Global Courant 2023-04-29 14:19:18
President Yoon Suk Yeol went to Washington to reset South Korean diplomacy by moving closer to the United States and playing a bigger role on the international scene. If the warmth of his reception was the measure of success, he did well.
President Biden welcomed him as “my friend.” Mr. Yoon exclaimed “American Pie” as the crowd booed at the White House dinner. Thursday he addressed the U.S. Congress, thanked the Americans for their support during the Korean War and praised a deep relationship between the countries that propelled South Korea’s rise to a global technological and cultural powerhouse.
“Even if you don’t know my name, you might know BTS and Blackpink,” Mr. Yoon said to chuckles from US lawmakers. “BTS beat me to the White House. But I was ahead of them on Capitol Hill.”
But Mr. Yoon is now returning home to South Korea to a distinctly colder audience — an audience that has punished him with low ratings and, in some sectors, has deep doubts about a pivot to the United States that could alienate China and threaten the position of the country. long tradition of diplomatic caution.
Even before Mr. Yoon left for Washington, South Koreans began to grapple with questions that had seemed distant until recently. How can they feel safe under North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear threat? And how should they deal with the increasingly bitter rivalry between the United States, South Korea’s main military ally, and China, its largest trading partner?
The main answer Mr. Yoon takes home is the “Washington Declaration” a joint statement with Mr Biden. In it, Mr Biden pledged that Washington would embrace South Korea as a close negotiating partner in its nuclear strategy for the Korean peninsula — though US presidents will remain the sole authority on whether or not to use nuclear weapons.
To demonstrate his “extended deterrence” commitment to defending his ally with nuclear weapons if necessary, Mr Biden promised that US nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles would call at ports in South Korea for the first time in decades. In return, Mr. Yoon reaffirmed South Korea’s intention not to develop nuclear weapons of its own, dispelling doubts in Washington that it would consider a nuclear option, as he indicated early this year.
But like everything else Mr. Yoon has done since his election last year, the reviews in South Korea have been polarized.
“History will remember the Yoon government as the first South Korean government to recognize North Korea’s nuclear program as a current and urgent threat and began preparing responses to the crisis,” said Cheon Seong-whun, a former head of the Korea Institute for National. Unification in Seoul.
The Washington Declaration was “a great victory” for South Korea because “for the first time, the Allies are discussing nuclear deterrence, which Seoul has so far failed to discuss with Washington,” said Kim Duyeon, a Seoul researcher for the Center. for a New American Security.
“They play out scenarios where not only North Korea could use a nuclear weapon, but the US would also direct the deployment of a nuclear weapon,” Ms. Kim said. “This is huge because so far the table exercises would end before Washington decides to use a nuclear weapon. The US considered such information too secret to share and because nuclear use would be a US decision, operation and execution plan.”
However, Mr Yoon’s critics at home felt he was giving too much away for too little, seeing the statement and a separate joint statement by Mr Yoon and Mr Biden as a carefully crafted design to silence calls for South Korea’s own nuclear weapons to cord. strength or redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in the South.
Such calls have gained momentum in recent months as North Korea has fueled nuclear jitters in the south by testing a range of so-called nuclear-capable short-range ballistic missiles. The North has also warned that the first nuclear strikes are now part of their military strategy.
“The Washington Declaration may look substantive and fantastic, but in reality it is an empty shell.” said Professor Kim Dong-yub, at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “There is no change in Washington’s policy.”
Critics also doubted that calls to ports by US nuclear submarines would do much more than further escalate regional tensions with China and North Korea and provide another excuse for the North to expand its nuclear arsenal. On Saturday, North Korea called Mr. Yoon “a fool” and mr. Biden “an old man with no future” and said it felt compelled to take “more decisive action”.
“It’s not a ‘prolonged deterrence,’ but rather a ‘prolonged crisis,'” said Mr. Kim.
An editorial in the conservative daily Chosun Ilbo chimed with what it called the Biden administration’s efforts to “tighten nuclear shackles” on its ally.
“The statement seems to place more emphasis on US concerns that South Korea could develop its own nuclear weapons than on the North Korean nuclear threat eliciting such aspirations,” the statement said. “Ultimately, South Korea must be able to defend itself.”
For decades, South Korea’s defense strategy was based on the assumption that the United States would come to the rescue if war broke out. But the once well-founded premise loses its credibility. In a survey by the Seoul-based Chey Institute for Advanced Studies late last year, nearly 49 percent of respondents said they doubted Washington would fight for South Korea at the risk of a North Korean nuclear attack on the mainland United States. States. Nearly 77 percent said South Korea should develop its own nuclear arsenal.
For such skeptical South Koreans, Washington’s promise of comprehensive deterrence “just amounts to rhetoric, however you package it,” says Lee Byong-chul, a nuclear policy researcher at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at the Seoul Kyungnam University.
Many South Koreans remain wary of superpowers, as a result of their deep grievances over Japanese colonial rule and the division of the Korean Peninsula by the Soviet Union and the United States at the end of World War II.
South Korea has kept Japan at bay, even as Washington has urged its two main allies to work closely together to deter China and North Korea. It has also sought a diplomatic balance between Washington and Beijing. The more progressive leaders, such as Mr. Yoon’s predecessor, Moon Jae-in, doggedly continued dialogue with North Korea, even causing friction with Washington, which tended to emphasize sanctions.
However, Mr. Yoon has made it a point to shake the traditional equilibrium.
In March, he broke a deadlock in relations with Japan by promising that Seoul will no longer seek compensation for victims of forced labor during Japanese colonial rule. Mr. Yoon also doggedly moved Seoul closer to the United States despite concerns about China’s ability to hurt South Korea’s vital economy.
“The alliance has now become a global alliance that guarantees freedom and peace around the world,” he told the US Congress. Korea will fulfill its responsibilities
While in Washington, Mr. Yoon’s war against Ukraine as “a violation of international law”. maritime claims, the militarization of reclaimed features and coercive activities.
Liberal South Koreans warned against Mr. Yoon’s approach.
“If South Korea is unilaterally sucked into the new US-led Cold War system, it must face the fact that relations with China and Russia, both of which have strong influence over North Korea, will become more dangerous, and the risk of a North Korean nuclear crisis and even war on or around the peninsula will increase,” according to the liberal newspaper Hankyoreh.
Both hawks and doves in Seoul policy circles will have reason to be disappointed by the Washington Declaration, which “signals neither an impetus for dialogue with Pyongyang nor promises Seoul to get its own nuclear deterrent,” said John Delury, an Eastern Asian scholar at Yonsei University in Seoul.
But for many South Koreans, especially younger generations struggling with dwindling jobs, the economy is a more pressing issue than the North’s nuclear arsenal.
In recent months, hardly a day has gone by in South Korea without headlines that Biden’s Inflation Reduction and Chips and Science Acts would hurt two of South Korea’s most important industries: electric cars and semiconductors. But in their joint statement, Mr. Yoon and mr. Biden agreed only to “continue close consultations.”
“Younger Koreans don’t know the lyrics to ‘American Pie,’ but they know the Inflation Reduction Act,” Mr. Delury said.
