The Death of an Alliance, Part 51

First, TKL is privileged to print this exclusive photo of the Bush-Roh luncheon.

The pomp and pageantry rolled out for America’s greatest ally since the Marquis de Lafayette does not end there.

Roh and the poor ROK Ambassador, Lee Tae-Shik, adjourned to Blair House to meet with a real who’s-who of has-beens. Extra props to whoever invited Richard Armitage, who must be the least popular man in this city this week. Also present: Madeleine Albright, Don Oberdorfer, Donald Gregg, Thomas Hubbard, Charles Pritchard, Richard Solomon, Sandy Burglar Berger, John Hamre, William Cohen (the one who just suggested we preemptively hit Musudan-ri) and the repellent Wendy Sherman, who thinks our human rights policy toward the North should respect North Korea’s “right to govern in its own way.” If there is justice in this world, Ms. Sherman will be first into Camp 22 and assigned the job of feeding, delousing, and caring for any survivors.

Extra irony: many of these folks belong to a foreign policy school that calls itself “realist,” which is a euphemism for diplomacy that emphasizes private diplomacy between diplomatic establishments, but which always has too much to apologize for to conduct effective public diplomacy. I don’t know Hamre or Solomon, so they’re exempt from the remarks that follow. The fact that this meeting with these people was the social highlight of Roh’s visit to Washington says everything. These “realists,” by bungling the public diplomacy, paved Roh’s way to power. They cocooned themselves with other like-minded members of the foreign policy establishment, avoiding the campuses while courting, I suppose, editors and other diplomats, trying their best not to notice that the streets of Seoul were thick with tear gas and North Korea was taking over the labor unions. The harvest of this realism was the elevation of one of those young radicals to the presidency of the Republic of Korea. Most of Roh’s voters wanted him to knocked down the hollow shell that was left of the U.S.-Korean alliance, and Roh has done an admirable job of it. It’s both ironic and fitting that they should celebrate together, but the question you have to ask is just what they’re celebrating.

Since so many of these people, in varying degrees, have expressed pretty much the same brand of hostility toward the policies of the administration in power now, this hardly seems like an ideal tactic for mending relations with the people who are actually in the Pentagon, working on the timetable for pulling the rug out from under your nation’s defense. It may comfort Roh to surround himself with members of a like-minded minority, but it will do little to create a sense of even minimally cordial relations between the two governments. I don’t dispute Roh’s right to have the meeting, of course, I just dispute the wisdom. Roh isn’t exactly putting himself in a position of greater strength by trying to build a political base of support among the least interventionist currents of American political thought. When the North Koreans are on the DMZ (or when they’ve collapsed into factions, and the Peoples’ Liberation Army is moving in to “restore order”) is Wendy Sherman really the person you want to count on to send you 690,000 American combat troops?

Hat tip: Mrs. Joshua 😉