Shaking relations with 4 powers

``Seoul`s relations with four powers surrounding Korea are good. We are keeping up our alliance with the United States, cooperation with Japan and partnership with Russia and China. The whole world, as well as the four powers, is supporting reconciliation between the Koreas,`` said President Kim Dae-Jung during a meeting with foreign ministry officials on Feb. 16. The current state of uncomfortable relations with these nations of late seem to belie the wishful thinking behind what the president told the meeting. Since President George W. Bush took office in Washington the inter-Korea relationship has been in a stalemate. The image of the Seoul government suffering a major setback over its contentious position on the national missile defense plan of the Bush administration, as it finds itself in a double bind between Washington and Moscow. The dispute over a new history textbook strained its ties with Japan, while another row with China is brewing over the import of garlic. Thus, it might not be too much to say that South Korea faces a general crisis in its relations with the big four players in the region. :—-Ed.

Crises of ties with four powers:

The government held successful first summit talks with North Korea last year on the strength of its solid partnership with the United States and Japan in dealing with the North, apparently heralding an epochal end to the Cold War.

Besides the alliance with Washington and Tokyo, Seoul reached a stage where it has to seek the support and cooperation from its old adversaries -- Russia and China. Through the Cold War era South Korea only had to walk in step with its allies as if to solve a simple first-degree equation, but today it is necessary to solve an equation of much higher degree -- of having to take into account its ties with Russia and China too, say foreign ministry officials.

Nonetheless, the government is beset with much constraint and incompetence, obliging it to attempt to solve a higher-degree equation with its limited capacity for solving simple equations.

Recruitment of a diplomat experienced in Chinese affairs as senior secretary to the president on foreign relations and security and a former foreign minister as ambassador to Beijing appeared to signify added priority on Seoul`s relations with China.

However, it courted the undeserved displeasure of Washington. Criticisms have been voiced even within the ranks of the foreign affairs-trade ministry that the government took a very weak-kneed stance to solicit the visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Seoul for a year or in negotiating the repayment of Korean loans to Russia. Relations with Japan have been wavering over the ongoing tit-for-tat as to some contested contents of a Japanese history textbook.

American misgivings:

Foreign ministry officials believe the difference of perceptions about North Korea between Seoul and Washington revealed during the Kim-Bush summit Mar. 8 had been lurking below the surface for a long time. Only an unusually close affinity between Kim and Bill Clinton glossed it over, they say.

In February then-Foreign Affairs-Trade Minister Lee Joung-Binn and Lim Dong-Won, director of the National Intelligence Service, went to the United States to bridge the gap in perception in preparation for the upcoming visit by President Kim for talks with Bush, but their trips failed their purpose. The two concentrated on explaining Seoul`s policy of engagement, which served only to deepen the gap, a diplomatic source here said. It added that President Kim broached off hand a basic inter-Korean peace agreement and a comprehensive reciprocity formula from nowhere in the course of the summit, as Bush expressed strong misgivings about the credibility of North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Il.

According to the source, the United States had reservations about the term ``peace`` Seoul officials were wont to use frequently because it believed that any such suggested peace arrangement between the two Koreas could mean an end to the existing state of armistice and adversely affect the status of 37,000 U.S. troops stationed here.

``Because Seoul`s diplomacy was so obsessed with Pyongyang, it ended up trying to tailor its ties with the four powers to its limited policy toward North Korea,`` said Kim Seong-Han, professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security. In the process, he added, South Korea made little of its relations with the United States and tended to favor partnership with Russia and China too much in pursuit of its engagement with the North.

From extinguishing fire to preventing it:

Specialists say the predicament of Seoul`s relations with the four powers needs to be untangled beginning with its ties with Washington because the latter led to the former.

Ham Seong-Duk, professor of pubic administration at Korea University, said Seoul`s preoccupation with an early return visit by Kim Jong-Il and speedy improvement of ties with Pyongyang deteriorated its ties relations with Washington.

``Our diplomatic policy toward the four powers should be worked out on the recognition that Seoul`s engagement policy would have to go astray if the Bush administration got lost in its North Korea policy,`` commented Kim Kuk-Shin, research fellow with the Korea Institute for National Unification.

Park Du-Bok, professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, said that the Seoul-Washington alliance has to be streamlined and strengthened to keep pace with the progressing thaw in the Korean peninsula before seeking to broaden the scope of cooperation with China and Russia.

Boo Hyung-Kwon bookum90@donga.com