Gong Ro-myung Criticizes President Kim's Foreign Policy
(Wolgan Chosun, June 2002 issue, pp. 100-118)[The June issue of Wolgan (Monthly) Chosun, published by the Chosun Ilbo, carries a long interview with Gong Ro-myung, a retired career diplomat who served as ROK foreign minister for two years under Kim Young Sam (Dec '94-Nov '96), and is now a chair professor at Dongguk University. An informal summary translation follows.]
A. Question: What do you think about Bush's "axis of evil" statement?
-- Gong Ro-myung: We have no need to harbor illusions about NK. Indeed, we must understand NK well. Kim Jong-il's "military first" policy keeps the regime in power. The ROK wants NK to choose a market economy, but NK's foremost objective is to preserve its own system. Those who consider NK our "brother" and believe that unification is right around the corner, those who equate our "federation" strategy for unification with NK's "curtailed confederation formula" not only ignore reality, they are doing something dangerous.
-- Gong (cont'd): At a moment in history when the world's nations seek peace and stability, when the world is one large village, why is a small country like NK developing missiles and weapons of mass destruction? NK signed the Anti-Terrorism Treaty, but it has been involved in international terrorism all along. What about the murders in Rangoon, the bombing of the Korean Air liner? We must not forget those things. We can't just say that NK's hands became lily white overnight. It is wrong to condemn Bush's statement without waiting to see how much NK will end up contributing to world peace. One must never rest from prudently managing the relationship with one's allies.
B. Q: What do you think about the anti-U.S. statements of some in the Kim administration?
-- Gong: That is not a desirable thing to do if you want to preserve the allied relationship. Likely they were afraid that Bush's statement would pour cold water on N-S relations and undermine the Sunshine Policy but, even if that is the case, those who said such things should have thought a little harder before they spoke. The ROK-U.S. alliance does not have the deep roots of shared culture and race that, say, the UK-U.S. alliance enjoys. The ROK and U.S., therefore, must always work to keep their interests aligned and their alliance burnished. Both must find and stress our similarities. You can't bash your ally and then suddenly stretch out your hand when you need him. Just before the IMF incident, then Deputy Prime Minister Kang Kyong-shik flew to Tokyo to try and arrange a foreign capital loan. Then President Kim Young-sam had offended the Japanese, and bilateral relations were sour. The Japanese told Kang to go home without the cash. In the end it was the U.S. that helped us out of the currency crisis. Those who led that effort in the U.S. government were the State Department and the Pentagon. The Treasury Department was not enthusiastic. I repeat, one must never rest from prudently managing the relationship with one's allies.
C. Q: Anti-U.S. sentiment has become much more public, much more obvious under the Kim Dae-jung administration with its stress on the Sunshine Policy.
-- Gong: As the process of democratization has proceeded in this country, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom to assemble have expanded. That has given greater voice to a relatively small number of people and groups who were quiet before. Those groups are active today, and that raises the decibel level of anti-U.S. expression. The 23 February 2002 Sisa Journal the carried the results of a Media Research survey in which 40.9% of respondents picked China as the country they liked best. Only 29.6% chose the U.S. A Gallup poll conducted at the same time showed that 59.6% of respondents said they disliked (silt'a) the U.S., while 33.7% said they liked the U.S. Those polls were taken at the time Kim Dong-sung lost a gold medal at the Winter Olympics to an unfair decision. I believe those bad numbers were only temporary things because the judge involved in that incident wasn't even an American. He was Australian. It's wrong to denounce the U.S. as if it were responsible. Polls show that the U.S. is the second most popular place to go to live, and I think that shows we don't see the U.S. only as bad. It's nonsense for NK to demand self-reliant unification involving only the Korean people when it was Kim Il-sung who brought foreign powers back onto this peninsula in 1950.
D. Q: Isn't it true, though, that USFK crime and trade friction anger the ROK public?
-- Gong: USFK crime does anger the public, but the public should stop to consider that there is no way you're not going to have some level of crime where 37,000 soldiers are stationed. Some of the "crimes" are blown out of proportion, too. When I was in the cabinet, TV news ran huge stories about a USFK soldier who sexually harassed a Korean woman in the subway. USFK informed us that the woman in question was, in fact, married to the USFK soldier in question. The problem was that he touched her bottom on the subway. The problem wasn't sexual harassment; it was a cultural difference. Korean culture doesn't allow a husband to do that in public. The TV news didn't know the facts, so it made a big deal reporting an incident of "USFK sexual harassment." We told the news people, broadcast and print, what the facts were, but nobody printed a retraction.
E. Q: Doesn't NK's incessant anti-U.S. propaganda foment anti-U.S. sentiment in the ROK?
-- Gong: That's very possible. NK always raises racial self-reliance as it demands USFK withdrawal, but there's a hidden agenda there. For example, NK canceled the fifth round of bilateral minister-level talks the morning they were to be held. The Swedish prime minister later visited Pyongyang, met with Kim Jong-il, and then came to Seoul. He said NK told him it postponed the talks until it could track U.S. NK policy more closely. Stop and think about that a minute. NK demands that the U.S. stay out of Korean affairs but halts N-S talks because of concern for the U.S. NK feels subordinate in its relations with the U.S.
F. Q: How does NK use nationalism deceitfully?
-- Gong: Some people believe that NK is more nationalistic than we are. Our university students focus a lot of energy on the left, and one of the books they read is "Perceptions of Liberation History." That book, for example, claims that NK embraces nationalism, while we do not. There again, if NK is bound and determined to be nationalistic and self-reliant, then it should improve N-S relations without regard for the U.S. It doesn't do that.
-- Gong(cont'd): When Russian President Yeltsin visited the ROK in 1992, he gave us documents about the Korean War that had been kept in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. The documents showed that NK planned on armed unification from the moment it was created. It sent a plan for peninsular unification by force of arms to Stalin in January 1949. Kim Il-sung visited Moscow in March of that year, but Stalin wouldn't hear of a NK invasion of the ROK. Kim Il-sung went back in March 1950 and strongly demanded that Stalin support an invasion, and Stalin approved, pointing to changed international conditions. NK protestations about "self-reliance" and ridding the peninsula of foreign powers is sheer nonsense.
G. Q: How do you feel about "self-reliance and independence" and "self-reliant diplomacy," slogans you always hear in anti-U.S. demonstrations in the ROK?
-- Gong: Who can oppose independence? A self-reliant and independent mindset, however, will not resolve all your problems. Usually when we talk about self-reliance and independence we raise as a bad example the toadyism that for 500 years formed the basis of the Choson Dynasty's foreign policy. The dynasty did not resort to toadyism because it had a deficient sense of independence. It did so because it didn't want China to absorb it, because that course maximized its self-reliance in a world dominated by a great power. That's the way it is and will be with our foreign affairs in the future, although not to the degree it was in the Choson Dynasty.
-- Gong(cont'd): These people who stress self-reliance and independence typically want the ROK to stand alone. After World War II, Japan went through an agonizing period of self-reflection trying to determine what led the country into war. Japan decided the basic reason was that it was isolated internationally. For that reason, Japan's foreign policy since the war has been based on alliance with the U.S. and on cooperating with and staying in line with the international community. I find no reason to criticize Japan for a policy toward the U.S. that puts cooperation ahead of "self-reliance."
H. Q: I hear frequently that Germany's rapid unification came about because of trust of the U.S.
-- Gong: Unification here, too, must be accompanied by international cooperation. Mutual trust certainly is necessary for unification. The U.S. position just before Germany's unification was that a unified Germany absolutely must be a member of NATO, but the Russians opposed that, as did even Britain and France in the later stages. British Prime Minister Thatcher said World War II was "living history" in her country because men who had fought in World War II were still alive. French President Mitterrand didn't directly oppose German unification. He just said it could come when Europe itself unified.
-- Gong(cont'd): The first President Bush's trust of Prime Minister Kohl gave Kohl the power he needed to pull off unification. The U.S. convinced Britain and France and got the Russians aboard, too. I met with West German Foreign Minister Genscher after unification. He told me, "You Koreans say you want unification, but you can't do it with the kind of relations you have now with the U.S. There will be no unification in Korea without U.S. support." Our geopolitical situation makes it amply clear that we will not achieve unification without the support and understanding of our allies, and no amount of fantasizing about "self-reliant diplomacy" will change that.
I. Q: Some believe the emergence of many left-wingers in the ROK has fanned anti-U.S. sentiment.
-- Gong: There's something to that, and I'm chagrined that so many of Bruce Cumings' theories have been accepted by our political scientists. You hate to say it, but some of those people are in the Kim
administration.
J. Q: Basically, what is the U.S. to us?
-- Gong: The U.S. helped the ROK to be born, and we must not forget that when NK invaded us in 1950, the U.S. came to our aid to help preserve our independence and our national security. No country was or is more important to us economically than the U.S.
K. Q: People claim that the Kim administration has messed up our relations with the four great powers because it forced relations with those countries to accord with overall ROK policy toward NK.
-- Gong: Certainly the Kim administration was displeased at the impact of the "axis of evil" remark on its NK policy, but I am more worried about the administration's placing a higher priority on relations with China and Russia than with the U.S.
L. Q: Do you have in mind the ABM clause in the ROK-Russia summit statement?
-- Gong: I think we weren't thinking quite well enough on that one. Much of the problem, however, was working-level. The ROK believed it could use that language because it had been used at the Okinawa summit, where both the U.S. and Russia were present and where neither made an issue over the language. Another problem was that the ROK foreign minister just didn't think through the ramifications of that language. He was so focused on Russia he failed to consider the broader implications. He and his vice minister later resigned, mostly because of that mistake. [Note: ROK Foreign Minister Lee Joung-binn resigned in late March 2001, shortly after both the Kim-Putin summit in Seoul and President Kim's disappointing summit with President Bush in Washington; Vice Minister Ban Ki-moon resigned days later.]
M. Q: The Kim administration messed up over appointing the ambassadors, too.
-- Gong: In fact, the man appointed ambassador to China had been a cabinet officer, while the man appointed ambassador to the U.S., our most important diplomatic post, was not. From the outside that looks very much like a tilt toward China. I believe President Kim appointed that man [Note: Prof. Yang Sung-chul] as ambassador to the U.S. because he felt he could trust him politically. I think he appointed former Foreign Minister Hong Soon-young as ambassador to China because he felt sorry for releasing Hong from the cabinet, and because Kim's aides argued that Hong was too good a man to put out to pasture. ROK press reports would have you believe the U.S. was upset over the ambassadorial appointments, but that wasn't the case. In diplomacy, it's not the title that matters. It's how close the man is to the head of state. No matter how you cut it, though, the fact is that it looks like we tilted toward China.
N. Q: There was a lot of concern after the ROK-U.S. summit in March 2001.
-- Gong: The Bush administration was new, and the two men hadn't met before. President Kim's message was a call for the U.S. to talk to NK. The U.S. had said it wanted to open a line of communication with NK, but the Bush administration didn't have its ducks lined up, so it really couldn't respond to President Kim. Kim went to Washington way too soon. He should have given the Bush administration time to get organized on the NK issue. Kim thought he would have an easy time of it, but he wasted the effort.
O. Q: I don't know. ROK-U.S. relations haven't looked all that good to me since that summit.
-- Gong: That's because the two countries have basically different views on NK policy. Bush administration views of NK are negative. Before she came to the White House, for example, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote for the journal "Foreign Affairs" an article on diplomacy vis-à-vis rogue states. In that article, she revealed a very negative perception of NK. The Bush administration's position is that it will not negotiate just to negotiate. It will not beg for dialogue. It will talk for results, and it wants verification of agreements. Verification is a function of reciprocity. The ROKG, on the other hand, separates politics from economics in dealing with NK and doesn't insist on reciprocity. It will be unilaterally nice to NK. That raises public concern.
P. Q: How can we narrow the differences in view with the U.S.?
-- Gong: We must approach it at every level. The Trilateral Committee Oversight Group can help. We must work ceaselessly at coordinating our positions. We're quick to accuse the U.S. of unilateralism when we're guilty of some of that ourselves. I think what we do now is inform each more than coordinate with each other. You have to make a value judgment. Should coordination take full cognizance of the alliance? We must conform to U.S. views, and the U.S. must understand our positions. You have to work at it always.
Q. Q: The Japanese prime minister again this year worshipped at the Yasukuni Shrine, and again our relationship with Japan is strained.
-- Gong: The two countries must work out the problem of past history. The ROKG must understand that working out this history requires ROK effort, not just Japanese effort. We expect co-hosting the World Cup to lead to more cooperation, but we shouldn't just stop with that. We need to pursue a new relationship with Japan. Neglect that, and the future is opaque. Japan cannot easily overcome the power of the right in that country. The Asahi Shimbun tries to do that, but the Yomiuri and Sankei counteract its efforts. We must give greater voice to the kind of people who prefer to read the Asahi Shimbun.
-- Gong (cont'd): We need to create a relationship with Japan in which each of us needs the other economically. Japan's aid to us in the 1960s was essential to our modernization process. We need a free trade zone with Japan if the ROK is to make another leap forward economically and carve out an economic niche in Northeast Asia. A free trade zone would increase our market by a factor of 10. Some believe a free trade zone would only worsen the bilateral trade gap, and that would be a problem, but only at the beginning. We need to start with small steps.
-- Gong (cont'd): China's economy will soar once it aligns itself with WTO requirements. China's enormous labor pool and its fast industrialization are major threats to the ROK. We must prepare ourselves by boosting the quality of our economy, and the best way to do that is to forge links to Japan's economy. Foreign policy must not be held hostage by public emotion.
R. Q: Japan's relations with NK seem to be going nowhere fast.
-- Gong: Japan tried for a long time to improve relations with NK, but the ROK urged it to go slow. Now the situation is reversed. There's a reason for that. Japan sent NK 500,000 tons of food aid. NK's Kim Yong Sun addressed that but instead of saying thank you, he said Japan sent the food to repent itself for past crimes. That angered the Japanese public. Then there's the issue of the kidnapped Japanese families [sic]. Japan can't normalize until that's resolved, and Japan is tired of giving to NK and getting nothing in return. NK must accept the rules of the international community. When it comes down to it, the Sunshine Policy aims to get NK to do just that.
S. Q: The Potomac Society in the U.S. surveyed next generation ROK leaders and found that an overwhelming number of them expected to be closer to China than the U.S.
-- Gong: Emotion is downright dangerous in international relations. The ROK public believes the Japanese occupation has not been cleared up and is romantic in its view of China. China fought us during the Korean War, but there is little evidence of that in the ROK public. We have embraced Chinese culture for centuries, of course. I myself descended from a Chinese ancestor. I link (smiling) directly to Kong Pu-ja (Confucius), in fact.
-- Gong (cont'd): At its present rate, China will overtake the U.S. in 2020. The Chinese, though, don't expect that to happen until 2050. China is already our second most important trading partner. Its proximity is a major determinant in our geopolitical situation. However, the U.S. security guarantee and even its economy remain more important to us than China. If history is any guide, we need to be on our guard against China. Chinese fishermen violated our waters every year despite the fuss our press made. It took nine years of work before we got a fishing treaty concluded with China, and that was only last year. Consider the garlic case. The garlic at issue was worth only $8 million, but China imposed penalties totaling $450 million. We must not bank on Chinese good will.
T. Q: China can help us resolve the NK issue, right?
-- Gong: China could help with unification, but it has no incentive to do so under present conditions. China's Korean specialists see NK as valuable to China strategically and geopolitically. They're not in a hurry to see a unified Korea, especially if the ROK plays the lead role. They see that as equivalent to the U.S. advancing right up to the Yalu. China's northeastern region is very important economically and militarily. Major military facilities dot the area. To the Chinese, a unified Korea would bring a U.S. bayonet right up against that soft underbelly. Year before last when the national missile defense (NMD) issue was big, KIDA sponsored a seminar, and the Chinese representative publicly warned the ROK that China would not sit still if the ROK accepted a U.S. NMD facility. That tells you all you need to know about the sensitivity with which China views the Korean peninsula.
-- Gong (cont'd): China each year provides aid to NK in the form of up to 500,000 tons of food grain and up to 1.2 million tons of oil. That's a third of NK's food requirement. Virtually all the oil NK gets it gets from China. China is preventing NK from collapsing, and it does so because it likes NK's policies.
U. Q: Doesn't China support peaceful unification?
-- Gong: No, it supports the status quo on the peninsula. China doesn't want NK to provoke the ROK, but it doesn't want the ROK to unify the peninsula. Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee year before last said in his autobiography (From Third World to First) that in event of peninsular unification, China would lose the NK card to play against the ROK and the U.S. Lee said China will never support unification.
V. Q: Russia is trying to exert influence on the peninsula.
-- Gong: Russia at this point would be hard pressed to abandon its move toward a free market. Although Putin in 1999 revived NK-Russian relations, qualitatively those relations are not a worry to us. Russia does want to exploit its technology and advance into NK, but it wants ROK companies to fund the move. That's hardly a frightening scenario from our standpoint. Unlike China, Russia would welcome unification under the ROK's aegis, so long as no power unfriendly to Russia was involved. China is the unmanageable problem for us. I wish more ROK people would say that, but they don't, and that worries me.
W. Q: How do you view the N-S summit?
-- Gong: I think it will prove to be a landmark in N-S relations, but a number of things about it frustrate me.
X. Q: For example?
-- Gong: President Kim Dae-jung's speech in Berlin led to the summit, and in that speech Kim promised three things -- a security guarantee for NK, aid to restore the NK economy, and help for NK in the world community. He also made three requests of NK -- that it immediately abandon armed provocation, that it stop development of nuclear weapons, and that it stop development of long-range missiles. He also said unification was not around the corner, so NK and the ROK should avoid war and increase cooperation.
-- Gong (cont'd): In the joint statement issued after the 15 June 2000 summit, however, nothing was said about peace and security, yet unification was played up despite President Kim's statement that it wasn't around the corner. Peace and security would have been in the statement unless NK had opposed their being there. The summit was good; the joint statement good, but I worry about it because it does not spell out our areas of disagreement, as we might have expected it to do.
Y. Q: Some say the Kim administration blatantly used the summit for domestic political purposes.
-- Gong: Yes, they announced the summit just days before legislative elections. That may have helped their candidates, but they forfeited an opportunity to wait a few days and win widespread popular applause for their NK policy. They sacrificed a larger good for a smaller good. I can't understand that.
Z. Q: Many believe NK accepted the summit merely as a way to improve relations with the U.S., and maybe as a tactic to improve Kim Jong-il's image.
-- Gong: That's possible. It is certain that NK agreed to the summit as part of a larger strategy. I believe NK believed the summit would prompt the U.S. to jump into negotiations. When that didn't happen, NK put the brake on relations with us. The summit changed Kim Jong-il's image from that of a dictator of a starving country to that of a courteous and humorous leader.
AA. Q: NK's pattern seems to be to respond to something big, but then back away from major follow up.
-- Gong: I think that's right. They do that so they don't have to change. Lim Dong-won insists that NK is changing, but I don't see it. Yes, you've got farmers markets now, and the people can travel more than they could in the past, but if NK gets back on its economic feet, look for even those small developments to be reversed. NK is doing everything it possibly can to keep the Kim Jong-il regime alive. They don't want the kind of change we want them to pursue. The Kim administration's headlong rush to appease despite NK's lack of response causes public antipathy for our NK policies and causes our international friends to see us as naive.
BB. Q: Why did NK permit Lim Dong-won's visit?
-- Gong: Partly to get the U.S. interested, but mostly because it needed food and fertilizer. Don't think me too cold when I say this, but that's all NK wants from us. You can see that from the way they allow so few family reunions, and oblige us to hold them on their territory.
CC. Q: The Kim administration blames the U.S. hard-line position for the absence of NK-U.S. talks.
-- Gong: I don't agree. The U.S. has never said it won't talk. It has said it the other way, consistently. NK is holding it up. NK is using us to carry messages to the U.S. We're a messenger boy. NK has no intention of letting the ROK take the leading position in unification.
DD. Q: NK subordinates N-S talks to talks with the U.S., right?
-- Gong: They do, and its foolishness. They need to take a page from our book. We knew in the 1980s that the path to Pyongyang led through Beijing and Moscow. NK still thinks it can get to Washington without going to Seoul.
EE. Q: How do you view the Kim administration's separation of politics and economics in dealing with NK?
-- Gong: Selig Harrison is the most pro-NK U.S. figure. He believes that President Kim outdid all previous ROK administrations by separating politics and economics. I fail to see how the policy serves our interests. I'm not even sure you can separate them, as a practical matter.
FF. Q: How do you view fears of a peninsular crisis?
-- Gong: Those fears have no basis that I can see. The IAEA deadline is nearing, to be sure, but I blame NK for at least 80% of the whole thing, including the delay in light-water reactor construction. I
just don't see a crisis coming, and I can't understand those in the Kim administration who keep that fear alive.
GG. Q: Will Kim Jong-il make his promised visit to Seoul?
-- Gong: I don't rule it out completely, but it isn't likely. NK may want to exploit a visit at some point, but not this year. Many believe NK makes decisions quickly because it's a dictatorship. In fact, it's ponderous, and I wonder whether it could decide on a Seoul visit quickly enough to exploit some fast breaking situation. Jo Myong-rok made his Washington visit 18 full months after the Perry report came out. NK could have $10 billion and normal relations with Japan just by apologizing over the kidnapping, but it can't decide to do it. I don't think those people have a lot of flexibility in their thinking.