Insofar as a few experts have in recent weeks been publishing articles about how the horribly botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is being perceived by North and South Korea, it may be worthwhile to assess as well reactions from South Korean conservatives and leftists to Biden's disastrous execution of the withdrawal. Contrary to some Panglossian analyses by think tank denizens, whose rosy views may be colored by their angling for positions in the Biden administration, our friends in South Korea, not its leftist leaders, but conservative, pro-U.S. forces, may have good reason to view the current imbroglio with the utmost concern, in relation to their own national security and the health of the U.S.-South Korea alliance. U.S. officials have been trying to reassure South Koreans that the U.S. does not intend to abandon its allies and commitments, but Korean conservatives are nevertheless worried, and leftists are cynically attempting to take advantage of the situation.
This concern of South Korean conservatives is heightened due to the fact that the current leftist South Korean regime of Moon Jae-in has been cozying up to North Korea and China since Moon became president under highly unusual circumstances in 2017. Moon has surrounded himself, and appointed to top positions in his administration, former pro-North Korean and anti-American radical activists from the 1980s and 1990s who were in some cases leaders or members of groups which had advocated or engaged in violent attacks against U.S. facilities in South Korea. For example, Moon's Minister of Unification, Lee In-young, was a founding member and the first leader of the pro-North Korean and America-hating extremist group "Jeondaehyup," which he has never explicitly renounced.
In terms of the "mainstream" parliamentary left in South Korea, such as leaders of Moon's ruling Democratic Party, while they may be experiencing schadenfreude in witnessing America's humiliation under Biden, their public stance, as evidenced by a recent suggestion by Democratic Party head Song Yong-gil, has been cleverly calculated as a tactical matter. Song took an opportunistic approach, using the debacle in Afghanistan to repeat the talking point of his party and Korea's left more broadly, that the current situation supposedly "proves" that the security of his country would be improved, and the U.S.-South Korea alliance would be strengthened, by a speed-up of the planned transfer of wartime operational control of South Korean forces from the U.S. to the South. In this context, it must be kept in mind that Song, despite claims to the contrary, is no friend of the U.S. In recent years, Song has insulted the (then) U.S. Ambassador to Korea, Harry Harris, in racist terms. Harris, a former admiral, is of Japanese ancestry, and when South Korea's far-left and pro-North Korean forces staged a hate campaign against him, Song joined in, comparing him to a Japanese Governor-General during the period of Japan's colonial occupation.
Song finds himself having to mouth, for Korean public and U.S. consumption, diplomatic platitudes about his and his president's supposed belief in the importance of the alliance with the U.S., which he claims is motivating his call for an accelerated transfer of wartime control of South Korean forces from the U.S. to the South. However, many Korean conservatives and friends of the U.S. strongly doubt that he and Moon are sincere about this. On the contrary, pro-U.S. conservatives in South Korea oppose plans for a transfer of overall U.S. command of South Korean forces in the event of war on the Korean peninsula. They feel that the U.S. wartime operational control serves to deter North Korean aggression and prevent any rash moves by current or future South Korean leaders who are or will be sympathetic to the North. At a minimum, our friends in Korea are calling for a delay in this change. They see no reason to rush it through. Although the transfer had been agreed to, Korean conservatives do not want to see it implemented more rapidly, since it may send precisely the wrong signal to North Korea's Kim Jong-un at a time of heightened global instability, when U.S. resolve is being questioned, which could result in the North engaging in provocations.
Mr. Lee Dong-bok a well-known and respected pro-U.S. conservative in South Korea, who heads the North Korean Democratization Forum, was a member of the South's parliament, and for over 20 years took part in high-level talks with the North, has written the following to express his concern over Biden's withdrawal plan for Afghanistan, which is fairly representative of the views of many Korean conservatives.
"President Biden's assertion that the U.S. would confront the risk of an increased threat of attacks from such terrorist groups as ISIS and/or ISIS-K, should the U.S. allow itself to remain involved in Afghanistan any longer, does not appeal to us who have long been the victims of the likes of terrorist forces such as Communist North Korea. I hope somebody in Washington will remind Biden of a sagacious warning issued by President Syngman Rhee back in 1952 as he was winding up his state visit to the United States at the invitation of President Dwight Eisenhower that dealing with a terrorist force like Communism was comparable to "fighting against a Cholera" that required making sure that the virus was "terminated." Likewise, Biden's U.S. needs to face the reality that, unless it displays the leadership to mobilize the international community to confront the Taliban without appeasing them, it will be allowing the Taliban terrorism to quickly grow into a menace not only to a regional but also international peace and order." (Facebook post by Lee Dong-bok)
In the view of Korean conservative friends of America, Song and his party are merely using the Afghanistan crisis as a convenient pretext to ramp-up their push for a transfer of wartime operational control, as part of their ongoing policy of appeasing North Korea. There is not so much a fear that the U.S. is about to pull its forces out of the South or otherwise weaken the U.S.-South Korea alliance in any sudden manner, but rather a general and growing sense of unease about what is perceived as a Jimmy Carter-style weakness inherent in the conduct of the Biden administration's foreign policy. It remains to be seen if the North's Kim Jong-un has the same perception and if that will embolden him to issue new threats or engage in aggressive actions. As we and our South Korean friends know, "weakness is provocative".
Lawrence Peck holds a B.A. degree in Political Science from U.C.L.A. and a J.D. degree from Loyola Law School. He serves as an advisor to the North Korea Freedom Coalition. He lived and worked in South Korea for almost six years as a consultant to major Korean business groups. He is proud of the fact that pro-North Korean groups and activists have stated that his work is a threat to their movement.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member