The National Interest

Earlier today, Lee Myung-bak took his oath of office as the tenth president of the Republic of Korea. Not only does the inauguration—the second peaceful handover of power from one party to political opponents since the country’s 1988 transition to democracy—represent a significant milestone in South Korea’s constitutional evolution, it opens a new chapter in the country’s relationship with the United States which had been allowed to sour considerably under Lee’s predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun.

During his five years in office, Roh frustrated—if not alienated outright—many of Seoul’s traditional allies by his constant failed efforts to cast himself as a mediator between them and the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-Il. In 2005, when the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution censuring North Korea for "systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights" including "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, public executions, extrajudicial and arbitrary detention, the absence of due process and the rule of law, the imposition of the death penalty for political reasons, the existence of a large number of prison camps, and the extensive use of forced labor" as well as "all-pervasive and severe restrictions on freedom of thought, conscience, religion, opinion and expression," the South Koreans—who ought to know better than anyone else the truth of the resolution’s charges—actually abstained, invoking "the sake of more urgent and important policy goals integral to peace and stability on the Korean peninsula." A year later, as the North Korean regime prepared a series of provocative missile tests, the South Korean foreign ministry insisted that Pyongyang was only planning to launch a civilian satellite. When, instead, Pyongyang fired off seven rockets—all of which are fully capable of hitting anywhere in South Korea—Seoul turned its ire on those who made an issue of the incident, criticizing "the creation of a state of needless tension and confrontation by the excessive reaction of certain parties" (viz., the United States and Japan) which would "not be conducive to problem-solving." Unfortunately for Roh’s legacy, rather than being gratified by the apologetics, his mercurial North Korean counterpart went ahead later that fall with a full-blown test of a nuclear device—to which the South Korean president responded, in a nationally-televised address, by advising his countrymen that his "sunshine policy" was "not something we should give up upon."

Fortunately, for the future of not only the U.S.-Korean alliance, but also the balance of power in the region, South Korean voters thought otherwise and, turning on Roh’s United New Democratic Party during the December 2007 poll, allowed Lee Myung-bak of the conservative Grand National Party to trounce his nearest challenger in the race for the Blue House by a 22.6 percent margin, the largest margin of victory ever in Korean history. With this electoral mandate behind him, Lee now has an opportunity to restore his country’s battered relations with the United States as well as its ties with other partners—and it would be in America’s interest to reach out to him.

Despite the efforts of Roh Moo-hyun to play to anti-American sentiments among younger South Koreans, the United States still keeps some 28,500 troops in the country, the overwhelming majority of the United Nations force that, since the 1953 armistice, has been providing the security guarantee under which South Korea has prospered. The American troop presence is more than symbolic: despite the severe economic depredations of recent years, North Korea is still a heavily militarized state on a permanent war footing which deploys most of its conventional forces within easy striking distance of the South Korean capital (Seoul is only about thirty miles from the demilitarized zone). In case of war, the U.S. military commander on the peninsula is expected to take command of the combined U.S.-South Korean forces and somehow hold the line with a mere fraction of the forces which General Douglas MacArthur had when the Kim family dictatorship last struck half a century ago.

President Lee’s advisors have sent reassuring signals that they realize that the type of security that America has provided—at no little cost to itself—cannot be taken for granted. After all, Washington could conceivably still honor the terms of the mutual defense treaty with Seoul, which requires a U.S. response to any aggression by Pyongyang, without necessarily basing large numbers of American personnel in South Korea. In fact, an argument could be made that billeting the forces elsewhere actually gives U.S. commanders greater flexibility in their eventual response to any attack. Hence, Lee’s advisors, including Harvard-educated academic Kim Byung-kook, who will serve as first senior presidential secretary for foreign and security policy, have been openly discussing what South Korea can do to support U.S. security priorities, including programs which would be clearly aimed at containing North Korea like the Proliferation Security Initiative and regional missile defense. Lee has even gone so far as to state that reinforcing the U.S.-South Korean alliance would improve stability on the Korean peninsula: "South Korean-U.S. ties have been neglected for the sake of South-North Korean relations. Strengthened ties between South Korea and the U.S. will help make South-North relations better. And if South Korea-U.S. relations improve, North Korea-U.S. relations will get better."

Lee will also need to repair relations with Tokyo, which were even more sorely tested during the ten years of left-leaning governments by Seoul’s predilection for the North Korea regime, which not only fired missiles over Japanese airspace, but has dragged its feet on the highly emotive issue of Japanese citizens it has kidnapped over the years. The new South Korean president, who was actually born in Osaka, Japan, where his father was a migrant farm worker, is unlikely to exploit anti-Japanese nationalism for political gain the way his predecessor did.

South Korea’s oddly staggered system of five-year presidential and four-year legislative terms presents President Lee with the challenge of facing a parliamentary election barely six weeks after his inauguration. With that poll currently scheduled for April 9, the new chief executive has a very short honeymoon before facing a vote which may well determine whether or not he will have much of a chance to carry out the needed repairs to South Korea’s foreign relations. And here, his would-be partners abroad, especially those in Washington, have an opportunity to help, if they’re willing.

Exit polls taken during the presidential election indicate that the biggest issue influencing voters was the state of the South Korean economy; in fact, according to the liberal Hankyoreh newspaper, barely 3 percent of voters rated relations with North Korea as a major issue in the election. Other polls showed that Lee’s rags-to-riches background—he worked his way through school as a garbage collector and eventually became chairman and CEO of Hyundai—was a major factor in his favor among the electorate as was his campaign’s "747 Plan" (achieving 7 percent annual economic growth, raising GDP to $40,000 per capita, and making South Korea the seventh-largest economy in the world). And one might add that South Korea needs that type of massive economic expansion if it is ever to assume the financial burden of reunification with a post-Kim North.

To achieve anything close to economic results sought by Lee and his compatriots, however, requires that the Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), signed last year, be expeditiously ratified by the U.S. Congress. Whether that legislative feat can be accomplished in the middle of the U.S. election cycle is another story, notwithstanding the fact that South Korea is America’s seventh-largest export market and its sixth-largest purchaser of agricultural products. Of the presidential candidates, only Senator John McCain (R-AZ) favors passage of KORUS FTA, writing in Foreign Affairs that the accord is about the bilateral strategic partnership and not just economics and pledging that his administration would realize "the full potential of our new trade agreement with South Korea" in order to "rebuild our frayed partnership with South Korea." Both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) are on the record opposing the trade pact.

It would be rather ironic if, after a decade of repeated frustrations with South Korea’s solipsistic "sunshine policy," the United States, caught up in its own domestic politics, now fails to take advantage of a significant strategic opportunity presented by the dawning of a new day in Seoul.

J. Peter Pham is director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University and a senior fellow of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.