Category Archives: Korea (South)

Media Alarmism and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies about War in Korea

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Scheuer should stick to Al Qaeda and his Middle East expertise…

 

For the last week , I have read and watched a lot of the coverage. Most of it was pretty good, to my great surprise, although the international media were too, almost intentionally, alarmist, with little coverage of the fact that South Korean citizens all but ignored this and went on with their daily lives. I didn’t even know about the shelling until my classes had ended that day and a BBC reporter told me. South Koreans have become inured to these outbursts, because they happen so often. This life-went-on-normally story needs to compete with all the images of smoke from the island and the USS George Washington deployment. The Korean media noted this problem as well.

There was a clear tone difference between international media outlets like CNN, Reuters, SkyNews, Fox (above), and the NYT, and the local Korean media. Friends in the US emailed me after watching US news coverage, because they thought a war was imminent. (What are the networks telling you guys?) I get CCN International in my house, and the initial coverage was unhelpful too, with flashy graphics of ‘Breaking News!’ and its on-site reporters got a little carried away with the claim that Korea is close to all-out war. More generally, the tone seemed to be that this was one of the  worst crises since the war. Really? You mean that? Do you see Koreans running around with their hair on fire? Didn’t everyone just stay to work that day and the next? Did they run civil defense drills? Did the KOSPI drop? Does Scheuer (above, whom I think is quite good on Middle East) really think we should sink the NK navy? Interviewing expat English teachers in Seoul whose mothers don’t know anything about Korea and are freaking out is not reporting. It was noticeable and disappointing that none of the foreign outlets hit the news conferences at the MND or MOFAT or Blue House, where an admirable restraint and seriousness prevailed. There is an obvious audience-expansion incentive to hyping the shelling (it’s World War III in Korea!), but the blowback problems created for policy-makers are serious and threaten a self-fulfilling prophecy: they don’t look ‘tough’ if they don’t hit back in a CNN-hyped crisis, so they hit back, thereby worsening that very crisis.

So please don’t portray the Yeonpyeong situation like the first step toward war in a wholly unique provocation. It was neither. NK does this stuff all the time; the NK elite doesn’t want a war because they will lose and all hang afterwards (this is why SK retains the death penalty which they almost never use at home anymore); NK frequently does these things for internal, intra-NK in-fighting reasons that have little to do with the rest of world; SK doesn’t want a war, because it doesn’t want its rich democracy nuked. So please, control the hype and hysteria. If it is both unwarranted and a bit dangerous, because it pushes SK’s elites toward macho, George-Bush-style decision-making so they don’t look ‘weak.’ Raising the temperature artificially to gain viewership is unethical and retards de-escalation.

Korea has ALWAYS been geopolitically tense in this manner. NK has regularly bullied SK; SK’s belligerent rhetoric has never been seriously followed-up; the US routinely steps in to back up its ally; there have been lots of these sorts of crises before, and many far worse: the tree-cutting incident (1976), the cabinet bombing (1983), the KAL bombing (1987), the Cheonan (2010), plus lots of little Yellow Sea skirmishes before (1999, 2002, 2009). NK is always saying they will bomb SK and turn Seoul into a sea of fire. So come on, wae-guk-sarams; put in some context, as if you are genuinely a qualified Korea expert and didn’t just fall off the plane from Tokyo or Hong Kong. For my previous thoughts on CNN, which broadly apply this time around, try here.

By contrast, I was struck by how good the Korean media was on this. I watched a lot of the KBS and SBS TV reports in the last week. They were very informative, full of interviews with government officials and academics, with lots of imagery and maps and such. They walked you through exactly where the NK rounds came from and which SK units returned fire, what the rules of engagement are, who might have been responsible in the KPA. They explained in detail about the in-theater US and Korean forces. So far as I have seen, none of this detail was presented in external media, although I tried. The context I mentioned above was fully presented, as most Koreans roughly know this history anyway. All sort of talking heads from universities and think tanks were rolled out to give lots of perspective and policy suggestions. There was no scary music or quick-cut graphics, although you can always read the Chosun Ilbo for your saber-rattling fix. Usually I am pretty tough on the Korean media on this site. Among other ills, they are endlessly jingoistic, fact-check even less than Dan Rather, are far too statist and deferent to elites, and tilt toward xenophobia on the English teachers here (underqualified, pot-smoking child molesters from Canada, they tell me). But this time they were measured, focused, and professional, maybe because of the gravity of the situation. Hear, hear.

So everyone should relax. If Glenn beck sounds off on the Rapture and North Korea, ignore him (in fact, ignore almost everything Beck, or worse, Palin on NK, says). If the neocon-industrial complex fires up on the necessity of NK regime change and starts claiming Obama is weak, don’t listen to them either. By Korean standards, this is not scarcely a crisis yet (you’d be amazed how blithe they are about these sorts of things), so let’s not raise the pressure on them for ratings or politics. This stuff is far more manageable than those early images of smoke rising from the island lead you to believe.

NB: if I sound to too sanguine, here is the threshold when you should indeed panic about Korea: when South Korea shoots back. Then  you can run your Michael Bay war-time stories, because SK is super-vulnerable to NK. Hence if they still shoot back, they are taking a huge risk and that means the debate here really has shifted. To date, SK has never struck back militarily after one of these sorts of things (no airstrikes, port mining, etc). So that is the real benchmark for ‘Krisis in Korea on Fox!’

NB2 for US readers in Korea: in event of a war, the embassy plan is for us all to head for Pusan and then be flown/shipped to Japan. You can bring your Korean spouse too, but not her family (so I won’t be going Sad smile). You will be notified via the embassy’s email registration system. Sign up here if you haven’t already. No joke on this info, btw.

What the Yeonpyeong Shelling Taught Us

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Not quite… He actually ducks a little

 

Actually, not a whole lot. Mostly, it just reinforced stuff we already know. I said the same thing after the Cheonan was sunk earlier this year.

1. Koreans take this stuff in stride. It was more the international media that portrayed this as a major crisis. In Korea, everyone went about their regular business. The stock market didn’t drop. There was no rush on food-stuffs in grocery stores. No one is digging bunkers. It’s not evolving into the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Korean media reported rather well on the crisis, without the level of overstatement – ‘Korea on the brink of war!’ – that was common from the international media in the first few days especially. This is far from the worst crisis with NK in the history of the stand-off.

2. These sorts of things re-galvanize the flagging US-Korea defense relationship. This may be the biggest benefit to South Korea from the whole mess. Although US political and military figures regularly invoke the alliance as shoulder-to-shoulder (which of course you would expect them to say) both here and in the US, the reality is that the American position here is shrinking and moving away from the hot-spots under substantial US budgetary pressures at home (a $1.3 trillion deficit!). USFK (US Forces in Korea) has shrunk substantially over the years. US nukes are out. The Combined Forces Combined (CFC) is schedule for termination. The number of bases has shrunk. The US is no longer deployed along the DMZ (the big bases will be around Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul, in the future). The massive US fiscal mess will make it even harder to retain what we still have here. Defense budget cuts are coming – in a big way if we want to save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – and US overseas deployments are an obvious place to cut (Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, western NATO especially, unless the hosts want to pay 100% of the costs – which option the Koreans should genuinely consider as a part of point 3 below). Here is my fuller commentary on this. Also here and here.

Korea particularly is a tempting place to cut. Korea is wealthy and has a capable military. It can afford to spend even more on defense (below), while the US most certainly cannot. Nor is Korea really a core US defense interest. Unification on Northern-terms would have little impact on the US now that the Cold War is over; Korea is more a regional issue now, not a global one. Korea hardly ranks against Japan, Canada, Mexico, (Israel?) or Western Europe as obvious ‘core commitments’ to American security. This does not mean I want the US to abandon Korea, only that the likelihood is growing, because the costs to the US of an ROK defeat/reduction are low for the US. Nor do Americans really want to fight in Korea (only 41% now), especially after all the misadventures of the 10-year war on terrorism. Read this as well on this issue.

So if you are Korea, these sorts of scrapes are secretly valuable from a medium-term national defense view.  They put NK back on page 1 for the US voter. They force the US to say yet again in public, that the US will defend Korea. This creates greater ‘audience costs’ for US elites should they try to slip out of the alliance commitment in the future. After the Cheonan, the dissolution of the CFC was delayed for 3 years. Note here that Obama talked around Barbara Walters’ excellent question, ‘is an attack on SK  an attack on the US?’ The president ducked that one (video above). These kinds of public comments make it harder for the US to retrench (even though we really need to), and that is good if you are SK.

3. SK needs to spend more on defense. SK only spend 2.7% of GDP (according to the CIA). I hate to sound like an uber-hawk, but honestly, that is really not enough if you live next to NK and are number one on the hit list. By now it should be clear to almost everyone except the most unreconstructed SK leftist, that dealing with NK is only possible from a position of strength. The North cheated a lot during the Sunshine Policy years, even demanding a big cash payment for Kim Jong Il personally to get him to attend the inter-Korean summit. And in the last few years, the North has gotten even nastier – with the nuke and missile tests and more of these sorts of asymmetric strikes. But Koehler has a series of good links and analysis here that SK has not adjusted well. The US is broke; SK is not. The time for burden-sharing is here.

But you say this is just arms racing. Everyone will just run faster and faster to stay in place. More Southern weapons will scare the North into further wild behavior and yet further punish the much-suffering NK taxpayer. Maybe, but the NK military functions as a state-within-a-state already, and its stringencies on the NK citizenry derive as much from its internal as external insecurities. And NK policy-makers are so irresponsible (Brzezinski went so far as to call them insane), that the causal connection between lower SK defense spending and better NK behavior seems loose at best, while the costs – like the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong – are very clear. Among other things, South Korea might want to consider militarizing more areas north of Seoul and depopulating them gradually, expanding the navy, as these flashpoints occur mostly in the Yellow Sea, paying for more of USFK, even for its expansion, conscribing women as well as men (as Israel does), and possibly – I hesitate to say – signaling renewed interest in nuclear weapons. That last one is hugely controversial, but given the growing likelihood of US retrenchment and the expanding Northern nuclear program, it should probably be discussed.

The North Korean Shelling

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Here is the frightening video if you haven’t seen it yet…

 

So much for the quiet week on blogging because of Thanksgiving. Yesterday NK started shelling Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea (what Koreans call the West Sea). It’s all over the news of course, but here is a good place to start, particularly on the possibility of a hawkish SK response. Here is a write-up from a more left-leaning Korean newspaper. For a good IR theory take on this, try here. I spoke yesterday on the BBC World Service “Newshour” program about this. Here is the link. My comments begin at 10:10 and conclude at 17:45 (this is ‘chapter 1’ of the listed choices). Here is the podcast (please refer to the download entitled “North and South Korea Exchange Fire 23 Nov 10”).

Here are my thoughts (fuller than my BBC remarks). All the links below connect to my previous posts on NK. Please see them for greater detail which this post summarizes:

1. I am surprised that this has evoked so much concern given that the Cheonan cruiser sinking in March was worse (46 deaths then vs 3 this time). The Cheonan sinking very clearly would entail many deaths, whereas yesterday’s artillery strike was less certain to do that. To my mind, NK is more culpable in the spring than this time, but the rhetoric is more belligerent from the ROKG this time than last. Even though fewer died, this might be explained by a ‘straw that breaks the camel’s back’ logic: SK has just had a enough of these sorts of out-of-the-blue strikes (point 3 below), and this time they are going to hit back regardless of the costs. This incident is also somewhat different from past provocations, because it openly is targeting South land territory, and the North Koreans knew that. The other Yellow Sea skirmishes were on the water. Also, there were civilians on the island – and only one firetruck – so it looks perhaps more egregious than attacking a warship. (Although the Cheonan sinking was wholly undeclared and the Yellow Sea islands have been disputed for a long time, so I still find the greater outrage this time confusing.)

2. NK is almost certainly miffed and unhappy at all the global press SK got for the G-20. This is a way to hit back and play the spoiler of SK’s afterglow. NK did something similar in in 1987, when it blew up KAL 858 in order to discourage SK from holding the 1988 Olympics. In both cases, SK regarded the event as a global coming out. In 1998, the Olympics showed that a previously poor underdeveloped country torn apart by war had bounced back through an astonishing economic miracle (2 decades of double-digit GDP growth) and was wealthy and stable enough to hold a major international event. The contrast with brutalized, still poor NK was obvious.  In 2010, the G-20 was also regarded in SK as a major coming out for Korea as a big economic player inside the elite G-20. And now, NK is even poorer and worse off than in 1988. The comparison is pretty stark. So my kremlinological guess is that NK is once again showing its displeasure and that it is still a major force on the peninsula.

3. NK has a history of these sorts of provocations against SK. These sorts of things are practically ritualistic now. While these things are disruptive (to say the least), they are not actually unpredictable. In fact, they follow a pretty established pattern of NK brinksmanship though asymmetric outlashings at SK from time to time. These strikes show the North’s unhappiness at something in the South (like the G-20 last week) or to bolster the CV of NK insiders (like Kim Jong-un today) jockeying for influence inside a fairly corrupt regime with pretty murky rules and shallow institutions. Just in the last 12 months, North Korea sank the SK Cheonan cruiser in the Yellow Sea (March 26, 2010) and fought a naval skirmish in the same area (November 10, 2009). There were also skirmishes in the same area in 1999 and 2002. So this stuff is pretty common actually.

4. This probably won’t escalate, because the South Koreans have little appetite for war against NK. The sinking of the Cheonan was a far worse provocation (46 sailors died), but the SK military did nothing, because most South Koreans just want to forget about NK. They don’t want their wealthy comfortable democracy trashed in a war with a ruler they consider a quack. So South Koreans just put up with this stuff. Their tolerance for NK pain is quite high, because the costs of war and reunification are frightening. Also, South Korea’s hands are badly tied by the extreme exposure of SK population centers to NK retaliation. 50% of the SK population lives within in 50 miles of the DMZ, and NK has stationed thousands, perhaps 10-20,000, canon and rockets with striking distance of those cities for the purpose of holding SK hostage. So NK can act out all these provocations with little fear of retaliation. It is just too risky for the South to hit back.

5. Finally, the Kim family transition in the North itself generates huge uncertainty. These kinds of strikes demonstrate the NK military’s relevance to all involved – not just in the South, but also China, whom they don’t want to dominate them, and to the leader-to-be, Kim Jong-un. This sort of thing reminds him who is boss in the regime, or at least, who is a competitor for power.

Asia’s Improved IMF Quotas — Wake Up! It’s not that Boring…

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images

Here is a subject that could put anyone to sleep but is probably the best thing to come from the otherwise poor G-20 summit last week. The voting shares of the IMF were reweighted to reflect Asia’s expanding size in the global economy. Here is good write-up; for Asian self-congratulation, try this. This puts it in context for Korea.

The quota represents the percentage of control that a state has over IMF decisions. Big decisions are made by the IMF’s Board of Governors, the national representatives who collectively control the institution. On the Board, each country receives a weighted vote whose size (quota) is roughly in line with its national percentage of global GDP, crossed against the importance of exports to national GDP (its ‘openness,’ in IMF-speak). (The voting formula is ridiculously arcane for non-experts. There are endless proposals to reform it. Here it is in the words of the IMF itself.) In short, the bigger your quota, the more sway you have in IMF decisions (about loans, the creation of Special Drawing Rights, IMF responsibilities for the global economy, etc.). The biggest quotas, inevitably, belong to the US, Japan, and the Europeans. However, given Asia’s expansion of the last few decades, pressure is rising to re-weight the votes to Asia’s favor. In practice, that means giving China a bigger voice at the expense of the Europeans, who are resisting quite selfishly it must be said, for all their talk about cooperative global governance and multilateralism. US and Japanese shares will be scarcely affected. Korea’s share will reweighted a little bit as well (1.4% to 1.8%).

For Korea and other emergent economies’ share to get even bigger, they would need explosive growth like China’s, as well as a major demographic expansion. Neither will happen realistically. Globally speaking, Korea is just too small to have a much bigger quota, although a 0.4% jump is 30% quota expansion, which is actually pretty good. The really big quota fight is between China and the EU, with India coming down the pike as well. In short, global economic institutions are adjusting, albeit painfully, to the rise of Asia. The increasing equality of wealth between Asia, Europe, and North America means that the voting weights of each of those regions are slowly equilibrating.

States are sensitive about quota size, because it is a zero-sum game. If Korea gains .04%, that means some other state loses 0.4%. Hence the Fund can never be made large enough to make all feel confortable. Instead, control of the Fund will always be relative – if I have 0.0001 percent, then you do not have it. While global GDP expansion is positive sum, Board control of the IMF (and World Bank) Board is not. And inevitably, the size of a national quota is interpreted as a general sign of global clout and importance. One can see that in the Europeans’ strenuous efforts to delay and obfuscate the re-weighting, for they will lose in that process. It is like the veto rights of the permanent 5 members of the UN Security Council. That is widely considered as a signal of their great prestige, and even though the French and British empires are long gone, it is unrealistic to think that they will give up their P-5 status.

So Korea’s quota increase is good for Korea, in a small way, and it is just, insofar as Korea has grown more rapidly than the EU in the last few decades. But it is not really that important, because 1. Korea’s relations with the IMF are quite chilly anyway, and 2. Korea is simply too small economically and demographically at the global level. More interesting would be Korea’s ‘quota’ in the emerging Chiang Mai Initiative, which is like a local Asian version of the IMF.

Generally, we should be pleased that the IMF was able to evolve like this. The more it looks like the actual world economy, the more it can meaningfully intervene. Contrast that with the UN Security Council, frozen in time (1945), with three veto-wielding ‘great powers’ (Russia, France, and Britain) that are no ‘greater’ than a lot of other countries now. Unable to adapt – again, primarily because of European selfishness (France and Britain will not a agree to consolidate their veto into one for the EU) – the Security Council is sliding into irrelevance. If the IMF – the supposed global tyrant – can adapt, how about the UN?

Asian Myopia on the Imbalances – Deficit Importers will Revolt in Time…

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Suominenfig1

This week, I explained the issue of imbalances in my classes, as well as the general failure of the Seoul G-20. For all the talk of Korean ‘leadership’ at the G-20, it fizzled. Instead of leading by example to actually push through a deal, Korea ethnocentrically took the G-20 as an opportunity to grandstand to the world that “Koreans are great.” So self-congratulatory G-20 concerts took the place of any real leadership on the most obvious thing Korea could have done – finish the US-Korea free trade agreement (FTA) – to help unwind those imbalances. Instead, President Lee choose to sink the FTA at the behest of rabidly protectionist, consumer-punishing Korean auto and agricultural interests. So, with no help from Korea’s ‘world leadership,’ global imbalances have worsened this year.

So let’s go over this once again – with economic logic in the place of raw nationalism.

1. In a closed system, like world trade, some one needs to buy stuff. Everyone cannot export; everyone cannot run a permanent trade surplus; it is mathematically impossible. We cannot export to the moon or God. There must be global demand somewhere, and for much of the last two decades, the US was that anchor – so much so that we even re-packaged the business term  ‘buyer of last resort’ to apply to the US. So, as my students protested, it is true that the US government and consumers, as well as many EU countries, went wild in the last decade with their credit cards and created their own debt problems. But it is also true that without their demand, Asia and the Germans would have nowhere to export to. Now that the US and many other places are deeply in debt, it is obviously time to return the favor. The old exporters should become new importers in order to restore some balance to the system. ‘Diffuse reciprocity’ in trade is a basic requirement, in order that no one feels too much like they are being rooked by the other side. Without rough balancing over time, political disruption ensues (think Greece this year). This threatens the whole system in the long-term. Why is the Korean media too myopic to not see that?

2. The near permanent trade surpluses (above graph) in Asia are not, NOT, natural. It is mathematically all but impossible that a free-trade environment would return a situation where Korea, Japan, China and Germany would run 30 years of trade surpluses while the US ran corresponding deficits in the hundreds of billions USD. Why is this nearly impossible? Because the currency of such super-exporters would go up and up as their exports went up and up. In laymen’s terms, if the whole world wants to buy your stuff (Japanese cars, Korean TVs, Chinese everything), then the whole world needs more and more of your currency to buy all those amazing exports. So all those foreigners buying your stuff exchange their currencies for your currency. All this bidding to buy your currency (so they can buy your exports) means that the price of your currency goes up and up. So if you are permanently exporting more than importing, your currency should be permanently rocketing to the moon as foreigners scramble to buy it. Of course this has not happened. If you look at east Asian currencies, they all are pretty soft against the dollar, frequently moving downward. This is mathematically impossible to square with a permanent trade surplus. The only possible explanation is currency interventions to keep their currencies undervalued. In other words, cheating. And this is in fact well documented. China’s currency is pegged at a ridiculously low value to the dollar (estimates rage around 40-50% undervaluation!), and the Koreans and Japanese regularly ‘sterilize’ their currencies’ appreciation through massive dollar purchases. The Korean central bank’s euphemism for such raw mercantilism is ‘fine-tuning.’

3. Trade must be a two-way street in the medium-term, or the permanent deficit countries will eventually revolt. Here the Korean media is totally unhelpful with its nationalist and short-termist thinking that Korea’s success requires a surplus. This is also logically incorrect. There is no especial value to piling up dollars. Foreign currency cannot be spent in another country, so why stockpile hundreds of billions of dollars, or in China’s case, trillions, of someone else’s currency? If you don’t spend it back by importing, then at some point your export targets run out of money. And this is precisely what has happened in the great recession. The importers of yore are broke, and they need some of their dollars recycled back as export sales. But if you politically refuse to countenance a trade deficit by buying imports from your trade partners, then eventually you anger them: you are trade manipulator, and you provoke trade conflicts. Japan learned this the hard way. Its currency and trade gaming lead to two US backlashes – first when the US broke the Bretton Woods system and inflated in the 1970s, and then again the 1980s with the Plaza Accord. And this is what the Fed’s current quantitative easing is today. The US, unable to convince the surplus countries (esp. China) to import for the collective good of the system, is going to force them to do so, or they will see the value of their dollar reserves evaporate in inflation. Quantitative easing is a declaration of war by the Fed on the People’s Bank of China. This is extremely risky for everyone, as it throws the dollar’s reliability in the air, but it shows you just how head-in-the-sand obstinate the surplus countries are. In order to maintain short-term trade surpluses, they risk the inflation of the very currency they have stockpiled.

Korea and the G-20: An Exercise in Koreaphoria

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A street near my house got festooned with G-20 flags for a week.

There has been lots about the G-20 in the major financial press, but little on the way in which Korea has rewritten the meeting, at least to itself, as a global homage to Korea’s arrival. Most Koreans haven’t the slightest clue what the G-20 is. Nor do they really care much for OECD trading norms – which, of course, is the whole point of the G-20. In fact, they flagrantly violate those norms (as just about every western businessman I have met in Korea reminds me at every conference I go to). The ROK is irritatingly mercantilist, and Americans are right to think Korea cheats on trade. So if Koreans actually wanted the G-2o to be a success, how about dialing down the protectionism and currency ‘fine-tuning’ (i.e., sterilization of inflows to favor big exporters like the ship builders)? I am hardly one to defend the US auto industry for making cars that no wants to drive and that wreck the environment, but Ford nails it with this write-up. So the Chosun Ilbo says Korea should be a good global citizen, but that’s not what Korea really cares about in the G-20.  In Korea-land, the G-20 is an opportunity to preen, not what it actually is suppsed to be – a global economic coordinating body. In the words of no less than the SK president, the G-20 in Seoul means, “Koreans are great and that the world is now recognizing that fact.” Somehow I doubt that is what Medvedev, Singh, Kirchener, and all the rest had in mind. *Sigh*

The Korean press is nothing if not unprofessional and arriviste, aggressively desperate for recognition that Korea is a ‘player’ or, in the locution most preferred by the jingoistic media here, an ‘advanced country‘ (with the obvious implication that other countries are therefore ‘below’ Korea – ask Koreans what they know about Africa, e.g.) Start here and here, in order to learn that the G-20 in Seoul means that the whole world is watching Korea, that Koreans should be proud, that Korea is a global player, a powerhouse, a model, blah, blah, blah. Among other narcisisstic disinformation was the media line that Korea was the ‘first’ non-G-7 state ‘ever’ to host the G-20 leaders. Technically this is so, but the G-20 leaders have only met 4 times before, so it’s hardly as unique as it sounds. (This is preceisely the kind of faux statistic the ROKG and media love to create in lieu of something meaningful; try here for a simliarly desperate non-category – that Korean is a ‘top five food.’) But nothing could stem the self-congratulation. For the three weeks previous, there was a media countdown to ‘D-Day’ – yes, that’s what they called it. Literally, in the top left corner of the major TV networks’ broadcasts, there was a permanent ‘D-15’ (day minus 15) or ‘D-3’ graphic counting down to the big day the whole world would swoon over Korea. Perhaps my favorite moment in this bathos of self-absorption was the televised message on ‘D-1,’ by no less than the mayor of Seoul, that Koreans should be nice to visiting foreigners if they meet them on the street. Hah! How about the rest of the time for those of us who live here, huh? The last thing already hyper-nationalistic Koreans need is to be told that they should be even more proud.

I have said it lots of times before, but Korea is a really nice place to live actually – a lot better than the Central Valley – but then Koreans insist on spoiling that with over-the-top insistence that Korea is unbelievably awesome, and using almost anything to argue that Korea’s ‘brand’ – whatever that means – is on the rise. If all this sounds like the Tea-Party’s hysterical American exceptionalism it should.

For a more serious take on the G-20, one that actually recognizes Korea’s small size and its consequent limits, try this piece by a friend of mine at the Korea Times. Cho admits what Koreans know in their hearts, but adamantly refuse to admit to foreigners: that Korea is a bit-player, that it faces severe constraints in the future, and that Korea’s super-growth days are over. In short, Korea is a middle power, will remain one, and Koreans should accustom themselves to this rather than demanding, Uncle-Tom style, that resident foreigners recite a mawkish Koreaphoria.

Japan is an EU Country Trapped in Asia

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The Council of Foreign Relations blog, Asia Unbound, is quite good. If you don’t read it, you probably should before you read my stuff. To be sure, CFR is establishment; indeed, it is the very definition of the foreign policy establishment in the US. So it is not exactly the font of challenging new ideas. But still, they are linked into power in way that lonely academic bloggers will never be. And this week’s bit on Japan really got me thinking about how Japan is basically stuck with the American alliance indefinitely, whether they like it or not.

Recall a year ago when the LDP got whipped in the election, that there was lots of talk about how Hatoyama was going to create distance between Japan and the US, how this was a new dawn in the relationship, how the Japanese left would be so much more prickly with the US than the old boys network of the LDP. I was fairly skeptical of this at the time, and I think the recent flap with China over the islands has done a lot to confirm that skepticism.

Japan really has nowhere else to go but the US. It is stuck with us, primarily because it is geographically fixed in a neighborhood where it has no friends. And this opens all sorts of room for the US to push and bully Japan, which leads to regular Japanese outbursts that Japan needs to be independent of the US. (For the most famous, read this.) In fact, Japan is like a post-modern EU country in the wrong place. It should be comfortably ensconced in a post-national intergovernmental framework like the EU, where it could promptly forget about history and defense spending, and worry about how to care for its rapidly aging population – like Germany is morphing into ‘Greater Switzerland.’ But it’s not. Instead, Japan is trapped in modernist-nationalist-historical Asia, surrounded by states that don’t trust it and who want a lot from it that it doesn’t really want to give (historical apologies, imports, engagement, development aid, territorial compromises).

Consider that Japan, like China or Russia, has no friends or allies (save the US), and lots of semi-hostile neighbors:

Russia: Neither side has much interest in the other. There is an island dispute that has blocked normalization for decades. And, of course, Russia has been an erratic partner for just about everyone, not just Japan, since the end of the Cold War. So there is nothing to gain there.

Korea: There is also an island dispute with South Korea, over which even North Korea (!) has supported the SK position. NK kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 70s, and this has remained a permanent fixture in Japanese politics. For the North, Japan is high-up on the hit list; the North has launched missiles over it. Relations with the South are possibly even worse. S Koreans are intensely japanophic. The island dispute (Dokdo) rouses extraordinary passions here. Finally, of course, both Koreas are furious with Japan over its invasion and colonization from 1910-1945 and feel that Japan has never properly apologized.  Given how much S Korea and Japan share – democracy, concern over China’s rise, a US alliance, fear of NK, Confucian-Buddhist culture – they should should be natural allies, but Koreans will tell you with a straight face that Japan wants to invade it again. So forget that.

China: Yet another island dispute plagues the relationship from the start. And like Korea, so does history. The Japanese were even harsher in China than they were in Korea. The Rape of Nanking was brutality on par with the Nazis, and the Japanese used biological warfare against the Chinese as well. As the CFR post linked above notes, anti-Japanese street protests are becoming a regular part of Chinese politics now. A Sino-Japanese reconciliation would require astonishing, Willy Brandt-style statesmanship that the immobilist Japanese political system is wholly incapable of delivering.

Southeast Asia/India: Things get a little easier here, if only because it is further afield. But the ASEAN states too suffered under Japan in WWII, and like China and Korea, don’t feel that Japan has engaged in the appropriate historical reckoning. Only India is a possible serious Asian ally of the future because of mutual concern for China and the lack of historical-territorial problems.

Bonus problem – Economic Decline: As if this unhappy neighborhood weren’t trouble enough, add in Japan’s bizarre economic malaise. When China, Korea and the Soviet Union/Russia were a mess a generation ago, Japan could strut in Asia, but now these competitors are closing the gap while Japan stagnates. That just makes all the frictions that much harder to manage. China is so big, it can afford to miff the neighbors, but Japan no longer has this luxury.

In short, a weakening Japan so infuriates it neighborhood, that the US is all its got left. Given Japan’s paucity of options, the US has lots of room to bully and push Japan. But it must ultimately give in, because it’s position in Asia alone would be terrible – isolated, suspected, friendless. So bad is Japan’s position, that the US could effectively bring down the Hatoyama administration over something as minor as Futenma.

This is not meant to be an endorsement of US wedge politics against Japan. But it should certainly explain why its 20-year old complaint about US dominance has led to nothing, just like Gaulle’s petulant withdrawal from NATO ended in ignominy when the French finally gave up on ‘expectionalism’ and rejoined last year. It’s nice to be two oceans away from the competitions of Eurasia…

Is there Halloween in Korea? Alas, no…

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I still love Charlie Brown 30 years later…

 

It’s Halloween, so here is something semi-serious – if US holidays show up in Asia, is that proof of cultural Americanization?

One of the things I miss most in Korea as an expat is the US holiday season. In terms of fun, parties, color and festivities, nothing beats the three-month run of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Interculturally then, it is always interesting to see how much of this washes into other countries, given the endless debate about Americanization, globalization as cultural American imperialism, and all that.

In that vein, readers from the left might be glad to hear that little of that occurs in Korea. US holidays are generally un-celebrated here. While Korea is christianizing rapidly, Christmas has not even come close to the annual fun-time blow-out it has become in the US. It is still a religious holiday, not the cultural and shopping event it has evolved into in the US. (Ironically, religious conservatives who disdain the commercialization of the holidays might like the Korean attitude.) And Halloween has come mostly as an odd American event that is seen as somewhat fun, but kind of strange. When I explain Halloween to Koreans – Hallow’s Eve as the last night for evil spirits’ rampage in old Christian tradition – most Koreans find it fairly ridiculous. And all those new Korean Protestants don’t seem to know that story either.

Because of the big US presence in Korea for decades – first political-military, then commercial, increasingly now religious (American Protestantisms are pretty successful here) – you do have an awareness of US holidays, and some celebrations. But interest in this among Koreans generally serves Koreans’ interest to demark themselves from their fellows as cosmopolitan, worldly, and traveled. Ie, if you’re a Korean who celebrates Halloween with some resident expats, then you are ‘linked-in’ to the US culture in a way other Koreans are not, and that is a mark of social prestige. It is ‘cool’ to be able to say you celebrated Halloween with some white guy, kinda like it was to own a pair of blue jeans in the USSR.

In practice, then there is no trick-or-treating at all. Koreans mostly live in high-rises anyway, so trick-or-treating would be a weird, vertical affair requiring constant one-floor trips in the elevator. Horizontal neighborhoods filled with lights and people ambling about don’t really exist here. There are Halloween parties though. Korean clubs have them, but I have heard they are pretty strange events – just like a regular night at a club, only with some people in weird make-up. (Technically, there is no race-line for club attendance, but there are Korean clubs where foreigners would just never go in practice.) Ultimately though, it is the expat bars that try the hardest. They have costume contests and catch the spirit pretty well. The best expat bars are mixed; ie, Koreans come too. My impression though at these has always been that Koreans in attendance find the whole thing pretty bizarre and don’t get it at all.

So enjoy your Halloween. You are lucky to have the real deal…

When to Just Give Up on Territory Disputes: Palestine, Kashmir, Dokdo?

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imagesCA5GWV6N

One of the most basic tenets of almost all IR theorizing is that states are territorial, literally, and obsessed with holding, if not expanding what space they have. Even if you aren’t Alexander the Great or Napoleon, out to conquer whatever is there, you still want to hold on to at least what you have. Territory is a fundamental requirement of statehood (ask the Kurds), and more is better given land’s inherent scarcity. The logic for this is simple. There is only so much real estate in the world. Barring extreme scenarios like suddenly easier land reclamation (from the sea) or interplanetary colonization, space on earth is finite. So the race to control space is by definition a zero-sum game (the Scramble for Africa). If I have it, then you don’t. The more you have, the more secure you are from others (the further away they are), the more people you probably have, the more resources you are likely to find under the ground, etc.

And this logic is backed up by loads of empirical evidence. The Japanese fight individually with Russia, Korea, and China about islands. The USSR and China fought a border war, as did the PRC and Vietnam. The US Union invaded the Southern Confederacy. The Israelis and Palestinians seem ready to kill each other over inches of barren desert. I recall reading somewhere that after the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, Egypt sued Israel in the World Court over several hundred feet of extra space Israel wanted to hold for a hotel or something. (Egypt won.) And the above map makes clear just how severe the territorial dilemma can be for micro-states like Israel. (Do not take the source of the map as my endorsement of Israeli policy in the occupied territories; I chose it just because it makes my point well.) No state wants to be dismembered, and lots of blood in history has been spilt trying to expand one’s land space (imperialism).

But Israel’s endless troubles holding the Palestinians, much less converting the Palestinian space and people into exploitable resources rather than manpower and money sinks, or India’s endless quest to quell and hold Kashmir, raise a good IR theory question: when is it time to just give up and take less? I am not sure if this question has been researched much because we worry, obviously, more about expansionism and irredentism than voluntary cession. But there are some good examples of this also. This article got my thinking how Sudan’s Arab elite has simply decided to throw in the towel after 25 of years of civil war with the south. 15 years ago, Ethiopia’s government decided to do the same with Eritrea. And Britain, I think, secretly hopes the Northern Irish Catholics will outbirth the local Protestants and vote for republican unification, hence ridding Britain of the endless Irish question. In Korea, I frequently argue that Korea needs Japan more than Japan needs Korea, because NK is so scary, unification with it will be so expensive, China is so big, and the US is in relative decline in Asia. Hence, it would make national security sense for Korea to try to come to some kind of deal on its island dispute with Japan (the Liancourt rocks [Dokdo]). Better relations with Japan would help Korea prepare for the Chinese challenge and bolster it in the stand-off with NK. Nor is there anything of value on Dokdo (it’s a bunch of rocks, like most of the West Bank too) and because it is uninhabitable, control of Dokdo has no implications for division of the sea or seabed. In short, the benefits of a deal are high.

So there is a cost-benefit analysis at work here. At some point, an enduring, costly stalemate may just not be worth it. I can see a few reasons why:

1. Your country is already pretty huge, or the land disputed is comparatively tiny. If I were India, I think I would be pretty close to giving in on Kashmir. India is huge, both geographically and demographically already. How much does Kashmir really matter when you already have 1.3 billion people ? For Israel though, the problem is much more acute. The IDF has argued for years that the West Bank adds ‘strategic depth’ to little Israel, which, disregarding the  moral dimension, is accurate. By this dimension, the Eritrean succession surprises me, because it land-locked Ethiopia. I would have thought that would be a national interest worth toughing it out for…

2. There are no natural resources or other immediate, tangible national interests. Dokdo’s control does not alter any material element in the Korea-Japan relationship. If anything, it wastes Korean money to artificially keep people and services stationed there that would not otherwise exist but for this dispute. This is no ‘resource war.’ So what great benefit do you get beyond that patriotic tingle in your chest?

3. The disputed territory is not ‘holy ground.’ I think this is the most tricky condition, because these sorts of disputes, zero-sum in nature and frequently rooted in long-standing neighborhood grudges, are exactly the sort of thing that get layered in over-heated nationalist rhetoric about holy struggles, national identity, God-given missions and all that sort of metaphysical talk. Witness the Jewish right in Israel talking about biblical claims from Moses to the West Bank, or Hamas’ reverse claim (also made up) of the centrality of Jerusalem to Mohammed’s revelation (it was just a sideshow in the big Arabian picture). For a hysterical and mawkish Korean version of Dokdo as holy ground, try here (be sure to listen to the song). I think there is a good dissertation here.

Post-Unification De-population of North Korea?

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north-korea-map

PNU’s Institute of Social Science Research had a good speaker this week, demographer Berhard Koppen of Landau-Koblenz University in Germany. His talk, “Demographic Change and Immigration in Germany since Unification,” focused on the population impacts of German unification. As you can imagine, the Koreans study the German model (although not as much as you’d think), because they wonder what unification will look like – how much, how long, how disruptive, etc.

Koppen laid out a lot of good demographic data on just how extreme the population shifts from east to west inside Germany have been. I don’t have all the numbers in front of me, but it was pretty striking. In the most underdeveloped parts of the old German Democratic Republic (GDR), the population drop was more than 40% in two decades! In toto, the old GDR is 20% below its old population, despite the move of the capital to Berlin. So bad is it, that many east German communities have had to bulldoze housing, because it has simply sat unused for more than a decade (this, in country with one of the highest population densities in the world).

I have written about the geopolitics of Korean unification before. In short, they are not good, because China is much stronger than the USSR was in the German case. SK is weaker than was the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The US is also relatively weaker. And NK is far worse off than the GDR, which was regularly touted as the most advanced socialist state. All this forebodes that China’s role in unification will be much greater than the Soviet Union’s. As Koppen put it, the wealthy FRG could effectively ‘buy’ unification from the bankrupt USSR. China today though is ‘rising,’ and given the NK borders China, its interest and influence in the issue are correspondingly greater. As I wrote a year, China will structure any final status Korean deal much more than most people think right now (and the Chinese were sure to tell me that in Beijing earlier this year).

If this doesn’t scare South Koreans enough, Koppen’s data quieted the room. When I asked about the comparison with Korea, and what Koreans should expect, he could only foresee that a sudden border opening would lead to a huge southward flow – maybe 6 million people in the first few years. The differences between east and west Germany were much smaller than NK-SK, yet look at how much population flight has been happened there. One can only imagine how bad it would be here – a 40% depopulation of NK (9 out of 23 million), perhaps? Where would they be housed, how would they be supported, what would they do all day? The questions are endless.

Koppen closed by arguing that a slow federation of North and South would be better than the lightning unification of a sudden border opening as in the German case. Koppen used the EU as a model for Korean unification (an interesting parallel I never considered). As the EU is gradually federating in stages, so might Korea. I have heard this line of reasoning before using a more Asian model – Hong Kong and mainland China. Like that arrangement, perhaps Korea can go through a ‘one country, two systems’ stage. So North Koreans would get temporary work and living permits in the South, while Southern business would be encouraged to go North, with the North reconceived as something like a massive enterprise zone.

I am skeptical for a number of reasons:

1. North Koreans are vastly poorer than not only east Germans, but any of the eastern EU members. The moral pressure to do more faster would be enormous. Paced unification would look like Southern niggardliness in the face of desperation and poverty. Note also, that Hong Kong is quite wealthy, as is surrounding Guangdong province. This helps mitigates the border pressure; the opposite would be the case in a united Korea.

2. The nationalism factor would make holding the North at arms length difficult and distasteful. If the Koreans are one minjoek, as they never cease to tell us expats here, then how can you justify, save unashamed selfishness, keeping Northerners out? It looks bad, and it would certainly encourage populist North Korean politicians to complain about Southern cheapness, etc.

3. Keeping the North in some kind of semi-national limbo would encourage Chinese meddling. Indeed, the slower the unification process goes, the more likely China and others are to stick their noses into it. Conversely, if unification speeds along as a chaotic mess, then even China will likely say, we want nothing to do with the catastrophe-in-the-making; you South Koreans figure it out. This sounds unfortunate – the more anarchic the reunification, the more likely it will be a Korean-only affair, but I think it is so.

4. And in fact, Korean unification is almost certainly going to be messy, rapid, and chaotic if not downright anarchic. If one looks at Germany, once the communist lid was removed, the desire for unification on the part of the east especially, but also the west, exploded and became like a freight train accelerating downhill. It was just unstoppable. Yes, there were all sorts of GDR intellectuals who wanted east Germany to become a unique space, neither capitalist nor communist, but somehow ‘more humane,’ and all that. But the huge bulk of the population wanted nothing to do with such academic airiness, a luxury for elites. Average east Germans wanted nationalism, unity, wholeness, an end to an awful, artificial historical division, and an immediate improvement in living standards. They just pushed aside all those both internally and externally (Thatcher and Mitterand especially) who wanted a paced process. Helmut Kohl led reunification as much as he was led by it. And even though the GDR was supposedly ‘advanced’,’ it turned out not to be at all. The state collapsed almost immediately, and realistically, there was no one to pick up the many, many pieces expect West Germany. I think this is by far the most likely scenario here too. Once North Korea slips, it will go lightning fast. It will be chaotic, unpredictable, with huge national emotions at play and populations on the move, and near anarchy in the North, given how thoroughly illegitimate the state there is. The only realistic way to get control over this nation-wide meltdown will be the immediate extension of SK constitutional authority across the whole peninsula. It will be messy, hugely expensive, and involve the dramatic depopulation of the North, but realistically, I don’t see serious alternatives given how much worse off NK is than Hong Kong, the GDR, or eastern Europe.