The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (79 page)

Roh had no familiarity with foreign policy—indeed, he had never been to the United States before becoming president—and he was burdened
with terrible political instincts that left him poorly equipped to deal with many domestic issues. None of that was helped by the fact that he was the target of a South Korean press that relentlessly painted him as a radical anti-American working to undermine US-ROK security relations. Roh’s approach to North Korea was seen by many American officials and South Korean conservatives as Sunshine II, a continuation of Kim Dae Jung’s policies toward Pyongyang. Yet as one close observer put it, Roh “did not give a damn” about North Korea, and he certainly did not have Kim Dae Jung’s ideological outlook.

According to Moon Jae-in, Roh’s closest adviser and an unsuccessful candidate in the 2012 ROK presidential race, Roh’s main focus when he entered office was to rid South Korea of the remnants of its authoritarian past and to firmly establish democratic habits in the government and the economy. What he cared about was changing South Korea’s political culture, with its embedded traditional approach to nearly unfettered authority. In the end, Roh was a tragic figure, a leader deeply offended by the injustices committed during the years of dictatorship, yet one who—in his efforts to right the wrongs and correct the historical record—ended up adding fuel to the political passions that had kept his country’s politics bitterly divided for decades. That legacy, and the lingering conviction among many both inside and outside Korea that Roh’s leadership was simply “weird,” largely obscured the role he played in encouraging institutions that would help the still young democracy in South Korea deepen its roots and develop a civil society. His suicide in 2009, after he appeared tainted by the very sort of corruption that he had pledged to banish from Korean politics, shocked the nation and only reinforced the impression of the tragedy of his era.

Despite the adjectives tossed around in South Korean media, Roh was not a radical in any sense of the word. Above all, to those who observed him closely, Roh was a lawyer, with a lawyerly approach to problems. Too often, this technical approach left him seeming unmoored from the hard realities of South Korean politics. While conservatives attacked him from the right, his former allies complained from the left. In August 2005, at the midpoint in his term, the
Hangyore Sinmun
, a voice for liberal-leaning politics, sighed that Roh had been “trapped in the fortress called power and has lost his feeling for the real world.”
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Where Kim Dae Jung, a politician of long experience, knew how to maneuver and cajole, Roh’s approach was to go at issues head-on. Roh told his advisers that he had a good relationship with President Bush, and even
those American officials who observed the two leaders together agree that the personal chemistry was better than outsiders might imagine. The two were “straight shooters,” and in their own minds that was a major plus. On their first meeting in Washington, in May 2003, President Bush took Roh—who was a Lincoln fan—to see the Lincoln bedroom in the White House. The gesture got relations off to a good start. At another meeting, when he was working from briefing notes apparently prepared by aides who were skeptical of the United States, Roh would raise a point and Bush would answer it to the ROK president’s satisfaction. Finally, after several such volleys, Roh put the notes aside, saying, “Well, these are worthless.” Not every meeting went so well. On a few occasions, in public and in private, Roh pressed Bush to the limit. At a meeting in 2005, Roh would not let up in challenging Bush. After the South Korean leader had left the room, the president turned to his aides and said, “He’s pissing me off.” ROK officials who heard the remark hurried over to calm things down, and the atmosphere at the lunch that followed was fine.

Whatever their differences and occasional scrapes, Bush seemed to understand that Roh “delivered” on issues important to the United States, sometimes breaking with his own supporters to do so. In 2004, despite considerable popular resistance, Roh sent three thousand ROK troops to join the US-led coalition in Iraq.
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He even went ahead after a South Korean hostage was beheaded in Iraq by a group demanding that Seoul cancel the deployment decision. Roh also went against his party in pushing for the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, which was finally passed by the legislatures of both countries in 2011. Bush was in the minority in his views of Roh. Many in the upper ranks of the administration were utterly dismissive of the South Korean leader and his policies, reinforcing the general perception in both Seoul and Washington that the two governments were increasingly at odds.

As different as he was in most respects from his predecessors, Roh shared with them the stubborn conviction that Korean interests could not be advanced by always bowing to the priorities of a larger power. In 2004 and 2005, this conviction led him and his government into troubling internal debates over what, from Washington’s perspective, was a false and destructive dichotomy—the value of the ROK-US alliance versus the imperative of national sovereignty. In this case, “sovereignty” was seen as the need to weigh the alliance against the impulse for progress with North Korea—a balancing act that made absolutely no sense to Washington,
which believed without question that the alliance was essential to the security of the South as well as the bedrock for its economic and political progress over the years. As a result, there came a point in the minds of US defense planners, not unlike that often reached during difficult periods in earlier decades, when they felt they had to look past the storms swirling around an incumbent ROK administration and craft policies that would eventually bring the alliance intact to a more stable future. Even those in Seoul who were largely sympathetic to US views, however, considered the tactical approach Washington took in pursuit of this goal to be flawed, seeming to ignore Koreans’ sense of vulnerability and exciting concerns about the country’s defense when, in their minds, the United States should have been calming them.

The result was that concerns about US intentions and misperceptions on both sides about the future of US-ROK security relations became the basis of deep and persistent problems throughout the Roh years. During this stormy period, the habits of alliance and personal ties between Americans and Koreans built up over the decades proved crucial in keeping matters from getting worse than they did. That Roh himself did not fundamentally oppose the alliance but, in fact, saw it as crucial to ROK security may have been the biggest—if largely invisible—source of overall stability. On taking office, Roh told his advisers, and always seemed to believe, that his first priority had to be maintaining close relations with the United States. Although often accused of causing strains in the relationship, given the circumstances he faced he did a better job keeping ties intact than his critics were willing to acknowledge. The list of accomplishments in support of US-ROK relations in his years as president is reasonably long, even though the lasting impression of problems is stronger still.

Blunt and sometimes seemingly undisciplined, Roh in his public remarks often fed the fires of doubt about the future of the alliance with his own words. On a visit to Turkey in April 2005, he created controversy at home when he spoke out against “working-level” South Korean officials who, he said, did not grasp the “big picture” about the “gradually changing” ROK-US alliance. Unclear about the trends of the times, these people, Roh said, made “sullen” or “outlandish” remarks. That would have been enough to set off a firestorm in Seoul, but Roh, in typical fashion, proceeded to make things worse: “What I am most concerned about are the ROK people. Some considerably highly educated ROK people appear to have a more pro-American way of thinking than Americans themselves. . . .The ROK people should think and make judgments the way most ROK people do. What is important in guiding the ROK-US alliance is to effectively coordinate the American people’s perception of Asian order and the ROK people’s perception of Asian order and make a good judgment.”

The criticism of Koreans who seemed “more pro-American” than the Americans themselves naturally sparked outrage in South Korean media. The Blue House presidential secretary for public information did not help matters when, faced with criticism of Roh’s remarks, she responded, “It has been [the] ROK presidential offices’ mission to keep the alliance with the U.S. while preserving national interest.” That just further inflamed the situation, not only reinforcing the image that the government saw the two—the alliance with the United States and the “national interest”—as separate things, but worse, seeming to accuse those who were “more pro-American” than the Americans of favoring US over ROK interests.

Only a few months later, US-ROK relations faced what might have become a truly major storm. At a reception in the upscale Silla Hotel in Seoul just before the annual Security Consultative Meeting between top defense officials of the two countries, the ROK Foreign Ministry representative, Kim Sook, under instructions from Blue House National Security Council deputy Lee Jong-seok, informed the Americans that Seoul did not want to include a reference to the US “nuclear umbrella” in the traditional SCM statement. (The NSC had previously discussed the question and decided that dropping the term would help provide a positive environment for diplomatic efforts on the North Korean nuclear issue.) The US officials were dumbfounded. SCM statements had for decades contained a reference to the “nuclear umbrella.” Dropping it suddenly would be a major, inexplicable change and could mislead the North Koreans into thinking the United States had reduced its commitment to South Korea. After long, difficult discussion in the hotel’s bar, the Americans told Kim in so many words, “No reference to the nuclear umbrella, no communiqué.” Kim called that information in to Lee Jong-seok, who was attending a dinner with his NSC colleagues. Lee expressed surprise that the United States was so firm on the issue, even though he had been forewarned by the Foreign Ministry that dropping the reference would cause big problems. He told Kim to wait while he did some checking. A few minutes later, he called back: the reference to the nuclear umbrella could stay.

This sort of internal discord within the establishment in the South, added to the differences between Seoul and Washington, became corrosive, continuous drops of acid on the alliance. From the standpoint of some in Washington, Roh’s closest Blue House advisers—especially Lee Jong-seok—did not understand the nuances of military-security issues. When the ROK military complained to its US counterparts that it was being shut out of the Blue House decision-making process, Washington’s suspicions fed on themselves. American NSC staffers did their best to form good personal relations with their Blue House counterparts, and in their view succeeded in building bridges. The problem was that the gulf
in perceptions had become too wide and personal impressions in some quarters on both sides had hardened.

The ROK military was particularly unhappy with policy and had been since the days of Kim Dae Jung. The army viewed many of the steps the Kim administration had taken to advance inter-Korean relations, such as opening transportation corridors through the DMZ, as having undermined South Korean security and set bad precedents. To those charged with protecting the country’s security, holes poked through the DMZ were not knitting the two Koreas together, but rather opening dangerous routes for a North Korean armored attack. These concerns would grow throughout the Roh administration.

As intense as this criticism became, however, it never got beyond grumbling. The idea of a military coup against the civilian government, even when fears about the country’s security were involved, now seemed unthinkable. Military officials, instead, looked ahead to the possibility that the next ROK government would be a conservative one, and thus present an opportunity to reverse what many of them believed were terrible mistakes. In effect, members of the once politically decisive ROK army found themselves using guerrilla tactics against their own government, ceding bureaucratic space for time.

Concerns about the breaches in the DMZ were not confined to the US or ROK side, either. The DPRK army apparently had its own problems with the idea of opening up corridors that would permit high-speed access to the North by American and ROK troops. During one meeting with Kim Jong Il, South Korean officials saw what they interpreted as the supreme North Korean leader working to rope his own military into approving the construction. Rather than simply order his generals, Kim co-opted them, pushing them to take an active part in planning and building the transportation corridors—a rail line and two roads, one in the eastern part of the country and one in the west.

One of the most vexing problems that arose in the US-ROK bilateral security area had to do with OPCON, the proposed transfer of wartime operational control of ROK forces from US to South Korean hands. That would be a big step psychologically, reflecting Korea’s sense that it had entered the ranks of the middle powers and was no longer a dependent of the United States. But OPCON transfer would also involve changes to key aspects of long-established bilateral security structures. Theoretically, it could weaken deterrence by suggesting to Pyongyang that there were now gaps in the alliance, most specifically in the ability to coordinate a ROK-US military response to a North Korean attack. South Korean conservatives, prepared to battle Roh on every front they could find, charged that OPCON transfer was part of the president’s effort to weaken the alliance. Retired ROK army generals considered it a terrible idea, and they opposed it in droves.

Over the decades, the issue of wartime operational control had been raised several times by ROK leaders, who felt the United States used it to tie the South’s hands in dealing with North Korea during crisis situations. This time, however, was different. This time it was the Americans who proposed the OPCON transfer. Washington’s hope was to deal preemptively with what appeared to be signs that the Roh administration would eventually try to recast the alliance in ways that could weaken it. By jumping out in front on the issue, the Americans gambled they could shape the enormously complex process of the transfer of wartime operational command and keep the alliance effective. Once the South Korean military recovered from the shock that it was actually the Americans who were proposing such a big step, the two sides spent several years bouncing proposals back and forth over when the transfer should occur. The ROK military offered a date of 2012, which would be partway through the next South Korean administration. The Americans proposed the transfer take place much earlier—2009—setting off an uproar in Seoul and reigniting fears in some quarters that US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was punishing South Korea for its perceived anti-American tendencies.