Will new South Korean President Lee Jae Myung chart a foreign policy course different from that of his predecessors?  One finds there has been a deep continuity in South Korea’s foreign policy contours. Like his predecessors, President Lee seems to focus on promoting the country’s defense deterrence. In his media interviews, Lee has disavowed concerns that his presidency” would reverse the country’s previous reconciliation efforts with Japan and the trilateral allied cooperation” with Tokyo (and Washington).

Observers say that President Lee has no alternative but to boost his defense deterrence against the forces hostile to South Korea. In his inauguration speech in June this year, President Lee did pledge to keep open the “channels of dialogue” with North Korea to establish peace on the peninsula. Since then he has also taken steps to reach out to the North. He has ordered the removal of military propaganda loudspeakers along the inter-Korean border, authorized a resumption of humanitarian outreach and urged civic groups to stop launching any anti-North Korean leaflets. But all his gestures towards the North do not seem to have received any positive response. North Korea today treats the South as its “principal enemy.” Its supreme leader Kim Jong-un has long turned his back on his father Kim Jong Il’s goal of unification with South Korea. Recently, Kim’s powerful sister Kim Yo Jong has even rejected the overtures President Lee has made.

The observers say it is ironical that relations between Japan and South Korea, the two reasonably developed democracies in East Asia, are not as cordial as they ought to have been. Ties between the two nations are centuries old. After the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan in 1965, the two nations took several steps to boost their ties. They jointly hosted the 2002 FIFA World Cup. In September of 2022, they joined the US and staged joint anti-submarine drills. In August 2023, Japan signed a trilateral pact with South Korea and the United States. Today South Korean pop culture is very popular in Japan. And so is the Japanese one in South Korea.

The observers stress Japan can be Seoul ’s best defense against any threat from Pyongyang. Japan recognizes South Korea alone in the peninsula. It is through the Six-Party Talks that it would discuss the issue of its citizens abducted by the North Korean government during the 1970s and 1980s.

The ties between South Korea and Japan have been strained, mainly on account of their continuing rows over the record of the Japanese wrong-doings during its imperial rule. The dominant narrative amongst the Koreas is that after Japan came to colonize the peninsula in 1910, its army forced more than 100,000 Koreans to served. It forced many Korean “comfort women” to serve as  its prostitutes.

In 2015, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and then South Korean president Park Geun-hye did seek to address the issue of comfort women. Abe made public apologies to the Korean women who underwent painful experiences. But it did not cut much ice. The current leaders of the two nations would do well to address the issue of Japan’s imperial era “atrocities” at the earliest.

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Source: Weekly Blitz :: Writings