Sol Sanders Archive

But, mind you, the hypocrisy of what these Korean critics really believed and their real concerns was evident in their counterintuitive pleas not to reduce U.S. military forces in the country, their show-the-flag contributions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their support of the Washington-led effort to end nuclear weapons in North Korea [if sometimes sabotaging that effort with their own “sunshine policy” appeasement].

Indeed, the U.S.public has often tried to forget the bitter struggle of 1950-53 in defense of a free and independent Korea wherein almost 50,000Americans lost their lives.

But as often as proponents of an interventionist American policy in world affairs point to U.S. “successes” as postwar Japan and Germany, few mention the equally startling example of the Republic of Korea. Still besieged by the Communist North, the country is nevertheless a model not only for rapid economic development but for the demonstration of representative government with all its foibles.

It is curious but perhaps significant that the old Chinese Communist way of referring to what everyone else calls the Korean War, in many ways the most bitter of recent wars, is the "Movement to Resist American Aid to Korea.” For whatever the failings of U.S. policy toward the peninsular during the five decades since U.S. soldiers liberated it from Japanese colonialism, the fact is that the modern Korean state which has emerged in what the world calls South Korea owes not only its existence but much of its character to American intervention.

Not the least of that “interference” has been massive American aid. From 1946 to 1976, the U.S. provided $12.6 billion [contemporary dollars not adjusted for inflation] in economic and military aid to South Korea. No other strategic partner of the U.S. received such commensurate amounts except for Taiwan and Israel. Economic aid to Korea in this period, for example, was almost half of U.S. assistance to all of Latin America, that too an often neglected backyard. Nor does this count the massive private contributions, from aid to mission-supported public institutions including the great Korean universities as well as orphanages, hospitals, etc., etc., to the ordinary penny-ante contributions of Peacecornicks.

There are those – and the hangers-on of the recent Seoul administrations were prominent among them – who argue Washington created a dependence which held back development. Nor would anyone who observes the present strength and vitally of the Korean economy -- the third largest in Asia and the eleventh largest in the world, in terms of nominal GDP as of 2006 –account for it except through the grit and hard work of the Korean people themselves. It is simply not recognized often enough that in the aftermath of one of the most derstructive wars in history, South Korea grew from being one of the world's poorest countries to one of the richest, that in a few short decades it enjoyed one of the fastest rates of prolonged economic growth in world history.

Now, in their perceived wisdom, the Korean electorate has turned their back on a decade of “blame America first” politicians. And, as that old political maxim of former Vice President James Nance Garner of Texas goes, after reeling off all that he had accomplished for a constituent, the voter responded, “But what have you done for me lately?”, the South Koreans are looking for results from new leadership rather than more rhetoric.

It remains to be seen whether they will get it from conservative candidate Lee Myung-bak. Lee was elected president in a sweeping victory in mid-December, winning almost half of all votes despite last minute allegations of financial impropriety. Apparently the voters wanted “The Bulldozer”, former reform mayor of Seoul, a businessman unlike previous Korean presidents who have been either military figures or politicians, to try to get the South Korean juggernaut of the pre-1987-89 East Asian Financial Crisis rolling again.

The four or five percent increases in the gross national product which have been the recent norm – not bad at all as against a stagnating Japan, but miniscule against a roaring double digit figure for China, and even India, a latecomer to the Asian sweepstakes – is no longer good enough.

Lee seems to feel the national pulse: “I am well aware of what the public wants,” he said in his acceptance speech. “I will humbly devote myself to the people of Korea, I will save the economy from crisis, and I will bring harmony and unity to this divided society.”

Lee made it his minor pitch but while he will continue economic engagement with North Korea, he has promised to demand better behavior from Pyongyang in return for Seoul’s aid and development assistance. And he has also pledged to repair relations with the U.S.

More than one analyst said the results should be viewed more as a vote against unpopular incumbent Roh Moo-hyun and his once ikonic predecessor, still in the wings, Kim Dae-jung, than as a sign of Lee’s popularity, especially given the record low turnout of 63 percent of eligible voters, from over 81 percent a decade ago.

From the standpoint of a modern, industrialized democracy, things are not good. South Korea’s stock market has suffered huge net outflows of foreign funds during the past year because of lagging indices – and the snipping of the Blue House under outgoing President Roh Moo-huyn at foreign investors, some of whom rescued Korean enterprises in the 1997-98 crunch. The U.S. and global slowdown many are predicting would curb exports – even though South Korea has diversified its export base. [Seoul sent 21 percent of its overseas shipments to China and 13 percent to the United States in 2006, a turnaround from five years earlier when it was the United States that took 21 percent versus 12 percent for China.]

But growing competition from China for third markets is an increasing problem demanding that Seoul get back into the swim of importing foreign investment with its tied technology. [Lee has plans for a Korean Silicon Valley as part of his pump-priming along with ambitious trans-isthmus canal which would cut shipping costs and set up a new industrial corridor.]

Although overall unemployment remains relatively small by comparison with other industrial economies, South Korea’s labor scene is embittered by the still aftereffects of the 1997-98 collapse, a long history of repression of trade unionism, and the emergent militants. [Roh was one of them.] The unemployment also strikes particularly hard at new labor market entrants, graduates of South Korea’s huge educational system-industry, and their demands for “clean” jobs.

The country is sensitive to high oil prices, and those and other commodities are beginning to nudge inflation. There is a domestic liquidity crunch, added to galloping loan growth – all setting out plenty of problems for Lee to tackle with one of the most entrenched and obdurate bureaucracies in the still very Confucianist Korean society.

Also Korea faces parliamentary elections. Lee’s opponents hope that charges of corruption during his business career may stick and have an impact on the constitution of the new assembly. In Seoul’s own somewhat cumbersome combination of presidential and parliamentary government, it could make an even tougher job of assembling a new domestic program.

On the issue of relations with North Korea, Lee, as a businessman who turned a relatively small construction company into a giant in the shadow of one of the chaebols, the huge family-owned Korean conglomerates now under bitter attack from the left, seems to know instinctively what is at stake.

Open-ended economic assistance to the North [with payments under the table to corrupt politicians in the South] is not going to change the regime in the North, not even moving it to “the Chinese model” to save itself. Whether it is generally acknowledged by its partners [or even the U.S. State Dept’s striped-pants negotiators], what has moved Pyongyang to make possible concessions at all has been the application of an economic tourniquet by Washington and Tokyo on its operations, many of them black market, in East Asia – not entreaties to Kim Il Jong’s better character.

Most South Koreans want an accommodation with the North – both for nationalistic motivations and because they do not want half their population in Seoul to come under the artillery trained on them from just across the Demilitarized Zone. But they are not willing to pay the kind of price that they believe the West Germans have, however unwittingly, for national reunification – not at a time when unemployment is still high and their vision of the good life of a modern industrial society has been whetted.

Finding the proper compromise, to force the North to move [even at the risk of eroding their impoverished Communist monarchy] away from weapons of mass destruction and profitable proliferation of missiles and WMD technology to other pariah states will take careful and clever coordination of policies – not least with Seoul’s allies, the U.S., and, yes, the sometimes hated [but much admired and copied] former colonial power, Japan.

That’s why relations between Washington and Seoul aren’t going to be one big bed of roses hereout with Lee. But in the midst of all the everyday inevitable frictions and conflicts – even between fellow democracies – it’s not a bad idea to ponder on how South Korea as an example of how American statecraft has sometimes succeeded, willy-nilly, in a turbulent world.

That’s a particularly good thought while the American body politic and candidates on both sides of the political spectrum try to take snapshots of a fast moving turbulent scene in Iraq, another one of America’s ventures in world policing a half century later.