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The presidential spin doctor Cho Ki-sook told a press conference Tuesday the media cashed in on fears over North Korea in the past and was now doing the same by playing up disagreements between Korea and the United States. "Some reports go as far as distort facts to amplify fissures in the Korea-U.S. alliance," she said. But in fact, she said, there is "no difference of views¡± in the Korea-U.S. alliance worthy of being called a crack, a fissure, or anything of that kind.
All the while a former American ambassador in Seoul expressed this concern about the new independent balancing role Korea wants to pursue in Northeast Asia: "Pursued to the extreme, it cannot be ruled out that [the doctrine] would harm the Korea-U.S. alliance." And a U.S. Korea expert advising the House of Representatives spoke out: "Doubts are spreading in Congress about the Korea-U.S. alliance. Calls are heard for U.S. troops in Korea to be withdrawn and deployed elsewhere."
Now, the president recently impressed some quarters when he threatened to get ¡°red in the face¡± with anger at our American friends, and those who regard that as good diplomacy may feel it signals that Korea has finally become equal with the United States. The rest of us will have to persist in our benighted interpretation that the Korea-U.S. alliance has hit the rocks.
The presidential PR chief lectured politics in college before she was elevated to her current position, and perhaps we can find in her own remarks the reason she thinks everything is normal in the alliance. ¡°Sixty to seventy percent of the public,¡± she says, ¡°support the new foreign policy doctrine casting Korea in a balancing role in Northeast Asia." In other words, she calculates that standing up to Washington is going to be popular in the eyes of the voters.
In the 2002 presidential election, the present leadership rode high on anti-American sentiment that built up after two Korean schoolgirls were crushed to death by an American tank. Some analyses say it was a major factor in its victory. It is President Roh Moo-hyun¡¯s sudden dividing of the nation into pro- and anti-American that is an attempt to ¡°cash in¡± on cheap anti-American sentiment after his government failed to distinguish itself in any other way during the first half of its tenure.
The ruling forces of this country should look around them to see if they can find another administration that plays fast and loose with the fate of the nation to gain a short-term advantage in domestic politics. How peculiar that it should be this administration that is rushing to warn of the danger to the national interest from trying to make capital out of popular sentiment.
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