Lee Myung Bak, History, and Korea’s National Conversation

Nearly five years ago, before Lee Myung Bak was even a candidate for his country’s presidency, I expressed my reservations about his pushy style of governance and his history of gaffes. I do not share his love of grandiose and costly projects of questionable merit (something about water seems to unhinge him). But Lee has performed admirably at governing a nation that often seems ungovernable, and during some very difficult times. Competently.

Lee’s first real test stuck shortly after his inauguration — a mass protest movement founded on urban legends, and spread by state-owned broadcasters who were willing to lie for sensational appeal. Lee survived this. Later, he steered South Korea relatively unscathed through an international economic crisis that ought to have hurt a country with such inflated real estate values far worse than it did.

Lee has also stood firm in the face of plenty of extortion from North Korea. Breaking from the course of his predecessors, Lee refused to go on expanding — and even curtailed — South Korean subsidies to a regime that nonetheless felt entitled to murder, kidnap, and detain South Korean citizens, and which refused to take seriously its commitments to dismantle its nuclear programs. When North Korea responded with the most brazen act of war since its attempted hit on Park Chung-Hee in 1968, Lee might have caved (as Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Dae Jung assuredly would have) or let himself be provoked into a military conflict. He did neither. Instead, knowing the exceptionally gullible brand of “skepticism” that prevails within South Korea’s political left, Lee skillfully borrowed global legitimacy by convening an international board of experts to investigate the sinking of the Cheonan, exhausted his options in the U.N., and used the incident to repair his damaged alliance with a liberal American president whom many initially expected would be an uneasy ally. Lee hasn’t always responded as I’d have responded, but Lee has shown a canny sense of just how far his voters will let him go, and that’s certainly a sense I admit to lacking. I seldom claim the ability to make sense of how South Koreans will react to anything.

I approve, mostly, of the way Lee has handled North Korea, but I am of two minds about his success at influencing President Obama. The extent of Seoul’s influence in Washington dismays me, because I perceive such an excess of “clientitis” in our government. Why else do liberal South Korean presidents get the policies they want from conservative American presidents, and conservative South Korean presidents get the policies they want from liberal American presidents? I admit that this bothered me more when I didn’t like the way the influence moved us. I believe it pushed us to act against America’s own interests when Roh Moo Hyun was president. That caused me to weigh the other side of the ledger of risks and rewards, and question the value of the alliance as a means of securing America’s interests in the region. I still question it today, but now, I wish Lee well and want our government to find other, less risky ways of supporting his security objectives. And what better way to end our military presence in South Korea than to extinguish the very need for it?

That’s why I welcome Lee Myung Bak’s most grandiose and expensive undertaking yet:

President Lee Myung-bak’s proposal that South Koreans consider a unification tax aims to start what officials say is an overdue national conversation about the country’s future relationship with North Korea, the minister responsible for dealing with the North said.

“The government wants to make unification a public issue, make people have discussions over it and build consensus around it,” Hyun In-taek, minister of unification, said in an interview Thursday. [Wall Street Journal, Evan Ramstad]

Predictably, the idea of imposing a new tax caused some discomfort among conservatives, too, and Lee had to explain that there are no immediate plans for a specific tax — yet — only an acknowledgment that reunification is likely to be sudden and costly, and that the money to pay for it will have to come from somewhere.

Below the subscriber wall, Ramstad also notes so far, what Lee has done to begin this national conversation consists of launching some “surveys, workshops, and media events” among opinion-makers and intellectuals in government, academia, and business. One particular focus is on determining just what reunification is likely to cost, which is a calculation that must take place in a factual vacuum.

Naturally, this debate has horrified anyone who knows that there are probably gold stars on his dossier somewhere in the archives of the Reconnaissance Bureau in Pyongyang. Just as naturally, Lee’s people insist that they aren’t trying to encourage regime collapse (Who, us? Perish the thought!). At the same time, they say that the want the kind of unification that includes “denuclearization,” “economic cooperation, and most impossibly, as long as the Kim Dynasty holds power, “a political community where the freedom and dignity of Korean people are upheld.” Who could possibly disagree with these perfectly commendable objectives? Or so you might ask if you don’t follow Korean politics.

Whatever you believe Lee’s true intentions to be, and whatever you may think about the merits of those intentions, South Korea needs to have this conversation now. I’ll add that defectors from North Korea need to have a prominent role in it. Recent events have discredited the idea of gradual unification, and not because of anything that Lee could have done differently. The last thing North Korea wants now is an opening of its society — and least of all, unification — under any terms. The North must know that it is no longer capable of absorbing the South’s population, industry, prosperity, ideas, or its belief in gods not sanctioned by the state. Its ideal outcome for South Korea now is to finlandize it and extort regime-sustaining cash from it, just like it did throughout the decade before Lee came to power.

The North Korean system must change, yet it seems determined not to. Will the death of Kim Jong Il be the catalyst for North Korea perestroika? Perhaps at the margins, but North Korea will still be in the hands of people who know that isolation and repression are all that stand between them and the fate of the Ceaucescus. As they see it, perestroika exactly didn’t lead to an optimal outcome. And now that I think about it, Gorbachev and even Putin probably feel the same way.

For all of the hopeless idealism of his (non-)reunification policy, Kim Dae Jung was right about one thing. The Koreas can’t reunify overnight. The absorption must be gradual to give a provisional government time to bring North Korea’s public health crisis under control, repair its infrastructure, reorganize the security services, restore order, secure its WMD facilities, and ameliorate its most immediate environmental catastrophes. It will have to relax migration controls across the DMZ, and even within North Korea, gradually. And all of this must happen without inviting Chinese intervention, which could re-draw the DMZ and ignite a larger regional war (which is why I would offer a withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from all of Korea and no U.S. forces north of the DMZ after reunification — period — in exchange for a Chinese commitment of non-intervention). As you’ve probably inferred by now, what I’m speaking of here is a controlled and phased reunification under a provisional government under South Korean direction, and after a dramatic event in North Korea, such as a coup. What, you thought Jang Song-Thaek was just going to agree to this? Of course you didn’t.

Even so, it is right for us to remain open to unmistakable signs of genuine reform in the North under future leaders, no matter how doubtful it may be that anyone who holds national influence within the current system will allow the system to change faster than the movement of history will eventually demand. When those demands come due, South Korea must be ready — financially, politically, diplomatically, and psychologically. And if Lee accomplishes what he is setting out to do, he will deserve to be remembered as one of the greatest men in his nation’s history, a liberator and a unifier.