As the South Korean leader, President Park Geun-hye faces some perennial, but tough foreign policy challenges, just as her predecessors did. There is the constant troublemaker North Korea, and she has to deal with Japan, which often turns out to be a close neighbor only in terms of geographical distance. The growing rivalry between the U.S. and China is posing new, but no less serious challenges.
The series of summits Park hosted for the Chinese and Japanese leaders in Seoul recently illustrated how many challenging foreign policy riddles Park has to take on.
In the Seoul summits, Park failed to achieve all the goals she had in mind, including persuading Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to accept her demands for outright admission of Japan’s guilt and due compensation for the Korean women forced into sex slavery for Japanese soldiers during World War II.
Nevertheless, as the host, Park could be credited, at least, for reviving the South Korea-China-Japan group summit, which had been on hiatus for 3 1/2 years mainly due to Japan’s position on history and territorial disputes. The same credit should go to her separate talks with Abe, the first ever between the two.
The Seoul summits, which also drew Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, dealt with so many sensitive issues that all the details of the discussions made in the tripartite and bilateral talks might not be made public.
But one obvious thing that has emerged from the series of talks is that Korean officials are more secretive than their Chinese and Japanese counterparts. In other words, Korean officials keep much more from the public than Chinese and Japanese officials. In some extreme cases, they do not have qualms about lying or hiding.
For instance, we knew belatedly — and even then from Japanese media — that Abe took issue with China’s efforts to increase its clout in the South when he met Park separately.
It was also from the Chinese media that we learned that in separate talks with Park, Li suggested negotiations for drawing a new maritime border between the two countries. This could have implications on the territorial dispute over Ieodo, a submerged rock located about 150 kilometers southwest of Korea’s southernmost island of Marado.
We have come to know that military generals and defense procurement officials pressed ahead with the purchase of new fighter jets from Lockheed Martin although they knew the U.S. government would not permit the transfer of some of key technologies to the Korean side — which are essential for developing indigenous fighter jets. Even Park had been kept in the dark for five months after the U.S. side made its final decision.
Defense Minister Han Min-koo, perhaps in step with the Park Cabinet’s habit of excessive secrecy, hid the fact that in recent Korea-Japan defense ministers’ talks, his Japanese counterpart mentioned the possibility of Japanese military engaging in North Korea without permission from the South.
Like other human beings, diplomats and security chiefs can be mistaken or have a slip of tongue. There may also be some issues that cannot be made public immediately. But the recent series of cases raise concerns that they are making a habit of keeping as much as possible from the public. It is uncomfortable to think that they could be hiding more things from us.
