With Friends Like These (Pt. 2)
Via Robert, there is finally confirmation for something I’ve long suspected — the South Korean government brings anti-Americanism to the bargaining table and uses it as a negotiating tool:
Hong Seong-tae, a sociology professor at Sangji University, said, “The anti-American sentiment, voluntarily created by citizens, helps South Korea increase its negotiating power in its relations with the U.S.
In fact, Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon said, “Whenever the negotiations were at risk of failing, I produced a picture of the candlelight demonstrations.
In a self-congratulatory statement, the government gave itself 90 points out of 100 to its handling of the additional round of negotiations with the United States that resulted in new sanitary rules for beef imports.
In the end, the anger sparked by the candles, rather than appearing as a flash in the pan with the South Korean government kowtowing to the United States, has enabled the country to revise some of the terms of the deal. [The Hankyoreh; emphasis mine]
As I said, I’ve long suspected the same in the case of SOFA and cost-sharing negotiations, so I’m not sure why I find this so infuriating. Maybe it’s simply the fact that we put up with this. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m not sure who is governing South Korea, or whether South Korea is even governable above a basic roads-and-utilities level.
Speaking of cost-sharing, GI Korea links to South Korea’s latest creative scheme for sharing an even smaller portion of the cost of its own defense while sucking even more dollars out of the wallets of American taxpayers:
South Korea will likely start paying its share of the cost of maintaining U.S. troops here in goods rather than cash, officials said Friday, in an apparent move to limit Washington’s use of the money to pay for the ongoing relocation of frontline U.S. bases here. [Yonhap]
Another obvious purpose for this would be to channel USFK’s procurement toward preferred Korean vendors instead of the lowest bidder or U.S. manufacturers. This way, South Korea can capture even more of the “downsteam” economic benefits of USFK from what would otherwise be U.S. government contractors, some of which would be American.
The United States has long used part of the fund provided by Seoul to pay for the southward relocation of its frontline bases in what many South Koreans view as a diversion of the funds intended to pay for the cost of maintaining the U.S. forces in Korea. [Yonhap]
I’m not an expert on government contracting or procurement law, but I’d love to see what the GAO thinks of that. Personally, I like GI Korea’s suggestion about how to respond to this.
This is more evidence that, from the perspective of U.S. interests, South Korea is more parasite than ally. Personally, I’ve given up on the idea of a “conservative” government repairing an alliance that neither America nor Korea has needed for at least a decade. What U.S. interests does our expensive and strategically risky military commitment to South Korea really advance? We get along well enough with Chile, Singapore, Nigeria, and Moldova without stationing troops there.
It’s too bad they don’t have a more realistic view of how long it takes after USFK leave before KJI and his gay meth-heads try to repeat the 625…
Those who think he’ll hesitate either have cultural blinders or don’t know Korean Culture very well…
“Maybe it’s the fact that I’m not sure who is governing South Korea, or whether South Korea is even governable above a basic roads-and-utilities level.”
Bingo.
Shim Jae-hoon, who is the best native columnist writing in English, had it right on here:
Korea as an Incivil Society
by Shim Jae Hoon
Korea Herald, Dec. 4, 2003
Is Korea falling prey to a lawless society? It’s a creeping fear many of us develop as we watch the endless lines of violence rocking the country. From Seoul to Buan to Ulsan, Korea has been skating on the edge of anarchy as people from all walks of life, unionists, squatters, even politicians and foreign workers, all resort to extremism in demanding redress to perceived injustices.
That’s what we mean by a Hobbesian war of all against all, as all manner of people take up fights against each other for all kinds of grievances. It’s a phenomenon that engenders plenty of scofflaws as well as violence. At the bottom layer of Korean society a feeling runs that, if political and business elites take the liberty of corrupting each other, common people can themselves reciprocate by challenging the limits of law and good sense in fighting for what they want.
Politicians foster such perceptions by trivializing their action. Opposition party leader Choe Byung-yul is now on hunger strike to protest President Roh Moo-hyun’s refusal to accept a special parliamentary counsel to investigate suspicions of corruption amongst his aides.
Why is he going to such extremes when he can actually put to vote a bill demanding a special counsel, especially as his party controls a solid majority in the National Assembly? Isn’t parliament supposed to be a venue for debating issues and resolving differences by means of vote, not a battlefield where life is put at risk in the cause of political confrontation?
A government party member is staging a hunger strike of his own to rival Choe’s hunger strike in a tit-for-tat retaliation. Hunger strikes as a weapon of political protest have been used amply before under the military rule when democracy-fighters had no other way to get their views across to the nation at large.
Choe’s fasting, however, appears far from being desperate; it seems designed more to win sympathy from the streets for extra-parliamentary pressure, hardly a parliamentary way of resolving differences. Under democracy, a hunger strike in the cause of unrest is not a virtue; it s a form of violence.
In the southwestern fishing town of Buan, tens of thousands of people have been on the rampage for weeks, opposing the government’s plan to set up a nuclear waste dump site on one of their islands. They’ve taken the law into their own hands by ransacking local government offices and beating up the local town mayor. Daily protest marches fill up the town square.
Anarchy rules over Buan, but the central government stands mostly powerless to deal with this not-in-my-backyard (nimby) campaign, in effect signaling to people of other areas that they, too, may get what they want by employing similar violence.
But in intensity and scale of lawlessness, nothing can match the bloody violence involving squatters and the riot police in Seoul last week, which left dozens of people wounded on both sides of the dispute. Shanty-town residents resisting housing developers hurled flame-throwers and fired homemade guns and missiles to prevent construction workers from demolishing their houses. As bullets and Molotov cocktails flew across the police line, their confrontation turned into a veritable combat zone.
The angry residents justify their violence in the name of keeping developers at bay, but in doing so, they are signaling to other poor householders to employ similar violence in extracting more compensation from developers seeking to evict them.
Koreans are acquiring a notoriety around the world for using violence to get what they want, be it from foreign invested firms or local factories. Korea is the only OECD rich-country club member where unionists routinely use fire-bombs in pressing demands for redress. It no longer stands for a kind of civil society where differences are resolved through dialogue and negotiations. Foreign investors are packing their bags and leaving, while Korean investors take their projects to other, more friendly, countries.
Korea badly needs lessons in self-rule. Democracy is not just about changing governments or freedom to organize unions. It’s about the rule of law, about acquiring the system of resolving differences through enlightened self-interest. When we were fighting for elected government and freedom of speech under the military rule, we had little idea how difficult it would be to develop a consensual society based on the rule of law. Now we realize it’s much harder to maintain a democracy than fighting for it.
In the absence of political leadership, it’s the media that must play a key role in developing Korea into a mature civil society. It can start doing so by defining and debating the kind of values and institutions we need to shape in order to move ahead as a viable nation.
The central plank of this vision is to place reform at the head of our national agenda – reforming our archaic corporate, judicial, educational and political institutions to match the international standards of an increasingly globalized world. It’s a world where only the best can survive, and win, not a place for lawlessness and violence.
Hmmmm. Is there a word limit on the comment space? I copy & pasted an entire op-ed (because the op-ed is no longer available online), and it won’t go through.
There might be, but I haven’t figured out how to control it. Why not e-mail me the link, or paste the link into a comment?
Joshua,
I think there might be severe delays when comments are too long. As you can see, the comment did eventually appear–but almost an hour after I posted it.
It is also an old Korea Herald op-ed (and they delete articles after a short period), so I had to post the entire op-ed, rather than the link.
The main cultural culprit for South Korea’s political immaturity–along with the absence of a rule of law tradition that I’ve talked about before in your comment section–is that South Korean political culture has always been extremist or zero-sum.
So people tend to see very trivial issue as life-and-death, and I am sure that this is reflected in how South Korean representatives act in trade negotiations as well.
In fact, I think I recall reading that Park Chung-hee once went mano a mano with Spiro Agnew in Seoul during a heated U.S. troop reduction talks, where he refused anyone from living the negotiating table for something like five hours! (Of course, the punchline is that the South Korean representatives, including Park, had a tube connected from their, eh, urinary tracts to a discreetly placed urine-collecting jars of sort underneath the table.)
Sorry, your comment was in my spam trap.
Won Joon Choe: Thank you very much for cutting and pasting this article in the comments.
The cost sharing and relocation issue I think could be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back in regards to keeping USFK in Korea. If a so called conservative like 2MB can’t make the relocation happen then it is never going to happen unless the US government does a Rumsfeld and announces the withdrawal of the 2ID.
If just don’t know of anyone in Washington with the political will to do it.
Keep in mind that Defense is a lot more hawkish than State. State has shifted. Defense hasn’t. Lawless, who never missed an opportunity to push the cost-sharing issue, may be gone, but DoD doesn’t appear to have lost its enthusiasm for either cost-sharing or relocation.
USFK definitely wants to have the relocation happen that is for certain however it will take a lot of political backing from politicians to make it happen which it appears no one has the stomach to do right now. Gates has been a great Secretary of Defense in regards to Iraq/Afghanistan but I have not been all that impressed with him in regards to Korea.
I have not seen him strongly push the ROKs on cost sharing and the relocation as strongly as Rumsfeld did and has in fact caved into the ROKs by halting troop cuts. What did the US government get in response for halting troop cuts, mad cow craziness.
Now the Korean government is even going further and now further reducing their cost sharing burden with this “goods” payment scheme. I’m willing to bet the ROKs feel that Gates will not call them on it and can get away with it. I hope I’m wrong and Gates starts making some clear cut statements in regards to Korea policy.
The Koreans look at USFK as one big open wallet for them to pillage at will. We are here to give them all of our money.
Case in point: I pay for internet. I pay more for slow internet on base than I paid for fast internet when I lived off base in Anjungri.
This is offensive all by itself, but the Koreans took it a step further. They are blocking Vonage, SKYPE, and other US VOIP providers and forcing Soldiers to use their overpriced VOIP service. Not only do I get to pay too much for the internet, but I have to pay them for what I do on it. I guess they weren’t getting enough out of us.
GEN Bell fought the implementation of this thievery for about a year, but the Koreans persisted until he caved…which is standard Korean practice.
I agree with GI Korea. To change the status quo in something as massive as USFK, you have to have a hell of a lot of politically will-power. Rumsfeld was so surprising on Korea in this area. But he has by far been the exception.
I don’t see either an Obama or McCain presidency doing anything significant with USFK.
We’re locked in….and one day – it is going to cost us astronomically in terms of money and blood.