Impeached South Korean president Park Geun-Hye’s arrest last week (March 31) on charges of serious corruption brought to a close a drama that began unravelling as long ago as last October. It had everybody riveted because of the arc of triumph the story followed, marking the steady rise of the daughter of South Korean strongman President Park Chung-Hee. He was an authoritarian father while Geun-Hye’s mother was assassinated by a North Korean agent. She came under the spell of a Rasputin-like charlatan, emerged as a strong conservative leader, was elected president–and then suffered this sudden fall from grace.
But Geun-Hye’s fate is now a side show and the attention is shifting to the social and political changes that might ensue once South Korea elects its next President on 9 May 2017 for a full five-year term. Since 2008, conservatives have been in power after 10 years of liberal democratic rule under Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. Strangely, in the Republic of Korea (ROK), the term of the 300-member National Assembly is of four years’ duration and of the president, five years. In the 2016 National Assembly elections, the conservatives had lost majority and the drift towards the left was already evident.
In South Korea the political divide is on traditional conservative/liberal lines. The conservatives are more chaebol– or conglomerate-friendly, more pro-U.S. and strongly against any unilateral concessions to North Korea. The liberals are more favourably disposed towards small business, on friendlier terms with China and more accommodating of North Korea. The liberals do acknowledge the importance of the U.S. as a guarantor of South Korean security, but also perceive its policies as a hindrance in the normalisation of relations with the North. Most liberal strategic analysts would like to push South Korea in a direction that is equidistant between the U.S. and China.
In the forthcoming presidential election, the odds are heavily in favour of the liberals if they could agree on a single candidate and the liberal anti-conservative vote is not divided. In all the opinion polls, the front-runner is Moon Jae-in, a well-known human rights lawyer who had lost to Geun-Hye in 2012 by a narrow margin.
The process of selection of the Democratic Party candidate is underway and will be completed in the first week of April. The spoiler could be maverick Ahn Cheol-soo, who has floated his own ‘People’s Party’, has wide name recognition and is an unorthodox politician. After a strong surge, he had withdrawn from the presidential race in 2012 in favour of the Democratic Party’s Moon Jae-in to not split the liberal vote.
The conservatives are reeling under the twin handicaps of an impeached president and a split in the Saenuri Party, with a sizeable faction leaving it and organising themselves under a new banner: the anti-Geun-Hye Bareun party. Conservatives also do not have any credible candidate with double digit support in opinion polls.
Barring the scenario when two strong liberal candidates may enter the Presidential race, the election of the nominee of the Democratic Party is all but certain on May 9. In that event, what may be the likely implications for South Korean foreign policy?
Two major issues facing the new president are likely to be: the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) radar battery and the stance towards North Korea’s belligerence and future missile and nuclear tests.
Conscious of future uncertainties, the outgoing South Korean administration and the U.S. government have sped up the installation of the THAAD system to be able to present the new president with a fait accompli. Deployment of THAAD on Korean soil does not require any approval from the National Assembly, but the Democratic Party members are demanding a debate and vote in it to stall the project. (Liberals are in a majority in the National Assembly and can stall the installation of the system.)
China is quite vocal in its strong opposition to the deployment of THAAD in South Korea and has applied some economic pressure, advising Chinese tourist agencies against group tours to the ROK and boycott of Lotte products and stores in China as the Lotte group had handed over its land to the Korean military in the south-east of Seoul for the actual installation of the system.
The new South Korean president faces a dilemma. His left-leaning political instincts will not favour antagonising China nor intervening in a U.S.-China confrontation. However, stalling or delaying the operationalisation of the system once its installation is complete may well anger the Trump administration.
The other existential issue for the new South Korean administration will be to harmonise its policies with the belligerent attitude of the Trump administration towards missile and nuclear tests by North Korea. It’s reasonable to believe that despite more sanctions and international rebuke, North Korea will continue tests to acquire credible nuclear strike capacity and a delivery system to pose a direct threat to the U.S. Pacific Coast. In his pre-election utterances, candidate Trump had said that North Korea would never be allowed to develop that capacity. But the question confronting all U.S. presidents since the 1990s has been how this can be achieved short of an attack on the North.
On March 17, U.S. secretary of state Rex Tillerson said in Seoul that the U.S. would consider military action against North Korea, stating that “if they (NK) elevate the threat of their weapons programme to a level that we believe requires action, that option is on the table”. He publicly declared that the ‘Strategic Patience’ policy of President Obama was over. He rightly complained that the U.S. had provided $1.3 billion in assistance to North Korea since 1995 and “in return, North Korea has detonated nuclear weapons and launched ballistic missiles”.
Earlier, President Trump touched the core of the problem when he pithily tweeted, “North Korea is behaving very badly. They have been ‘playing’ the U.S. for years. China has done little to help.” China too has successfully ‘played’ the United States and has not done anything substantial to stop North Korea from defying the entire international community.
The march of North Korea to become a nuclear weapons power is now unstoppable. Any direct military action by the U.S. against North Korea would place Seoul at risk and put the lives of 28,500 U.S. soldiers stationed in ROK in jeopardy. No sane U.S. president will want to provoke the unpredictable Kim Jong-Un.
India needs to advise caution all round so that the situation does not spiral out of control. It should also not be averse to South Korea and Japan developing their own nuclear weapons capacity as a deterrent to the inevitable North Korean nuclear bomb.
Skand Tayal is former Ambassador of India to the Republic of Korea. He is currently associated with the Department of East Asian Studies, Delhi University as a Guest Faculty.
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