s new pragmatism. He notes that while Korea-US ties under Roh were not quite as shitty as commonly believed, Lee — a conservative and a businessman (not to mention a Jesus guy) might have a personal rapport with President Bush that Roh clearly lacked. As for how this might effect relations with Pyongyang, he writes, “The North’s conspicuous silence thus far at the election of the conservative South Korean as president is perhaps a sign of interest rather than disapproval. After all, North Korea may not yet have made a strategic decision to denuclearize, but it has clearly made one strategic decision: To engage with South Korean business.”
• Howard French is operating under the impression that Roh will eventually be venerated for his role in foreign policy and reapproachment with North Korea. Oddly enough, I happened to agree that Roh will be remembered warmly for some things, although most of those things are domestic in nature (i.e., he was the first Korean president to behave like a president in a democratic republic, not an elected dictator). But his foreign policy was an almost unmitigated disaster — an amateurish, almost comedic farce that saw Seoul get very little respect for even the “good” things it did like sending troops to Iraq, signing the FTA or providing North Korea with copious amounts of aid. “Northeast Asia Balancer” or “Diplomatic War on Japan,” anyone? The Bush administration’s recent coddling of Pyongyang has almost nothing to do with Roh and much more to do with the fact that Bush was all talk from the very beginning, the North Koreans called their bluff, and with Iraq going to shit, the Bush team bent over and took it in return for “good news.” That being said, Howard French is a good freakin’ photographer, and I always liked the design of his blog, which appears to be down.