President Roh Moo-hyun told U.S. opinion leaders on Saturday after his summit with his American counterpart George W. Bush, "Although many are concerned about Korea-U.S. relations, my visit to the U.S. and the summit confirmed that the two countries are friendly and that their friendship will develop in the future." Having agreed with the U.S. that Korea will take over wartime operational control of its forces, as he wished, he will have meant that the country will be able to achieve what he has touted as "cooperative self-defense" and "healthy” Korea-U.S. relations.

The president’s vision of the development of Korea-U.S. relations is rather different from what most Koreans are hoping for, but he pushed through with his plans regardless. Some 66.3 percent here oppose our sole exercise of operational control of our troops because it imperils our security and is premature, while 29.4 percent approve it because it goes to our sovereignty and because we are capable of self-defense. That was the result of a Gallup poll last week. Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating was 14.6 percent in a poll by the Korea Society Opinion Institute on Tuesday.

Once the majority opinion was clearly at odds with his own on operational control, the president ought to have asked himself if he is really the man to handle the problem. Mandated to defend the nation, it should have been his first duty to ask himself, before the people do, if a president with a 14 percent approval rating should be pushing through a matter opposed by 66 percent of the people.

But the president claims things went well. He again vented the baseless optimism he expressed when six-nation talks in September last year produced a statement of principles whereby Pyongyang agreed to abandon all nuclear programs, namely that Seoul’s diplomacy “over-achieved our objectives."

Those who believed the president have been let down time and again in the course of the year since then. After he proposed to the North "unconditional institutional and physical support," North Korea test-fired seven missiles as if to show us that it could. Japan distorts history and makes territorial claims to the Dokdo islets; China is engaged in the so-called Northeast Project to co-opt early Korean history and has attempted to raise a maritime dispute over Ieodo Island. That is the high esteem in which Korea is held by its neighbors. In July, when Seoul was sidelined in the UN Security Council's unanimous adoption of a resolution on North Korea, a White House official called it a natural consequence of our conduct. Things have got so bad that the ruling-party lawmaker who was the first defense minister of this administration lamented security has become “almost unbearably precarious.”

The sleep of many Koreans is troubled by the president's obstinacy and preposterous optimism. He has a year and a half to go in office. He must abandon the idea that he can bend the country to his ideological prejudice and contrary way of thinking. Elected by 48.9 percent of the public and now approved by barely more than 10 percent, that year and a half gives him just enough time to ruin the republic. That must not happen.