Roh Hints at New East Asian Order Roh Cannot Win This Diplomatic War Alone Korea Steps Up Military Cooperation With China

A senior government official explained the Northeast Asian order in which Korea has acted as one leg in the tripartite "southern alliance" of Korea, the United States and Japan was a leftover of the Cold War. "We can't be locked in that framework forever, can we?" he asked rhetorically.

If that is indeed the background to the presidential remarks, their repercussions would be far greater even than Roh's opposition to recasting the USFK as a rapid deployment force in Northeast Asia - what they call the "Roh Moo-hyun doctrine" at Cheong Wa Dae.

Korea as a stabilizer, deciding the balance of power in Northeast Asia: that must be interpreted as meaning that the country will be "locked into" neither the U.S.-Japan camp nor the opposing "northern alliance" of North Korea, China and Russia, and that Seoul will choose the side it takes on an issue-by-issue basis. It means also that South Korea will in effect break away from the tripartite security alliance with the U.S. and Japan which has been the basis of its survival for over five decades.

Korea is placed on the most precarious geopolitical fault line in the world. It is a grim reality that any of the three forces surrounding us - the world's sole super power America, the world's second economic power Japan, and effectively the world's No. 2 power China - is too powerful for us to cope with on our own. Brave though it may be to believe, on the merit of South Korea's enormously increased national strength, that it could play a decisive role on a geopolitical volcano, it is also extremely dangerous.

South Korea's declaration that it belongs to no side is nothing but a confession that it is isolated, that is has no reliable friend. The president's remark that the power structure in Northeast Asia will change depending on our choice, if taken wrong, could sound extremely boastful. More prosaically, however, it amounts to telling the surrounding powers, "We don't know what choice we will make in the future. Therefore you had better deal with South Korea as your potential enemy."

In short, the Republic of Korea is seriously confused, and the country is forcing its neighbors to watch the security situation very closely.

A series of remarks the president has recently made are so grave in nature that they could have a decisive effect on the fate of the 48 million population. Few voters would have cast their ballots as they did in 2002 in the knowledge that Roh would so lightly change the nature of our alliances, which have been of the most profound importance in the existence of the nation in the past five decades.

To repeat, the decision whether to annul or secede from our existing alliances, directly related as it is to the security of the Republic of Korea and the life or death of its 48 million people, is too grave a matter to be left to the president alone. At this critical time for the country, the government must recover its reason, and the people must do their job of keeping it in check.