Straight Talk
The AWSJ, under 'Notable and Quotable', recently quoted Aidan Foster-Carter of Asia Times, from his 8 Feb column,
A diss-service by self-righteous know-alls:
bq. Ignorant or blinded by spite, the AWSJ just doesn't get what Kim Dae-jung is about. His whole aim is to end this vicious zero-sum idea that rivals have to be eliminated. Thanks to his and others' courage, South Korea is no longer like that. Kim's dream was to extend this to the whole of Korea: to reconcile.
bq. A noble dream, but flawed in execution. Charges that the June 2000 North-South summit was preceded by a secret US$200 million payment to Pyongyang, made via Hyundai, must be a matter for dismay. But not for the AWSJ, which positively crowed at the news. More cocksure than ever, an editorial this Wednesday damned Kim Dae-jung as "a false prophet of peace", called his Nobel peace prize "wholly undeserved" and dismissed the entire Sunshine Policy as appeasement: nay, a "security-destroying peace charade".
bq. That ugly phrase, barely English, could come straight from the North Korean news agency KCNA. Our next column will refute the substantive charges, and defend the Sunshine Policy. For now, let's focus on the tone. In Asia, need I say, tone counts. This isn't Texas or New York. In yer face is just not the Asian way. If you want to persuade, you go about it subtly, showing your adversary a modicum of respect.
bq. Do the self-righteous hacks who pen this stuff really not hear how arrogant they sound? - and how this tone is liable to backfire? Two years ago, when George Bush (more subtly than this) dissed Kim Dae-jung in Washington, even Kim's enemies in Korea bristled. At a time when similar insensitivities have brought US-ROK relations to perhaps their lowest point ever, you'd think that sheer self-interest would prompt a tad more thought before rolling out the insults. Really, you wonder why they bother putting "Asian" in the title of the paper at all. The ugly American is alive and well: a preachy know-all, lecturing the lesser breeds for their failings - and as ever, doing his country's interests in Asia no good at all.
I have to start by noting the irony of Foster-Carter's complaints about tone and lack of subtlety - after all, the Asia Time and the Wall Street Journal are both private journalistic enterprises. If subtlety is such a big concern, shouldn't Foster-Carter be a bit more circumspect in his criticism of the AWSJ?
More importantly, as Foster-Carter illustrates, there is value to frank and honest discussion in the political arena, particularly on issues as contentious as the so-called 'Sunshine Policy.' It now appears that S. Korea gave its Northern friend more than US $500 milllion in exchange for his appearance at the conference. This money was not aid - it did not pay for food for the millions of starving North Koreans - it went into Kim Jong Il's private bank accounts. It could be funding his nuke program now, or perhaps paying for a new presidential palance. Or just sitting offshore.
Foster-Carter argues in a
subsequent column that it's not even that bad to pay bad guys to do what you want - after all, the CIA paid many of the warlords in Afghanistan to gain their allegiance. Of course, the warlords actually fought with the US against the Taliban...remind me again what Kim Jong Il has actually done?
The Korean dialogue to date has been mostly gestures with very little, if any, substance (by which I mean concessions by the North). That's fine, for as far as it gets you - improving trust is important. But paying over $500 million for gestures is utter absurdity (besides the apparently illegality), and the AWSJ is right to call a spade a spade. Bribe Kim Jong Il to step down, maybe consider bribing him to change his behavior, but don't bribe him in pursuit of meaningless gestures.
A Westerner trying, for the first time, to negotiate in Asia, or to manage an Asian staff, needs to take into account the notion of 'face' and the 'subtle nature' of negotiations. A newspaper such as the AWSJ or the Asia Times, commenting on state level relations between democracies and a totalitarian state, does not. The best thing outsiders can bring to this sort of debate is ideas, arguments, and information. From where I sit,
AWSJ op-eds have brought more new ideas to the debate than the tired anti-Americanism of the Asia Times.
Posted by Stephen Bronstein at February 25, 2003 07:23 PM