Wondering just how loyal a US ally Moon Jae-in is

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Originally posted at Asia Times.

In 2005, while serving as the US Marine Corps attaché in Tokyo, I spoke at a UN-sponsored symposium on stopping North Korea’s nascent nuclear weapons program.

The speakers put forth different combinations of carrots (oil, food, money) and sticks plus assurances that didn’t fall into either of those categories – packages that they thought might prompt Kim Jong Il (the current Kim’s father) to give up his quest for nuclear weapons.

Accomplish this, and all would be right with North Korea.

When my turn came, I noted that nobody had mentioned the humanitarian catastrophe and widespread torture that North Korean citizens were suffering. This alone, I argued, was reason enough to isolate and force change in the country.

At the break, two men introduced themselves as being from the US Department of Defense. One of them said: “We wish we could say that.”

My answer: “You mean we can’t?” I thought that’s what Americans were supposed to do.

Give a similar speech in Seoul these days and it might be the cops showing up in the foyer and telling me, “you’ll keep quiet if you know what’s good for you.” And if I were a South Korean citizen – even an escapee from the North Korean gulag – and decided to write the message down and send it to North Korea, there could be criminal charges and a spell in prison.

President Moon Jae-in’s South Korean government recently rammed a bill through the National Assembly that further criminalizes South Koreans doing things the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and his sister don’t like.

In this case, the law prohibits something South Koreans have been doing for years: launching toward North Korea balloons containing leaflets criticizing the Kim regime and its assault on human rights.

Some messages also describe the reality of life in South Korea (the opposite of what Pyongyang tells its citizens), and the balloons may also carry Bibles, rice, US dollars and USB sticks containing world news.

The nominal excuse for the ban?  The balloons might land on South Koreans in the border area. And also it is littering if they touch down in the wrong place. One hears these sorts of excuses from Japanese bureaucrats trying to cancel missile defense systems.

The Moon administration and previous leftist South Korean governments over nearly 20 years have tried to placate and buy off North Korea. Pyongyang’s behavior hasn’t improved, but the country does now have improved nuclear weapons capabilities and the means to deliver them.

Naive or worse?

This could just be Jimmy Carter-style naiveté, but maybe there’s something more going on.

Americans often assume that South Korean governments, regardless of political leanings, share Washington’s basic objectives – specifically, to maintain a solid US-Republic of Korea defense against North Korean aggression; to “denuclearize” the North; and to keep democratic South Korea as part of the US alliance network in Asia, with the People’s Republic of China on the outside.

But maybe Moon Jae-in and his colleagues aim for something different? Such as unifying South and North Korea – and removing the Americans from the peninsula. More than a few South Korean leftists see the Americans as imperialists whose presence is the reason for a divided peninsula.

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