What’s the Korean Word for ‘Obsolete?’
Unification minister-designate Lee Jae-joung said Wednesday while the Korea-U.S. alliance is crucial and should remain solid, it must not be allowed to affect South Korea’s future negatively. In a special lecture for children of Korean expatriates in English-speaking countries, Lee said there must be a “Maginot Line“ for South Korea in maintaining its alliance with the U.S., and the two countries should break away from the form their relations took in the Cold War and pursue a new relationship suited for the post-Cold War age.
[Link] So, do you suppose anyone will ever tell Minister Lee how that whole Maginot concept worked out?
Or do you suppose he knew all along?
And yes, a month after North Korea tests a nuke, Minister Lee has no inkling of why we haven’t sent Ambassador Ted Turner and his furniture to Pyongyang (the temptations aren’t lost on me).
Judging by the comments from senior U.S. officials, this Maginot Line isn’t working much better than the last one:
Seoul is doing “virtually nothing” to sanction North Korea over its nuclear test and faces a tense summit with Washington later this month, a former Bush administration official told the Washington Post on Tuesday. “The Republic of Korea is doing virtually nothing to impose a cost on the North,” the former senior director for Asia at the National Security Council Michael Green said. He said the meeting between the two presidents on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Vietnam “will be a difficult discussion.”
And this, from the New York Times:
In Hanoi, Mr. Bush is also likely to have a testy encounter with President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea. Mr. Roh has been critical of what he has called a one-sided American approach to North Korea, and earlier this week, he announced only weak sanctions against North Korea in response to its nuclear test on Oct. 9.
So far South Korea has declined to take part directly in the American-led effort to detect and seize illicit weapons shipments. Many North Korean ships pass through South Korean waters. American officials say that Mr. Roh, in a visit to Washington before the nuclear test, had indicated that if North Korea detonated a nuclear test, it would “change everything” in relations between North and South.
One of Mr. Bush’s senior national security aides, speaking in Washington before the president left, but declining to talk on the record about the friction between Washington and Seoul, said, “It seems to have changed almost nothing.
Honestly, I don’t know why we even bother.