South Korean President Park Guen-hye, who meets Friday with President Obama, is pushing for a deeper three-way alliance among Washington, Seoul and Beijing to address the threat posed by North Korea and to open the way for an eventual reunification of the long divided Korean Peninsula.
“We must make newly consolidated efforts among Korea, the U.S. and China in dealing with North Korean issues,” Ms. Park told an audience in Washington on Thursday evening. “Such diverse forms of trilateral diplomacy,” she said, “are a new endeavor in Northeast Asia, and these efforts will make valuable contributions to enhancing the bilateral and multilateral relations within the region.”
Ms. Park is expected to push the message again on Friday in her second visit to the White House since coming to power in Seoul in 2013.
While foreign policy insiders say the Obama administration is keen to work with her as a key interlocutor in their overall strategy toward both China and North Korea, Ms. Park’s growing diplomatic and trade push with Beijing has raised concerns.
With some 30,000 U.S. troops as well as sophisticated missile systems stationed in South Korea, the South Korean president is seen to be walking an increasingly precarious tightrope between Washington and Beijing, which has long been considered North Korea’s primary supporter.
What specifically remains to be seen is how eager she is to embrace Washington’s current strategy of leaning on China to contain the North Korean regime’s nuclear ambitions and confrontational military posturing in the region.
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From trade deals to climate change and cultural exchange, there are a host of issues that will be on the table during Friday’s summit. But Ms. Park’s relations with Beijing are expected to take center stage.
“Park and Obama will discuss how to promote better dialogue with China on a path forward in reining in this difficult regime,” according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS).
Despite “growing worries” about Ms. Park’s move toward China, the prospects are real that her efforts may ultimately help to reshape the wider geopolitical dynamics in Northeast Asia, said the analysis by Victor Cha, who holds the CSIS Korea Chair, and Andy Lim, a research assistant at the center.
“What we may actually be witnessing is Diplomacy 2.0: a nuanced, three dimensional foreign policy strategy by Park, designed to alter Chinese strategic thinking, engage U.S. interests, and ultimately build Northeast Asian cooperation,” the analysis said.
The administration has so far avoided specifics when discussing the situation publicly.
A White House statement said only that Vice President Joseph R. Biden had assured Ms. Park during a lunch meeting on Thursday that the U.S. will defend her country against “North Korean provocations” and reaffirmed the “unwavering” U.S. commitment to “deter and defend” against menacing from Pyongyang.
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President Obama, meanwhile, is expected to highlight Ms. Park’s visit as an example of how the alliance with Seoul reaches well beyond the security realm.
At a dinner honoring the South Korean president this week, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said the alliance “cannot be explained simply by the alignment of security and material interests — although, obviously, that helps — but is based much more on the discovery long ago and repeated over and over again that when Americans and Koreans get together, good things happen.”
“Today there are more than 2 million Koreans and Korean-Americans living in the [U.S.],” he said. “They can be found in every single corner of our land … and their economic and social contributions to America and to our bilateral relationship are profound.”
But sticky issues remain.
While Washington and Seoul have had a bilateral free trade agreement in effect since 2012, South Korea is not among the 11 nations included in the Obama administration’s highly touted Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade pact.
Analysts say even more problematic for the relationship is Seoul’s increasing closeness with China.
Ms. Park and Chinese President Xi Jinping have met six times over the past two and a half years, and some argue the pursuit of closer ties with Beijing is part of a wider strategy by the South Korean president to carve out a more influential role for herself on Asia’s wider geopolitical landscape.
Not only is South Korea a linchpin of Beijing’s rival Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — a separate trade arrangement the Chinese are pushing to counter the TPP — the Park government’s enhanced relations with Beijing carry security implications likely to cause frustration in Washington.
U.S. officials are keen to revamp and modernize the American military footprint in South Korea by using the nation to host a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) antiballistic missile system.
But Ms. Park has so far been unwilling to endorse the idea, and some suggest the South Korean president’s ambiguous posture reflects her unwillingness to upset China as Seoul’s top trading partner — which sees the THAAD deployment as a threat to its own push for military supremacy over the region.
Ms. Park acknowledged the severity of the military threat posed by North Korea during a speech at CSIS on Thursday evening. But she also reemphasized her ultimate goal of working toward an eventual “unification” between North and South.
Her comments reflected similar assertions put forward earlier this year by former U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill, who argued that American officials should more readily embrace China’s growing relations with South Korea and that all three nations should prepare for the inevitable collapse of North Korea as well as the hard work of eventually unifying the peninsula.
During a March speech in Seoul, Mr. Hill said he did not know when or how the demise of the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will come about, but he believed it would ultimately occur, and when it does, “we need to make sure that China, [South Korea] and the U.S. all understand what we’re going to do.”
But recent months have brought a new wave of turbulence between Seoul and Pyongyang that has featured new exchanges of artillery fire between North and South Korean forces, along with the wounding this summer of two South Korean soldiers in land mine blasts.
The two Koreas have remained technically in a state of war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. The U.S. troop presence along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two stretches back to the United Nations force that repulsed the North’s 1950 invasion of the South.
Ms. Park’s push toward a policy of reunification on the peninsula, meanwhile, appears to have the support of South Korea’s masses.
She was seen to have gotten a lift in domestic polls for the smoothness with which she responded to this summer’s tension on the DMZ.
After two days of talks in late August, negotiators from both North and South agreed to tone down their posturing, hold additional talks and to arrange reunions of families separated by the heavily fortified border zone.
But the notion of a serious thaw in North-South relations seems unrealistic as long as the Kim regime remains in power in Pyongyang.
Recent days saw North Korea mark the 70th anniversary of its ruling party with a massive military parade, replete with thousands of goose-stepping soldiers and military hardware, including missiles and drones mounted on trucks — as well as a declaration by the 32-year-old Mr. Kim that the nation is ready to stand against any threat posed by the U.S.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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