It almost seems like a curse. Last week, North Korea’s fourth, undetected, nuclear test angered the world, particularly South Korea, the U.S., Japan and reportedly China. Sanctions follow as cross-border tension soars.
The menacing threat will define not only the security status on the Korean Peninsula in the coming weeks and months, but more importantly South Korea’s footing in the merciless whirlpool of world powers most likely to make use of Pyongyang’s nuclear test to protect and expand their sway in the region.
Especially with the end of progressive administrations’ engagement with the North, the conservatives’ stronger sanctions and a tit-for-tat mentality appear the norm for dealing with the rogue state. It doesn’t quite matter that the rigorous global sanctions appear to have hardly discouraged Pyongyang from advancing its nuclear dreams.
Domestically, the North’s nuclear threat never fails to regenerate complexity.
The growing outlet of mouth-frothing anger against the government has once again been muted by the urgency of patriotism against the threat from the reclusive neighbor.
President Park Geun-hye became more vocal, warning the North, as she should, that its nuclear test is a serious challenge to the South’s security, and against world peace and stability.
Park delivered the much-needed observation that the North’s claim to have tested a second-generation hydrogen bomb can shake the security landscape of Northeast Asia and fundamentally change the characteristic of North’s nuclear issue.
Aside from that, it has been deja vu all over again.
Seoul resumed the propaganda broadcasts, minimized entry of South Korean businesspeople to the joint inter-Korean industrial complex, and heralded its robust alliance with Washington.
Park also took time to domesticize the issue, saying it was high time that the country remains stable, and that political parties stop political bickering and gather forces to protect the people’s security.
Naturally, her approval ratings bounced back, jumping 2.1 percentage points to 44.6 percent in a week.
Some of her staunchest support groups including the veterans’ associations took to the fore, upgrading the conservative agenda of anti-North patriotism to help Park cement her political viability.
Conservative activists pushed aside the progressive demonstrators on the streets, burning North Korean flags, calling for stringent sanctions, and branding less hard-line citizens as unpatriotic, if not pro-North.
While the sense of emergency and hatred toward North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was shared by the progressives, the turn of events was received bitterly.
The need was echoed to eradicate the impending nuclear threat from the cross-border state, but they also questioned what else Seoul could, or should, do about it — whether turning the switch on loudspeakers was the only self-sufficient leverage against the North.
Even with Park’s much-touted partnership with her Chinese counterpart over the past couple of years, there appears to be no change in the rhetorical distance between China and South Korea on reproaching the North.
Despite the government trumpeting its toughness against the North’s provocation, few felt safer, if not uninterested.
North Korea’s nuclear threat should not overshadow South Korea’s diplomatic inadequacy that was displayed in the latest sex slavery agreement with Japan. It should, in fact, pronounce it more, as Seoul is more likely to be sandwiched between the world players.
While the government advocates a denuclearized North and reunification as impending goals, nobody really knows how to achieve them.
For Korea, there is no luxury of politicizing security. Open bottom-up discussions on all possible scenarios and solutions should be allowed with only our interest at hand. Remove politics, remove ideology, on the premise that nobody wants a peaceful and unified Korea more than Koreans.
International threats or security emergency has historically prompted the people and political parties to rally around the flag.
But such phenomenon has only been temporary unless it came with positive results, as was argued by professor Mathew Baum of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Late American author and journalist Sydney J. Harris had said, “The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.”
South Korean diplomats have theorized that when it comes to national security, there is no right or left. Then they should be left alone to do their job.
It may be time for the people to remind their leader to loosen her oligarchic rule and leap over the political scale to resolve the peninsular predicament.
Patriotism should no longer be about ideologies, but about survival.
By Lee Joo-hee (jhl@heraldcorp.com)
Lee Joo-hee is the national desk editor of The Korea Herald. She can be reached at jhl@heraldcorp.com. — Ed.
