I want to write about the China-US relationship, but that’s going to take a bit more time to get my thoughts in order. In the meantime, some light can be thrown on the topic by an interview published yesterday by the BBC’s Jean Mackenzie with South Korean president Lee Jae Myung. It’s well worth a read.
As you might remember, Lee was elected in June, at his second attempt, following the impeachment and removal of his predecessor, Yoon Suk Yeol, who had attempted to stage a coup last December. Yoon and his supporters portrayed Lee as a dangerous leftist in league with North Korea, but in reality he seems like a completely normal centre-left politician.
The difference between left and right in South Korea is not that either of them wants to compromise on the country’s independence, but rather on just how to deal with the challenge of the north. The right tends towards confrontation, the left towards negotiation. Given the erratic and unscrupulous nature of the North Korean regime, and the downright weirdness at times of its leader, Kim Jong Un, that’s not an easy choice to make.
But these days Kim looks less and less like an outlier, as Donald Trump has redefined the standards of sanity for world leaders. South Korea once felt itself to be confronting the maniacs in the north while anchored in a relatively stable western alliance; now it is much more a matter of balancing between madmen on both flanks. And China, which used to be concerned to rein in Kim even as it propped him up, now sees more of an advantage in having a madman on its own side.
Hence president Lee’s dilemma, trying, as Mackenzie puts it, to “navigate South Korea’s place in a shifting world.” Although he describes the world as “dividing into two camps,” with Russia and China on one side and the west on the other, that’s not the real problem: if that were all there was to it, South Korea would have no practical choice but to side with the west. The problem is that neither “camp” is stable: Trump rejects the values on which the western alliance is based and often prefers to side with Russia, while the China-Russia relationship is at best a precarious marriage of convenience.
So Lee, who has been keen for Kim and Trump to resume the warm relations that characterised Trump’s first term, now says that denuclearisation of the north should not be insisted on as a precondition for agreement, although it should remain a longer-term objective. A deal that would freeze the expansion of North Korea’s nuclear program would still be a step forward – what he describes as “an interim emergency measure.”
At the same time, South Korea needs to maintain its engagement with China, in the hope that mutual economic dependence would deter China from any move towards armed confrontation. That’s the same calculation that Taiwan’s supporters of peaceful co-operation made, but their voters decided that this was a losing game and they are now out of office. And it’s possible that the voters were right: China has an emotional investment in Taiwan that could conceivably outweigh rational calculation (just as Vladimir Putin’s did in Ukraine), but it has no such animus towards South Korea.
Given Trump’s support for his fellow coup plotter Moon, Lee can hardly expect warm relations with the US. But unlike, say, Volodymyr Zelensky, for whom the risk is that Trump and Putin will do a deal at his expense, he is in no immediate danger from a Trump-Kim agreement. His priority is to keep the madmen around him in a rough sort of equilibrium and, like the rest of us, to weather the immediate storm in hopes that a saner world will one day follow.
The World is Not Enough 