South Korea in the Crossroads: Autonomy and Alliance in an Era of Rival Powers

DATE: 18:00 -19:00, Monday 12th February 2018
VENUE: The Henry Jackson Society,
Millbank Tower, 21-24 Millbank, London, SW1P 4QP
SPEAKERS:
Scott Snyder
Author of South Korea in the Crossroads
Director of US-Korea Program, Council of Foreign Relations

Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Senior Research Fellow, Asia Programme, Chatham House
Senior Lecturer, Modern Japanese Politics and International Relations, University of Cambridge

Dr John Hemmings
Director, Asia Studies Centre, Henry Jackson Society

Dr John Hemmings:

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m John Hemmings the Director of the Asia Studies centre here at the Henry Jackson Society. It’s a real honour and privilege for me to be seated here next to these two gentlemen here who will be speaking to us about South Korea. Scott Snyder is over here from the US, author of this fine book which you will find outside – and I hope you will have a look at it after the event is over. Scott is an old friend, someone I have worked for and admired his writing for a long time, he is a very serious author of not just on South Korea, but also North Korea. His negotiating book from 1999 was my first experience of him, I’m very happy to have him here. He’s the author of the US career program here at the council of foreign relations. Equally privileged to have here on my left is Dr John Nilsson-Wright who is the senior research fellow at the Asia program of Chatham House and is the senior lecturer in modern Japanese politics and International Relations at the University of Cambridge, and he will be a discussant for a talk which will be about fifteen minutes and then about seven minutes. I think with that, I will not say too much about the men’s bios there is a paper in front of you, you can refer to that if you want more information. And with that Scott, will you take us away.

Scott Snyder:

Ok, well thank you John very much for hosting me here at the Henry Jackson Society and it’s a pleasure to be in London and I very much appreciate and remember the opportunities that we’ve had to work together in the past. In fact, this is the second book event I think that John has helped to host me for, he put together something for a previous book I did as well. Every author is really keen for opportunities to talk about their work so I really thank you for that.

So this book South Korea at the Crossroads, really is the product of a research effort on my part to try to understand and dig-in and identify the determinates behind South Korean strategic choices. There are three main South Korean foreign policy debates that I was really interested in exploring, but as I get started in looking at the factors facing South Korean strategic choices, I realised that I also needed to step back and understand the evolution of South Korean foreign policy over the timeframe since the founding of the republic of Korea in 1948, so actually I ended up backfilling the first part of my book provides a historical summary of the evolution of South Korean Foreign policy really trying to dig into what I identified as the central theme or tension that has really framed almost all of South Korean foreign policy discussion from the 1950’s and is an enduring tension between the desire for autonomy and the need for alliance, and actually that particular tension has endured across the backdrop of South Korea’s remarkable economic transformation and it’s political transformation. And so

in many respects it’s really self-evident that the tension existed really from the time that the alliance was created as a product of distrust between President Eisenhower and President Syngman Rhee
As the US was trying to push through the negotiation of the Korean armistice that would end hostilities on the peninsular, in a way the alliance was really an instrument to keep Syngman Rhee from continuing to try to fight the Korean war and continuing to try to go North, and it bound the US to South Korea in terms of a commitment to preserve South Korean security. But then, as South Korean foreign policy capacity evolved, each South Korean president has taken a different approach to trying to manage this tension between the desire for autonomy and the need for alliance, as it pursued its foreign policy and as the scope of South Korean foreign policy expanded from initially – I would say that south Korea’s foreign policy was almost completely defined by its relationship with Washington. To one now in which we see now that South Korea has a global reach diplomatically and Washington is still an important part of it. But South Korean policy goes well beyond the relationship between Washington and Seoul.

So I kind of explored that particular evolution, but then these three policy debates that I really wanted to dig into, one, is what are the implications of South Korea’s diplomacy for its capacity as defined as a Middle Power. South Korea has been increasingly using this middle-power framework as a way to try to define and find various options, that would help it to try and get out of its conundrum historically, geographically and geo-strategically as being on a fault line between major power interests. And there’s a kind of paradox that South Korea faces as a middle power in that it’s able to do things like host the Olympics in Pyeongchang, which is able to do very efficiently and in a way that generates global appreciation. And yet, South Korea remains constrained in its own immediate security situation, I mean after all it was necessary for some kind of inter-Korean agreement to try and tamper down tensions across the peninsula for South Korea to have this successful Olympic Games. In some ways the success of the Olympics still depends upon Kim Jung-un, to that paradox I try to dig into.

A second debate that I look at is how Korea can balance its economic dependency on China, against its security dependency on the United States and I try to project how that might develop overtime as the context of the US China relationship evolves from one where the US has been the dominant player to one where China is increasingly challenging and making itself felt on South Korea’s immediate environment.

The third one is really about the South Korean long standing desire for unification, and that’s the one I’m going to drill down on a little bit and talk about in more detail. I had been using as my kind of entry story into that discussion a focus on the DMZ and the joint security area, and actually we’ve seen some interesting development over the past few weeks that involved the demilitarised zone and that’s really the historically significant symbolic point of confrontation between the two Koreas. But it was also the line which was traversed when North Korea came to negotiate at [inaudible] arrangements for participation at the Olympics, it’s also the line that the North Korean orchestra crossed back to the North just earlier today. But I think the story that I think is most significant for the DMZ that was recounted to me by a South Korean professor was his visit to the joint security area. Usually foreigners are the ones who go, South Koreans usually don’t go. But this professor went with his parents and with his children, and he told me about how they had different reactions. For the Grandparents they were almost afraid to come to the front, they had living memories of confrontations, so the idea of looking into North Korean territory actually generated fear. For him and his wife it was more of a deeply symbolic, reflective moment to be there and think about the symbolism of the demilitarised zone and Korean division. And for the kids it was essentially a play area, no historical consciousness. And what’s really striking to me about this story is that it reflects the changes in terms of Korean attitudes towards reunification generationally as we get away from the immediate experience of division and we can see a lot of these changes in public opinion, especially in the South Korean youth towards North Korean participation in the Olympic games, just over the past few weeks. But just very briefly I want to go through, that I think there are four main South Korean approaches or strategies to the longstanding objective of reunification that I see over the course of the past two decades and these moments of reflection and action in terms of South Korean strategies on reunification are also are very useful in expressing the south Korean domestic divide on reunification, because two of them are reflective of progressive yearnings for a gradual reunification process, while the other two are more reflective of conservative interpretations of how North Korean collapse might bring in reunification, and so just very quickly going back, one critical moment where Koreans thought unification might occur was towards the end of the cold war. At that time, then South Korean President Roh Tae-woo, the first democratically elected president (but with a military background) proposed a nord-politic strategy based on the German ost-politic and actually his particular formula that his government put together was called the Korea national community unification formula, it involved conversations on both sides and was initially designed as a gradual reunification formula and the nord-politic formula actually results in inter-Korean negotiations and agreement between the Koreas, sometimes called the basic agreement. But it really is an agreement that outlines everything you would want to see in terms of reconciliation, non-aggression, exchange and cooperation on the social, political and conference building levels.

Of course the problem is that it was never implemented, why? Because of the emergence of North Korean Nuclear problem in 1992 and the US concerns about that. So fast-forward a few years and we have the second moment, where I think many South Koreans thought that unification might be at hand. At that time South Korean president was Kim Young-sam, Kim Il Sung, the founder of the North Korean state had died. North Korea was facing a lot of economic difficulties as a result of the cut off in aid from the Soviet Union and China and the South Korean President started talking about a hard landing for North Korea and he used this analogy of a broken aeroplane and the expectation was that North Korea was going to collapse under its own weight. And of course we know that the North Koreans faced a famine at that time, there were upwards of a million casualties as a result of that particular famine. And many people I think thought that, indeed some American negotiations thought it was going to collapse. And we made an agreement on the nuclear issue on the premise that North Korea would indeed collapse. But that was a moment where the conservative view of unification by absorption it was kind of in view, but then it didn’t come about. What we saw instead was a financial crisis which took the wind out of the sails of conservative South Korean views about unification by absorption, it was accompanied by and enabled by the first progressive south Korean leadership under Kim Dae-jung and of course Kim opened up an entirely new approach to North Korea, everyone knows it as the Sunshine policy. Because of the Asian financial crisis, the prospect for being able to finance and mediate unification had evaporated, and so the idea of having a longer-term view of a process, a gradual process of convergence between North and South Korea involving reconciliation, exchange, cooperation and eventually some kind of political union became the dominant frame work for South Korean under Kim Dae-jung, and of course that policy lasted to his successor Roh Moo-hyun, but overtime it became characterised by critics as a one-sided love affair, involving South Korean economic giving, but not much reciprocation from the North Koreans. And eventually we got a switch back to a conservative administration.

And so the last example I want to focus on is under the previous President Park Geun-hye we had the unification jackpot she used that phrase, to invoke the idea that North Korea again following the passing of Kim Jong-il and the rise of his son Kim Jong-un, that somehow at the moment of transition, the idea that North Korea again could be vulnerable. And of course we all know the end of that story [inaudible] Kim Jong-un is still there as the leader of North Korea. So what can we take from these three strategies of Korean unification moment, well I think the most important observation on that front was made to me by a former South Korean Minister of Unification who made the statement that, there’s not anything that South Korea can do to attain reunification, it is instead something that will come to us, it will come to South Korea, and South Korea will have to deal with it at that particular moment. And so very briefly I would simply suggest (and I go into much more details in my book a couple of factors that would be critical in shaping the pathways to unification and peaceful co-existence on the peninsular. The first set in some ways are in flux, but they are choices that the North Korean leadership can make about its own approaches to economic reform and to relations with South Korea and I would argue that those two issues have a material impact on possible pathways to reunification. The issue of economic reform or not economic reform, integration vs [inaudible] will have an influence on what South Korea can do in terms of engaging with North Korea and also the question of whether North Korea views South Korea as an enemy or as an object of co-existence will have an impact, because after all, in the end I think for many south Koreans unification is far distant, but the critical issue for South Korean prosperity and security is the prospect for peaceful coexistence. There was a song that was sung at the inter-Korean concert, called our wish is unification. But I think that for most South Korean young people, their wish should be for peaceful co-existence. And then, just very quickly the other factors I explore is, what if North Korea is unstable, what are the options there? I would argue that the pace and nature of instability in North Korea will shape those pathways, and in terms of nature it’s the question of whether North Korea’s instability comes in explosion or implosion, and in terms of pace its whether the process is sudden or gradual. Each of those pathways begins to help us to take a first cut of what the situation will look like, and obviously for someone like the former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung who wanted to pursue a sunshine policy, he was betting on the idea that North Korea would be reformist and would not be an enemy to South Korea, that bet looked like it wasn’t going so well in the end, but now we’re in a situation when Kim Jong-un has been pursuing reform but without opening economically, but he’s facing an international pressure campaign that is actually designed to undercut that, to induce instability and put us on one of the pathways that I just described though instability for unification. So I think that’s where we are at. I think we’ll just have to wait to see if the events over the weekend actually mark a shift in Kim Jong-un’s approach from being an enemy, or some kind of reconciliation, or whether or not a visit from President Moon to visit Pyongyang is actually a different form of competition that is designed with more nefarious ends. I’ll just stop there and look forward to hearing what John has to say.

Dr John Hemmings:

Thank you Scott, John, I’ll turn it over to you.

Dr John Nilsson-Wright:

Great, well thank you very much Scott for a fascinating and a wide ranging talk, you’re confronted me with a challenge really, of where to begin. You’ve given us history you’ve given us insights into leadership, the first thing that stuck me hearing you talk about this tension between autonomy and alliances and the US role in building a relationship with South Korea is how similar in some ways those choices are for South Korea’s neighbour Japan, with one I think very obvious difference, which I think is that when you look at early American engagement with Japan there’s a degree of shared common knowledge and a degree of affinity that is somewhat counter intuitive given the legacy of World War Two. But it struck me that in some ways, the challenge in the united states have been greater because of the differences between the two systems for much of the post war period authoritarian governments in South Korea until the 1980’s as you mentioned, and therefore if you like an inbuilt tension. so one of the questions that I have is how South Korean leaders, who have been so focused on developing their autonomy within this alliance structure, is how they have developed to accommodate differences with the United States. Another striking difference with Japan is that despite Japan’s economic success over the post-war period at least for the early stages for South Korea relative economic stability and dependency on the United states would have constrained South Korean freedom of movement, and yet we’ve seen this real ambition, this aspiration, I think it’s no coincidence that the South Korean’s like the Japanese use the term, Middle Power Diplomacy, In fact I believe it was actually arguably a Japanese academic who coined the phrase. And yet it’s the Koreans who’s made much of the running, in terms of being able to put policy flesh on the bones of that idea, so it raises an interesting question, how have they been able do that? Is it partly a function of leadership, because here I’m struck by another similarity; South Korea for very obvious reasons as a new state emerging in the aftermath the Korean war is inevitably a divided politic, not only between North and South, but also between internally between two distinct communities that have very different visions of political life, whether it’s those who focused conservatively on prioritising economic development or those who embraced the democratisation movement, and to see leaders from both sides of those distinct political communities both conservatives and progressives investing so much energy in developing this sense of autonomy and at the same time managing the relationship with the United States suggests to me that there is a quality of leadership in South Korea that we perhaps haven’t seen in Japanese politics at least until recent developments in Japan, with president Abe. You talked also about how now we see a change in attitudes, particularly amongst young people when it comes to unification. One of the ironies is that as South Korea has developed economically that traditional conundrum of how best to accommodate the relationship with the United States in the context of the cold war and the need to reach out to North Korea. That tension has been elided a little bit as South Koreans have become (particularly with the younger generation, people in their 20’s and 30’s) less focused on the issue of unification, and yet obviously as a strategic issue this is something that the leadership cannot ignore, and one of the things – and this is another question to you Scott that I would be interested to hear your views on. One of the things that I think has marked President Moon out in contrast to Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun is that as a progressive leader, he seems much better placed to walk the tight-rope between those two distinct communities; we saw it early in his presidency in his handling of the THAAD discussion, we’ve seen it in the arguably in the fairly astute way in which he has handled President Trump, giving him the public credit for if you like initiating the idea of the peace Olympics, even though all the evidence pointed towards the South Korean role as being decisive, long before perhaps the new year’s address of Kim Jung-un. So what is it about President Moon. Is it the learning experience of having seen his mentor attempt to reconcile these tensions but fail, that has allowed him to learn from that direct experience? Or is there something more fundamental structurally about South Korean society and politics that gives him more attitude? Is it a function of the way in which the new blue house operates, and of course the question that I’m sure all of us would like to ask you coming hot-footed from Washington is what is happening internally in Washington? Because for those of us who have been looking at the alliance relationship for so many years, it’s hard to imagine, to remember a situation in which things seemed so unbalanced on the surface and yet we hear from people close to President Moon that behind the scenes, that the relationship is actually working better, even with what appeared to be a major propaganda coup for North Korea, with the arrival of the leader’s sister and the appearance of a vice President who was perhaps flat-footed, in terms of his tactical response to the North Korean overture. We are also hearing privately that Vice President Pence and President Moon are actually on the same page when it comes to being receptive to this overture.

I suppose what I would like to end with is really a question about identity politics. Identity politics between North and South Korea because when we think about unification we know that there are multiple models; federation, confederation, unification by absorption, all of the things that have been discussed and some of the things that have been explicitly ruled out by President Moon, thinking back now to his speech in Berlin last year. Yet it seems to me, if we think about identity as a number of factors here I’m thinking about the work of a Polish intellectual [inaudible] said in an article he published about a decade ago, that identification, collective identification is a function of a number of factors: a sense of common origin, a sense of history, a sense of a common substance or a territorial delimits if you like, a territorial space that is common to the nation, but also a sense of a common future, that defines a nation and its identity. If we think of those ingredients: a sense of common origin, a sense of history, a sense of a territorial space that is common to the nation, and a sense of a common future what are the ingredients that would work when thinking of a model absent the hard landing that we have heard you refer to (either explosion or implosion), if these states manage to maintain their separate existence, but remain committed to a common goal what are the ingredients in their common history that could provide a basis for a workable unification model as well as a sense of common future.

Dr John Hemmings:

So, I think with chair’s prerogative I might lump one extra question on you, I do apologise. So the two questions from John if I have correctly are, what drove Moon in terms of the triangle with North US, and then the second one identity politics, where do we go from here on the future on North South identity. I wanted to throw another triangle at you and that’s the triangle you’ve written about before, which is with China, the United States and South Korea, and I wondered this recently in a work group we had in that where if China were to suppose the United States in hard power terms, and it’s a conjecture question, but how would you see South Korea’s balance shifting? Is south Korea invested in the values part of the alliance, or is it a shrimp among wales that must respond to its environment as it sees fit.

So if you can answer those three then I’ll open it up to the audience.

Dr John Nilsson-Wright:

John, can I just add one other thought that has just struck me?

Dr John Hemmings:

Please, sure.

Dr John Nilsson-Wright:

You’ve presented Scott some sort of, a sense of how easily personalities change how the North Korean challenge is framed and we know that one term-presidents often swing from one side of the pendulum to the other if we look beyond President Moon, are we likely to see, given the consolation of political forces in South Korean at the moment, a swing in the pendulum in the opposite direction, away from this emphasis on engagement. Or is engagement now seen as something that both sides of the political isle need to embrace?

Scott Snyder:

Ok well there’s so many very hard questions, I don’t know how I can possibly get to all those. Let me start with where I think the Moon administration can be placed in the context of the history of the alliance relationship and this tension between alliance and autonomy, it actually goes beyond what I was going to cover in the book but it’s such an interesting question. John I think focused on learning or structural factors and you focused on primarily domestic structural factors. But I think the major factor that really shapes South Korean policy under Moon is actually the most is the international environment and the fact that in an environment of rising tension between the US and China and the US and North Korea, South Korea finds itself constrained. So as a result even though Moon Jae-in was the Chief of Staff under Roh Moo-hyun who was probably the South Korean President that pushed the bounds furthest in terms of trying to pursue autonomy, but ultimately found himself unable and unwilling to abandon the alliance framework, Moon has made a very pragmatic approach. Basically he has pursued pragmatism. Rather than ideology, it could be learning, but I think it is really the fact that the environment surrounding the peninsula has constrained South Korean foreign policy options, autonomy as an explicit objective of a progressive president is simply not viable give the domestic and international factors that Moon faces, in my view. That leaves you with the sub question, of how can Moon manage relations with Washington, I’m kind of cheating on this one because you referred to it, but I want to address it because I think it is really interesting. It’s another issue that is kind of lurking out there, but I couldn’t cover it completely in my book, and that is what does South Korea do about the possibility that the US could pull the rug out from under it? After all candidate Trump said let them go nuclear essentially, to South Korea and Japan. But if I look at the structure of the relationship between South Korea and the US I think the right approach for South Korea is to continue to double down on institutional coordination, strengthening relationships with congress, continue to tend to unprecedented levels of support from the American public for South Korea, that are driven primarily by perceptions of North Korea as a threat. As a way of embedding or entrapping Trump in the alliance relationship. If we go back to the other critical moment where the alliance seemed to be in jeopardy back in in 1970, when Jimmy Carter was ready to pull the US forces out of South Korea because of the South’s atrocious human rights records we see actually that was thwarted primarily by the institutional view of the threat of North Korea, and that was sufficient to overturn Carter’s campaign flash. Actually, now I think that South Korea has a lot more to work with and a much larger reservoir of support at present and so they need to focus on maintaining those three stands in the relationship as a way of trying to keep the US on side.

The identity politics question was asked in such an interesting way. Really I think that if we look at those factors related to identity, and think about origin, history and substance it looks as if North and South Korea are operating on very different playbooks. I think that increasingly, actually peaceful coexistence is the goal out on the horizon that is feasible, and that unification is going to be a kind of mirage. It doesn’t mean that it might not be a useful political trope (it might continue to play that role) but I think that in reality there might not be much other than other than a duet that we can find between the two Koreas, a duet at a recent concert, that really binds them together in substantive structural terms. Then future South Korean strategic choice, John chapter nine is exactly about that question, so I probably should just say buy the book (laughter ensues). I do want to say one thing about that issue, the values issue is one of the factors that will hold South Korea on side to some degree, I would argue that the critical question for South Korea as it looks at the future of its position between the United States and China, is actually, who sets the global rules, because South Korea has been such a beneficiary of a US led rule by law, especially with international trade. So that question is really very important when we think longer term about where south Korea might go in the event that China becomes more powerful than the United States hypothetically. But I do think that is a factor which would generate increasing possible tensions in the alliance as South Korea views that prospect on the horizon. So I think we will see some manifestations of hedging in one form or another that will become a challenge for US-Korea [inaudible].

Dr John Hemmings:

I did start this section, I loved how you mentioned that Korean scholars recall the disastrous failure of transitioning their allegiance from the Chinese Ming to the incoming Manch’s and how that was a horrific experience for them.

There we have it. I will pick on you, if you could keep your questions relatively short since its so many people, maybe say who you are, your affiliation and your question. Do I see any one?

Bureau chief of Sankei Shimbun, Japanese newspaper:

Thank you very much, my name is [inaudible], Japanese newspaper bureau chief of Sankei Shimbun. I just wondering regarding the North Korea crisis, regarding missile development, how South Korea takes part in stopping these issues, for example our prime minister, President Moon didn’t mention military exercise with the US, why is President Moon not willing to exercise? if he is at a cross road, we understand he should take exercise [sic].

Dr John Hemmings:

It’s a good question, a very interesting question; why did Moon push back on the [inaudible]?

Scott Snyder:

That’s been very interesting to watch and in a way I think it’s a good manifestation of the peculiarities of trilateral coordination among South Korea, Japan and the United States vs the bilateral Japan South Korea relationship. So here you have a situation where the South Korea Japan relationship in many ways, I think you could describe it as cool. The questioner may consider that to be a diplomatic description. This trilateral framework is actually enabling some productive interaction between the three countries. The issue of the exercises of course, well first of all what’s the state of play currently, they’ve been delayed in view of the fact that South Korea hosting the winter Olympics, the general expectation is that they will be held in April. There’s been no evidence yet there is going to be any additional delay. Is this a question that President Moon might try to take up with President Trump in the context of his invitational letter to Pyongyang, well I don’t know. Maybe, that’s going to be something that the South Koreans are going to have to sort out. Because in the end President Moon really needs President Trump’s endorsement frankly, he needs a little bit of a stamp of approval in order to be able to go on that trip without finding that he’s facing an even more severe domestic cleavage. I think the better way of asking the question is what does Moon need and how is he going to prioritise what he needs in order to keep the ball rolling; I would argue that he may need to go ahead and have exercises in order to keep the ball rolling. But he may also need the North Koreans to do some things and the biggest thing that he needs from the North Koreans, that he’s asked the North Koreans to do is talk to the United States, basically I think in South Korea, if the South Korean President raises the issue of could you please denuclearise, we already know that the North Koreans are going to respond apoplectically to that. So talk to the United states, I think is basically a code word for, we’ve got to address the denuclearisation issue as part of this process. I don’t think that cancelling military exercises is going to get the US on board to working effectively on the denuclearisation piece, so what came out of the meetings between Moon and Pence is a continued commitment to international pressure, which will not be removed until we see evidence of concrete of action toward denuclearisation from North Korea. And the issue of military exercises, well if the NBC commentator is having problems with what he said about Japan in the commentary during the Olympic ceremonies, then we can imagine that it may not be an entirely fit topic for public discussion between the leaders of Japan and south Korea about the future of a US exercise; I think the interesting question is are we seeing continuing progress, or are we seeing stagnation in terms of trilateral security cooperation among the US, South Korea and Japan? There are some reasons for concern on that issue, but on balance I don’t think that we’ve seen regression, to date.

Dr John Hemmings:

Even after TCOG?

Scott Snyder:

Well TCOG, that’s a different historical timeframe. I’m talking about recently.

Dr John Hemmings:

John do you want to add any points to that?

Dr John Nilsson-Wright:

I would just point out that I think that this issue of trilateral coordination reflects the main issues of your talk really, which is autonomy and security. Autonomy not only in the context of the US-Korea relationship, but in the context of the relationship between Tokyo and Seoul. At least the press reporting that I’ve seen, suggested that Mr Abe made it very clear, to his South Korean counterpart that he wanted those military exercises go ahead. Whether because of domestic political reasons, personal sentiment, or the second issue which is the issue of security assessments the South Koreans effectively said this is our decision, this is really an issue of domestic security, and how we approach the North, but then the second issue is you we assess the motivations of the North Koreans, and you would expect a progressive President to be more optimistic, all be it very cautiously, that the North Koreans might be willing to offer something that would be considered sufficient to let these talks take place. But the basic principle that it is a combination of unrelenting pressure through the sanctions regime in the hope that you will then have the opportunities for discussion, but the North Koreans have to move first. But it then it seems to me that if we are assessing the trilateral relationship, that there is a greater optimism in Seoul than there is certainly in Tokyo that the North Koreans might be persuaded to do something different. There are of course, increasingly I think more hawkish voices in Japan; this is I think a significant potential wedge between the Japanese and the South Koreans. Very unusually, you argue that the military option has to be considered as a viable option, and of course you can see from Japan’s perspective strategically the risk is much lower, I mean it may not be much comfort to the residence of Tokyo, given North Korea’s missile capabilities. But compared to the people sitting in Seoul, military action if it were to be taken would ultimately have a much more immediate impact on South Korea. That leads me to a question that I wanted to ask Scott in response to the very first point.

Dr John Hemmings:

Can you save it for after?

Dr John Nilsson-Wright:

Can I save it? Ok, sure.

Dr John Hemmings

I’m sorry, just so we can go back to the audience; Warwick had one.

Warwick Morris:

Warwick Morris, former ambassador to South Korea. In fact, you asked a question that I was going to principally focus on and you have answered it to a large extent Scott. I was just going to talk about how Moon got to where he is, he was as you say very close to Roh Moo-hyun. He was Chief of staff throughout the time I was there and throughout his precedency and of course he saw Moo-hyun lose favour with the people and by the end of Roh Moo-hyun’s precedency in spite of all these efforts to build bridges with the North Koreans, the South Koreans people lost all faith in it because they didn’t believe they were getting anything in return so Moon has seen all that in close quarters and I think there is quite a lot of learning in his current position as president. I agree about peaceful coexistence being the aim and managing the situation. I was in South Korea again in the late 80’s for the Seoul winter Olympics and in the early 90’s again when the Soviet Union collapsed and German reunification happened; overnight young Koreans were suddenly saying if we do reunify it’s going to be very costly, overnight professors were saying to me that their classes were saying that they weren’t sure about reunifying any longer because they realised it was going to cost so much. So there was a huge change then in attitudes, and as you say young Koreans are for obvious reasons less concerned than their predecessors. That’s a comment because you answered the question I had.

Dr John Hemmings:

Thank you very much, does anyone from the region – I see some young Koreans in the room, have any questions? Go ahead, did you have your hand up? Tell us who you are.

Audience member:

I didn’t have a specific question, I just wanted to show you a little something.

Dr John Hemmings:

Fine (it was implied Mr Hemmings would be shown the information once the event had concluded).

Simon Smith:

Thank you very much John and thank you for wonderful introductions from the speakers to such a range of really complex issues. My name is Simon Smith, in precisely three weeks from now I will be starting my job as the next British ambassador to South Korea. So I have something to look forward to there. I have a very brief question on the China relationship; we’ve seen where we’ve got to so far on the THARD episode, how would you characterise that, is that just end of act one? [inaudible]. What more might we expect from China having seen what can be achieved or perhaps also having seen what can’t be achieved by applying that sort of pressure. What next, what’s act two is there is an act two?

Dr John Hemmings:

Do the three no’s still exist?

Scott Snyder:

Oh, yes well, I believe we are act the end of act one and there will be more acts to come. That’s exactly the formulation I’ve been using actually. There are more potential areas where missile defence can come into play and also for China the objective of this whole THAD episode has been to bound the US ROK relationship to the peninsular; there’s a problem in that regard because the US and South Korea have already defined the functions and scopes of the alliance as going beyond the peninsular. The China are actually a little slow to catch up here and so there will be I think other areas of potential tension; the Chinese still see South Korea as a potential weak link in terms of national security and the nature of the way in which the THAD issue has been taken out there on the Chinese side as an issue, both in the context of the three no’s as informal and contested expressions, that may define a desired bargain, that in South Korea relations has not been consummated or accepted and are subject to changed based on future evolution of developments. This is a very complicated formulation that frankly in some ways at least again, first at following the Moon visit to Beijing not clear that either side has really got enough to call the relationship stabilised at the level that both sides had desired to achieve. We could see more on this, it could be on issues related to missile defence, but it could also come in other forms. We saw a classic example of this prior to the Moon administration, where basically the Chinese tried to declare in the Asian international conference building group that South Korea was involved with, along with a bunch other countries from South and South West Asia, that one of the principles they should act on is no alliances. The South Koreans pushed back on that and rejected it. We’ll see other forms of pressure like that, that will come up and it’ll be interesting to see how a progressive leadership manages under these conditions.

Dr John Hemmings:

I do apologise I know we’ve got plenty more questions, but really we should wrap up. Then obviously you’ll sign books I hope afterwards, so if you’re keen to ask a question you can do so while you get your book signed.

I just thought what I’d do is I’d ask John to make some final remarks and get Scott to make some final remarks – maybe throw your question in there.

Dr John Nilsson-Wright:

Yeah, I was struck by your recommendation for what the Moon administration should be doing; in terms of managing the relationship with the United States with the emphasis on institutional coordination and strengthen ties with American public opinion. One would assume that just the durability of the alliance would mean there is a reservoir of good will, but at the same time we’re also in a very different strategic environment, with the expectation that with the year, North Korea’s missile capabilities, if testing continues will become materially much more threatening to the United States. We’ve heard predictions form American senators who one would imagine would be slightly more sober-minded that President Trump, saying that once the United States is in the crosshairs that the risk of the United States having to engage with military action becomes much higher. What happens then, to the emotional effective ties between Americans and South Koreans, how stable are they? To what extent do American politicians, American public opinion and the American media see South Korea with whom they have a common interest, and therefore is the danger that South Korea facing something that should be prioritised, even at the expense to exposing themselves to more risk.

Scott Snyder:

Well this is going to sound like a truism, but fundamentally unilateralism is bad for alliances. Hate to break that to people. But really I think the thing you are pointing to is that there is this really bad dynamic that we see in alliance management and the impulse for the stability and perpetuation of the status quo. What I’m really interested in that regard is that if we go back to 2010 and the North Korean sinking of the South Korean, Cheonan vessel; at that time there were a lot of South Koreans that were frustrated that they didn’t take greater retaliatory measures against North Korea. Of course on the US side we were concerned about escalation control, we didn’t want to see the South Koreans take a step that was going to result in an escalation of the crisis beyond what we could manage. When it comes to the potential threats to the United States the roles end up being reversed, and of course the South Koreans must be concerned that the US could take a unilateral action, that we haven’t really thought through and that would blow through any constraints on escalation control. Because that would have tremendously serious consequences for South Korea. The broader existential question is, are we better off together and is there going to be a unilateral moment as we address this issue together? My position is going to be that we’re better off together both on the sub deterrents challenges and on the asymmetric challenges to deterrents that North Korea poses.

John Hemmings:

Well I think that, we could not have a more knowledgeable panel here in terms of both John and Scott. I think we’ve really just scrapped the surface of an incredibly complex set of challenges facing a dynamic country in North East Asia. I would like to give a hearty thanks to Scott, a hearty thanks to John and I would ask the audience to do the same. Thank you very much.

HJS



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