Where's the Beef?

Readers of the June 11 New York Times had a right to be startled by a front-page photo showing tens of thousands of demonstrators flooding the streets of Seoul--first because the paper had barely covered six weeks of previous protests, and second because the multitudes of people seemed out of proportion to the supposed issue at hand: fears of mad cow disease should imports of American beef resume after a five-year embargo. But the real beef was with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who barely got inaugurated before running off to brown-nose George W. Bush. Lee's bright idea was to push a new hard line with North Korea, even after Bush had given up that hard line, and to cozy up to Bush without a lot of apparent thought to his capricious policies toward Korea or the likelihood that the next American President will not be a Republican. Everywhere else in the world people are counting the days until Bush returns to Texas--but not in Seoul's Blue House. This fundamental miscalculation turned a landslide victory last December into such burgeoning discontent that many analysts wonder if Lee can hold on to power.

At the heart of the problem is the perception that Lee is toadying up to an Administration that runs roughshod over Korean national sovereignty and could care less about the unprecedented warming of relations between North and South over the past decade. President Kim Dae Jung's "sunshine policy" did more to enhance peace and reconciliation between the two Koreas than all his predecessors combined and won him the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize. His protégé and successor, Roh Moo-hyun, continued this policy through five years of intense American pressure and criticism. Both presidents were ultimately vindicated when the Bush Administration swiveled 180 degrees in early 2007 and talked directly with the North. But along came President Lee, blaming his predecessors for coddling the North over "ten lost years." Beltway pundits fell all over themselves applauding Lee's sagacity--finally the adults were running Korea again--and Bush rewarded Lee with a weekend visit to Camp David in April. The new Korean president brought with him what appeared to be a modest offering: lifting the ban on American beef imports.

Kim Dae Jung was the first foreign leader to visit the Bush Oval Office, in March 2001, close on the heels of Secretary of State Colin Powell, saying he wanted to continue the Kim/Clinton policy of engaging North Korea. Instead President Bush lectured the South Korean president on how Kim Jong Il, a leader Bush would later call a "pygmy," could not be trusted. In September 2002 Bush sent an envoy to Pyongyang to accuse the North of having a second nuclear weapons program using highly enriched uranium. The predictable result was the North's rapid repudiation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the end of the eight-year freeze on its plutonium facility and the recovery of some 8,000 plutonium fuel rods--enough for five or six atomic bombs. (As it happened, US intelligence on the North's highly enriched uranium was no better than it was on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.)

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