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On the contrary, it’s Washington that must take back our sovereignty from Moon Jae-in’s lobbyists

DONALD TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL ADMIRERS ARE READY TO AWARD HIM A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. These people actually seem to believe that the Singapore summit proves his hype about what a great deal-maker he is. Moon Jae-in’s most loyal admirers are ready to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. These people actually seem to believe that the Panmunjom Summit proves his hype about what a great peace-maker he is. Most members of the latter group believe that the former group are fools, and the converse is also true.1 Each camp could be correct in its appraisal of the other, but both are wrong about Singapore and Panmunjom. I’ve been observing both Pyongyang and human nature long enough to know better. Not that I needed to wait to see events validate my skepticism yet again, but they have.

Trump and his admirers will eventually figure this out. Most of them won’t change their minds before Trump does; but they will lose enthusiasm and interest first. In the case of Moon’s admirers, the error is harder to excuse, easier to explain, and for most of them, impossible to dislodge with any amount of evidence. It’s harder to excuse because many of them are academics and journalists who are supposed to be smart, sophisticated, critical thinkers. It’s easier to explain because intelligence is worse than useless when it becomes a talent for deception — starting with self-deception — that superior reason, rather than human emotional predisposition, must be the basis for one’s opinions. Understand that conceit and you understand much of what ails academia and journalism.2 Where else in this world can one not only evade the hard consequences and empirical measurements of misjudgment, but make a career of it?

This year, too many academically intelligent people fawned over Moon’s anti-anti-North Korean policies with all the objectivity of KCNA covering Kim Jong-un’s on-the-spot inspection of a llama farm. But maybe the bloom is finally off the rose. Even I thought this was a bit too harsh:

In Washington, I hear growing unease about how far and how fast Moon is moving to undermine the pressure of U.S. and U.N. sanctions before Pyongyang has taken meaningful steps to disarm. The unease is greatest in Congress, where there is also unease that both Moon and Trump have done so much to legitimize a tyrant who would, in a more just world, be hauled before a tribunal and sentenced to spend the remainder of his life eating stewed vegetables. But with Moon now openly violating U.N. sanctions—and probably U.S. law—why do our watchdogs in Seoul sleep so silently under their host’s porch? Why do our think tanks (Heritage and AEI being notable exceptions) not politely point out that Seoul is directly undermining stated U.S. policy that Pyongyang will receive no sanctions relief until its disarmament is verified? Could it have anything to do with what happened to the U.S.-Korea Institute recently, or to the American Enterprise Institute years ago, before it stopped taking Seoul’s money? Or to David Straub?

Herein lies a second obstacle to useful analysis of North Korea. For years, this blog has raised questions about South Korean influence in Washington, and for reasons that should be obvious, hardly anyone else in this town will. When I wrote this too-lengthy post on Korea and the Foreign Agents Registration Act, public interest groups like the Sunlight Foundation were still compiling data on foreign influence in Washington, and hadn’t yet gotten around to adding up South Korea’s spending. I expected that sum to be substantial, but even I was gobsmacked by this:

[Open Secrets]

That’s right–South Korea spends more money to influence U.S. policy than Israel, China, and Saudi Arabia combined. Admittedly, this chart doesn’t tell the whole story. Much of Israel’s influence in Washington comes from donations by pro-Israel Jewish-Americans who aren’t subject to FARA registration and whose advocacy enjoys First Amendment protections. Much of China’s influence must come from corporations like Google that do (or want to do) business in China, and have been coopted as China’s lobbyists in exchange for access to its markets.

Then, according to Open Secrets, “[t]he majority of the spending came from a single organization: the Korea Trade Promotion Center (KTPC), a state-funded nonprofit promoting foreign investment and partnerships, which accounts for $45.9 million of the spending” and which “also ranks first among registrants.” This would seem to suggest that most of Seoul’s lobbying is commercial rather than political in nature. Indeed, KTPC, better known as Kotra, says that its principal mission is to promote foreign investment in Korea, and its 2016 annual report reflects that. On closer scrutiny, however, a Korean newspaper informs us that Kotra’s mission also includes making influential friends in government.

The state-funded Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, or Kotra, runs 120 overseas offices in 82 countries. They assist Korean companies trying to make inroads into overseas markets and promote foreign investment in Korea. However, they do not merely serve businesses. One of their unofficial yet important tasks is entertaining lawmakers and senior bureaucrats in the cities around the world where they are stationed.

These so-called VIPs receive red-carpet treatment from the overseas Kotra staff. Packages typically include chauffeur service from the airport, a tour guide with an interpreter, making all the necessary arrangements for the visit, booking rooms, and dining and entertainment.

According to the agency’s report for the National Assembly audit, Kotra provided such top-class services to 668 lawmakers and 1,161 senior bureaucrats and executives from public institutions over the last three years. During the first eight months of this year, about 43 legislators a month relied on the Kotra overseas services.

The visitors who took advantage of these services mostly did so at Kotra branches in famous tourist cities, which implies what their primary purpose really was. Kotra had not hosted a single trade- or investment-related event in Saint Petersburg, Russia, or Madrid, Spain, last year, and yet visits by legislators and government officials were frequent. Those offices were primarily entertaining and guiding public-sector visitors. [Joongang Ilbo]

There is also a nexus between security and trade policies, but we’ll get to that later.

Some of Korea’s more explicitly policy-related contributions to U.S. think tanks come from groups like The Korea Foundation and the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, which should register as agents of a foreign principal. KIEP is actually registered as a foreign principal, despite the fact that it actually operates in the U.S. as an agent of the South Korean government, sometimes circumventing its own FARA-registered agent. That’s still better than the Korea Foundation, a gargantuan contributor to U.S. think tanks with a record of trying to censor criticism of Seoul’s policies, and which isn’t FARA registered at all.

Like Think Progress, I believe that the “FARA still remains woefully under-enforced,” and as I’m about to explain, Seoul’s influence over those who shape our Korea policy is extensive. For example, the Korea Foundation has provided support for policy-related research by the Brookings Institution, the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Korea Society, the Mansfield Foundation, the Wilson Center, and the Korea Economic Institute of America (KEIA), which is registered under the FARA as a foreign agent of the Korean government.3 Experts from these groups are on the contacts lists of journalists who write your news and influence you.

Most other think tanks sent scholars to seminars sponsored by the Korea Foundation, although it’s not clear whether the benefits they accepted went beyond compensation for travel, lodging, and meals. The Korea Foundation also sponsors congressional delegation visits to Korea. Most of the Korea Foundation’s funding comes from big anonymous donors or from South Korean corporations, including Hyundai and Kookmin Bank. It also brokered a $1 million donation to a small American university from Chung Mong-joon, a wealthy heir to the Hyundai empire and a key corporate supporter of “engagement” with the regime in Pyongyang.

Already, some will want to mischaracterize this argument as anti-Korean, but as the downfall of Park Geun-hye proves, South Koreans view corporate donations to their own politicians with great suspicion. If Koreans also think that cash from the chaebol exerts a nefarious influence on their own politicians, they may know something we should.

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Thus, despite all the qualifiers about the amount Seoul spends in Washington, anyone who deals with think tanks, Congress, and government knows that Seoul’s influence here is extensive, and that Seoul has used it to push positions that I certainly view as contrary to U.S. national security interests. As one who approves of our national conversation about Russian influence, I believe we also need a local conversation about South Korean influence. A time when Moon Jae-in’s policies are widening Seoul’s conflict of interests with Washington is a good time to have that conversation.

For example, Seoul is currently lobbying the U.S. government to reopen the Slavery-Industrial Complex at Kaesong, which the previous South Korean government suspected of financing North Korea’s nuclear program, and whose resumption would undermine U.N. sanctions and U.S. national sanctions. In reality, nobody but Kim Jong-un knows where that money went, despite the fact that Seoul, and every bank and investor under its jurisdiction, were and are legally obligated by UNSCR 1718, paragraph 8(d), to “ensure” that their money wasn’t paying for nukes. Thus, at best, Kaesong would violate and undermine U.N. sanctions. At worst, it amounts to a subsidy by our nominal ally and protege of the WMD programs of a regime that now poses a direct threat to the United States itself. So far, the U.S. government is correctly resisting the push to reopen Kaesong. In 2006, Seoul also lobbied to get Kaesong included in its Free Trade Agreement with the U.S., also without success.

Even as Seoul lobbies Washington for the consensus that U.N. resolutions now require, to subsidize Pyongyang through joint ventures like Kaesong, Seoul also lobbies Washington to continue to subsidize Seoul’s own defense from Pyongyang. As one who spent four years as an American soldier in South Korea, I find this to be outrageous and absurd. Certainly, my service in Korea enamored me to Korea’s people, and to many aspects of its culture. It also made me a skeptic of the idea that keeping 28,500 U.S. military personnel in South Korea really serves the U.S. national interest or Korea’s molting from dependence into a self-assured democracy.

If the real lesson here is that self-defense is essential to a nation’s self-confidence, Seoul seems to have learned the wrong lesson: that lobbies are cheaper than armies. Yet this is neither a formula for Korea’s nationhood, for its security, or for a healthy relationship with its allies. And so, except for gentle, sotto voce notes that are inoffensive to Seoul’s ears, it remains dangerous for scholars here to ask whether the U.S. assumes too much of the burden that South Korea ought to assume on its own, what parts of our alliance with Korea have ceased to serve U.S. interests or outlived their usefulness, or whether South Korea’s interests are diverging from our own as a result of Moon’s policies. My suspicion is that Seoul’s long purse-strings strangle such notes, even as so many of our service members–and their spouses, and their children–live within range of an increasingly serious North Korean threat that our host-nation ally is increasingly unserious about protecting itself from. That’s why I find Moon’s plaintive calls to claw back more sovereignty from the Yankees to be such a triumph of chutzpah:

Consider South Korea’s presidential Liberation Day speeches. Curiously, the causal effect of the sacrifices of U.S. servicemen in vanquishing Imperial Japan and Korean liberation are not only assiduously accorded the silent treatment, but the role of the U.S. in Korea is occasionally frowned upon. President Moon Jae-in, giving his Liberation Day speech today outdoors in the sweltering heat of Yongsan, Seoul, the site of the pre-1945 Japanese military base and post-1945 U.S. military base, did mention the “ROK-U.S. alliance,” but only in the context of the recent relocation of the U.S. base.

Calling the grounds where he stood “the center of exploitation and subjugation,” Moon remarked that Yongsan, having “long been taken away from us,” now has been “returned to the arms of the people after 114 years” and has “finally become an integral part of our territory.” The implication that the U.S. military presence in Korea was an exploitative continuation of Japanese colonialism or, at least, an unwelcome usurpation of Korean sovereignty, was noteworthy. [Sung-Yoon Lee, The Hill]

As always, Professor Lee’s entire piece is well worth reading. Note well that the quoted language was carefully crafted to allow Moon to answer potential critics and claim that he only meant Japanese “exploitation and subjugation.” Well played, although I suspect that Moon’s anti-American base cheered for the broader and more plausible interpretation. In any event, Yongsan wasn’t the “center” of Japan’s oppressive system or colonial rule. Those would be (respectively) Sodaemun Prison and the now-demolished General Government Headquarters, seen here on Liberation Day, 1945.

[Not pictured: Kim Il-sung]

In the same speech, Moon also argued that “inter-Korean relations” are not secondary to Seoul’s relationship with America, and that Koreans — straw-man alert — are the “owners” of their own nation. This nationalist turn is something of a departure for Moon, who has fooled liberal journalists into believing that he’s one of them while surrounding himself with illiberal extremists and pursuing the illiberal censorship of the media, suing and even jailing his critics, and silencing critics of Pyongyang‘s crimes against humanity. Yet until now, Moon was always careful to keep a cordon sanitaire between himself and any rhetoric that could convict him of being the arsonist of the alliance, even if every time a suspicious fire broke out, he was sure to be found a block away smelling strongly of gasoline.

Domestic politics may soon drive Moon to embrace nationalism more openly. His mentor, Moon Chung-in, has threatened as much. Inevitably, as with all politicians–and especially with glib ones who make grand and unattainable promises–his poll numbers have fallen from the ionosphere, though he still retains 60 percent approval and won’t face a serious electoral contest until April 2020. What’s more, most of the support Moon has lost has gone to the even more extreme Justice Party, not to the nonexistent center or the hapless right. His support will continue to decline if he continues to delegate the stewardship of Korea’s economy to graduates of the Hugo Chavez School of Economics. It would decline even faster if Washington would stop giving Moon political cover to harm our own core national security interests by undermining our policies and underwriting our enemies. Trump’s demand, on the eve of Moon’s election, that South Korea should pay for THAAD, was one example of this. Trump’s overproduced performance of at Singapore, on the eve of South Korea’s local elections, was another.

These errors cannot be undone, but there are other decisions to come. For example, we should block Moon’s push for U.N. sanctions exemptions to allow joint ventures or infrastructure projects while North Korea is accelerating its nuclear and missile programs. We should object to sanctions dodges like Seoul’s proposal to share fishing waters; after all, we know that Pyongyang has overfished its own waters, will certainly export its catch for hard currency, and will certainly violate paragraph 9 of UNSCR 2371 when it does so. We don’t have to reassure South Koreans that their banks and companies will face no consequences for importing North Korean coal in violation of U.N. sanctions and likely violation of U.S. laws, to subsidize a regime that Washington is trying to sanction. We don’t have to pretend that all is safe and calm in Korea by keeping the families of U.S. service members in installations that aren’t well protected from North Korean missiles, while Seoul drags our feet on deploying defenses. We don’t have to keep infantry, armor, artillery, and Army aviation units in Korea that should have been withdrawn decades ago, when Seoul has just announced its intention to cut 118,000 troops from its own army and is floating trial balloons about withdrawing some troops from the DMZ. We don’t have to bargain gently in cost-sharing talks with an OECD nation that spends a lower percentage of its GDP on defense than we do.

Moon Jae-in is not behaving like our ally. So why has the White House done so much to help him politically?

As one of his most unrestrained admirers in the media has reported, Moon has sought ways to prop Pyongyang up economically without violating sanctions. But because Pyongyang is putting growing pressure on Seoul to break “brigandish” sanctions, and because the brilliant legal minds in the Blue House can’t be bothered to read U.N. resolutions anyway, the “without violating sanctions” qualifier no longer matters to Moon. Pyongyang is forcing him to choose sides because, unlike Washington, it’s willing to use its leverage to force that choice. Its leverage, of course, is the growing nuclear and political hegemony about which the majority of U.S. scholars and journalists remain in an inflexible state of denial. But if the White House is getting independent, clear-eyed advice about where our interests lie, it also has substantial leverage to push Moon in the opposite direction. Why must we salve South Koreans’ anxiety about an alliance that they still overwhelmingly want? Why must we conceal the truth that Moon is endangering it by opening a widening disunity of interests? Perhaps if more of our institutions had more “sovereignty” and freedom from Seoul’s “subjugation,” it would not be relegated to unpaid bloggers to ask such uncomfortable questions.

If Moon, as the leader of the government that spends more to lobby Washington than any other, means to bolster his domestic support by calling (as Roh Moo-hyun did) for greater “independence” from the object of his patronage, he should be careful what he asks for. In these times, one result may well be that Moon’s lobbyists and our soldiers both return home on a shorter timetable Moon’s pollsters might prefer. Another result might be a more frank debate about North Korea policy in both capitals. Of course, the loss of Moon’s donations might affect quite a few scholars, but I doubt that our debate would be any worse off if some of the scholars he’s most likely to support found other fields of study. We can all wish Mr. Moon the best of luck in protecting Korea’s sovereignty by signing a treaty with Xi Jinping, although I’d urge him to poll some Uygur and Tibetan exiles first.

The more our interests divide from Seoul’s, the greater Washington’s interest in reexamining its relationship with South Korea, and the sooner it does so, the more likely that relationship continues to be an alliance. I can envision a modernized alliance in which the U.S., South Korea, Japan, and other Pacific nations pool their resources and technology to reform an alliance rebuilt around a layered mutual defense against artillery, submarines, and missiles. I can also envision a modernized alliance in which the U.S., Japan, and other Pacific nations pool their resources and technology to reform an alliance rebuilt around a layered mutual defense against submarines and missiles.

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1. My consistent policy on Mr. Trump has been to praise the things he does right and criticize the things he does wrong. And if Mr. Moon ever does anything right, I’ll praise him, too.

2. Obviously, I’m not referring to everyone in the entire industry, but I am describing too many members of each.

3. The Korea Foundation’s 2012 annual report also lists the American Enterprise Institute, but a senior AEI official recently told me that AEI had since stopped taking funds from the South Korean government. With regard to KEIA, at least it complies with the letter and spirit of the FARA by registering itself openly. Also, KEIA does publish views like this one from Bill Brown that (if gently) criticize Moon Jae-in’s brand of engagement.