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U.S. President George W. Bush made it clear in a New Year¡¯s press conference that Washington has no intention to compromise on North Korea¡¯s alleged counterfeiting. Bush will reinforce a ban on transactions with the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia, which the U.S. says is Pyongyang's primary money laundering channel; a U.S. congressional researcher in charge of tracking Pyongyang's drug deals and counterfeiting said this is meant to squeeze North Korea so it gives up its illegal activities.
President Roh Moo-hyun, in his own earlier New Year press conference, sent a message to the U.S. to ease pressure on the North Korean regime if it wants to avoid friction with Seoul.
Whenever so far concerns about the Korea-U.S. alliance have surfaced, Bush said it was an "important" relationship and Roh that it was "healthy." Seeing one president evade questions and another gloss over problems, some people believed them and some did not. But now that both presidents have made their differences over the counterfeiting question explicit, nobody can keep claiming that the relationship is in the best shape.
Standard procedure is to solve differences between working-level officials or, if that fails, at the ministerial level or in a summit. But Korea and the U.S. have come to a point where the two countries' heads of state contradict each other in public. To make matters worse, the informal dialogue channel between the two countries that should continue dialogue out of sight of the world when the official line is not working, appears to have run dry.
The alliance has deteriorated to such an extent that it is difficult to see how it can be mended. The reason is that this government has in the past three years conducted a foreign policy that jettisons the national interest for slogans like "dignified diplomacy" and "independent national defense." Even as well nigh all other countries are doing everything they can to maximize benefit for their own national interest in a unipolar world dominated by a sole superpower, the Republic of Korea alone has driven up a blind alley with the sort of politics you find in big letters on campus posters.
Having maneuvered us there by comprehensively pulling the wool over people¡¯s eyes, the government must explain how we will find a way out of this dead end for the country's security and prosperity.
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