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5 February 2010

I’ve mostly ignored the speculation that the Koreas will hold a summit because I think the chances of it actually happening are still pretty vaporous. One thing I will observe is that South Korea is saying that it won’t reward North Korea just for showing up, but I don’t see any chance that Kim Jong Il would attend without a payoff. Really, I think Kim Jong Il’s dispositive motivation is that payoff, while Lee’s is to look like he’s open to dialogue, which means that he wins just by keeping this story alive. I wouldn’t put it past Lee to actually go through with it if his poll numbers drop, which is reason enough for the Americans to worry that a summit would ease the economic pressure on the North just when that pressure is starting to destabilize it.

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Iraq has largely disappeared from policy debates in Washington. There are special envoys for every critical country in the region except Iraq, the country whose evolution will help determine how American relevance to the currents of the region will be judged. The Obama administration needs to find its voice to convey that Iraq continues to play a significant role in American strategy. Brief visits by high officials are useful as symbols. But of what? Operational continuity is needed in a strategic concept for a region over which the specter of Iran increasingly looms. [Henry Kissinger, Washington Post]

If only we had a some sort of senior government official in Baghdad whose job it was to make sure that Iraq’s interests and views were heard at the highest levels of our government, and who performed that function competently and effectively.

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A Chinese dissident is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and the ChiComs try to bully the Nobel Committee out of it. I’m feeling charitable enough to give the ChiComs a little free advice: instead of validating the universal perception that you’re thugs, why not validate that other universal perception — that the Nobel hasn’t meant anything for at least a decade? Then again, the fact that no one would in Europe would dare to nominate a critic of radical Islam for a Nobel suggests that the ChiComs may be on to something.
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South Korea wants to “renegotiate” the transfer of wartime operational command. Has anyone else noticed that all agreements with South Korea are endlessly renegotiable?
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Danish Neocons? I agree with what the makers of The Red Chapel were trying to do politically speaking, it’s just that based on the sample I saw, it didn’t seem very funny, or effective at conveying its message. This reviewer had a more positive view.
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Interesting: Japan and South Korea may team up for a military exercise. More interesting: the exercise will focus on “humanitarian disaster response.” Hmmm.

7 Responses

  1. Joshua wrote:

    South Korea wants to “renegotiate” the transfer of wartime operational command. Has anyone else noticed that all agreements with South Korea are endlessly renegotiable?

    Yeah, like the FTA.

    Oh, wait. Never mind.

  2. Didn’t both sides demand that the FTA be renegotiated? Surely we haven’t forgotten that beef thing, have we? But that’s what happens when you negotiate right up to a deadline — you end of leaving things unresolved.

  4. He was forced to demand extra concessions on the age of the animals and the parts that could be used. Don’t recall all the specifics. Really, the problem with all of this is that it’s done against a backdrop of irrational emotion and anti-Americanism. Korea is a democracy and the government has to respond to popular will, but I’ve never seen a functioning democracy where popular will was so volatile, so easily influenced by urban legend.

  5. I thought those were concessions on the agreement to re-allow imports, which is not the FTA itself.

    But even if I’m right, the FTA is an exception to what has long been a bad habit by South Korean administrations to try to renegotiate things when the wind changes direction. It’s a very big exception, and one where I’m not happy about the apparent role-reversal, but an exception to a “rule” nonetheless. Sorry for the quibbling.

    Clearly LMB’s end of the political spectrum was not happy with the ideology-driven decision by Roh Moohyun to transfer wartime command, and they couldn’t get that reversed fast enough if they could. In many ways it’s a lot like the Democrats’ allergy to free-trade agreements, and as soon as they got control of the Congress and then the White House, they’ve been trying to kill it by neglect.

  6. Joshua wrote:

    Really, the problem with all of this is that it’s done against a backdrop of irrational emotion and anti-Americanism. Korea is a democracy and the government has to respond to popular will, but I’ve never seen a functioning democracy where popular will was so volatile, so easily influenced by urban legend.

    Absolutely. For South Korean democracy to mature, politicos need to stay the course when they’re right about something and stop being afraid of offending the loudest voices, which are often the vocal fringe.

    I think LMB did do that as much as he could in the face of a well-orchestrated movement that was determined to boot him from office, and ultimately the concessions he gave were largely cosmetic.