|
South Korea and the United States will hold a summit around September, the presidential office has announced. It will be the sixth between the two presidents and most likely their last.
The government should face the forthcoming summit in frank acknowledgement of differences in position on major bilateral issues. What the U.S. says is a missile North Korea is preparing to launch, for example, South Korea says is a satellite. But the two allies are also poles apart on matters from North Korea¡¯s nuclear program and dollar counterfeiting to the Stalinist country¡¯s human rights record. The government must be honest about the state of its relationship with Washington, instead of persisting with the fiction that the relationship ¡°is being managed in a healthy manner."
The government must acknowledge that differences in position between Korea and the U.S. are of two kinds: those between the Roh Moo-hyun administration and the Bush administration and those between the Korean people and the U.S. government.
It is well known that this government and the U.S. have many diametrically opposite positions, to the point where no single summit will be enough to reconcile them all. Instead, they will have to try and find where the differences between Washington and the Korean people lie and seek common ground there. Thus a recent call in the U.S. for a preemptive strike against North Korea¡¯s missile base is a matter that is unacceptable to the Korean people.
President Roh and his government must first discover the public¡¯s expectations of the Korea-U.S. relationship and the issues between the two countries, and establish a diplomatic line based on them. The president needs to listen to opposition voices and solicit the advice of senior national leaders.
Over his tenure, the president has pushed forward with quite a few things the people gave him no mandate for. By doing so, he has driven the country into a situation, that a former defense minister has described as ¡°almost unbearably critical." The summit comes with little over a year to go before the next presidential election. Therefore the chief executive should go into what is likely to be his last meeting with his U.S. counterpart, not as a representative of the Roh administration but on behalf of the Korean people -- and that includes the next government that will inherit the Korea-U.S. relationship in the state in which he leaves it.
|
