As usual, North Korea’s Kim family is causing trouble. As I write this, we’re shadowing a North Korean freighter believed to be carrying missile parts and nuclear materials. More spectacularly, Kim Jong-Il is threatening a Taepodong missile launch to Hawaii on or about July 4th. Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ’rocket’s red glare’.
But at this time of tension, South Korea has a new president. He’s Lee Myung-bak, nicknamed the ‘Bulldozer’. He is brunt, pragmatic and not given to illusions.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak — nickname: The Bulldozer — isn’t a man who minces words, as Barack Obama will discover when he hosts a summit with him on Tuesday. Mr. Lee, known for persistently asking “Will it work?” in meetings, is taking a hard-nosed look at his country’s despotic northern neighbor and planning the next steps. The task gained increased urgency late last month when Kim Jong Il’s regime tested its second nuclear weapon. Pyongyang is reportedly readying another.
Until now, South Korean presidents have unreservedly backed the six-party talks — a forum that includes the U.S., the two Koreas, Japan, China and Russia. The multilateral group was launched by the Bush administration in 2003 after Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and it has been enthusiastically supported by the Obama White House. All six parties say they agree about the need to “denuclearize” the Korean peninsula. Yet the North is believed to have two nuclear programs: a plutonium program and a highly enriched uranium program that Pyongyang alternately denies or boasts about.
The talks — only the latest iteration of a two-decade effort to stunt North Korea’s nuclear program — haven’t worked. And Mr. Lee, speaking to me yesterday at the Blue House, which houses the president’s private offices, is the first national leader to publicly acknowledge their failure.
Read it all. Lee’s views are a radical departure from the ‘Sunshine Policy’ pursued by his predecessors. Under Sunshine, South Korea pursued a dovish policy toward the North, even to the point of junking its intel networks in the North. Lee is already taking steps to beef up intel as well the South Korean military.
I always prefer a blunt-spoken pragmatist to dovish equivocators.
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