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Previously, I have argued Korea should be more proactive in its own defense against North Korea and its largest trading partner, China.
Surely, I have my own critiques of President Park. The poor emergency response to the Sewol ferry disaster tops the list. Further, Park has been ineffective in increasing real wages for the poor, working, and middle classes; unemployment and underemployment of young, Korean adults with tertiary education is still woefully high; the Korean social safety net is one of the lowest in terms of government funding of OECD countries; and wage disparity between men and women is one of the highest of all developed nations (nearly three times the OECD average, which works out to women earning 60 cents to every dollar men make for the same job, experience, and education level).
The last point, of the Korean government's dearth of policy and legislative initiatives on the parity of wages and general fairness for women, I find particularly egregious. As Korea's first woman president, one would think increasing equality for women in the workplace, and more broadly, society, would be of some importance to President Park.
Yet, again and again, President Park gets high marks for her foreign policy (which makes me wonder if she would have been a better foreign minister than president). She's deftly shown strength and a cold, realistic approach to Korea's relationship with the North. Gone are the days of nutritional and monetary aid to the North without verifiable, concrete steps towards the DPRK's nuclear disarmament. Korea's military strikes with more precision and less hesitation when provoked to do so under Park's administration.
Park has tried to play the long game in both holding the North in check while calming China's concerns about the United States' and its heavy military presence on the Korean peninsula. In many ways, her maneuvers, particularly with Seoul and Beijing's relationship, have worked. That's until THAAD's deployment in South Korea was officially announced.
For the uninitiated, THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) is a missile defense system meant to intercept incoming missiles at high altitudes via its own projectiles, destroying the weapons high above, long before said missiles reach their target.
THAAD has a 100 percent kill rate as of the printing of this article. Vice Admiral James Syring, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) recently confirmed this at a news conference in Seoul. Testing THAAD's competency at destroying intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) have yet to take place, however. Tests of THAAD's viability against IRBMs will be conducted next year.
THAAD was always going to be an option Seoul would find increasingly difficult to delay. The protection of Seoul, and the rest of Korea, from the North's conventional missiles and artillery is why THAAD's a smart (and inevitable) decision.
Many defense officials in both Korea and America, including General Scaparrotti (former Commander of United Nations Command, R.O.K.-U.S. Combined Forces Command and U.S. Forces Korea) are strongly in favor of deploying such a system in Korea to guard against possible future aggressions from the DPRK. Scaparrotti's successor, General Vincent K. Brooks (the first African-American to hold the USFK post), concurred, having recently said, "This [THAAD's deployment] is an important ROK-U.S. decision…North Korea's continued development of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction require the Alliance to take this prudent, protective measure to bolster our layered and effective missile defense."
China (and to a lesser extent, Russia) dislikes THAAD because it complicates its own geopolitical endeavors. Beijing has been performing large-scale and impressively fast land reclamation throughout the South China Sea, claiming "historical" ownership of much of the area, while dismissing competing (and in some cases, legitimate) territorial claims by smaller and weaker Asian countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
Further, China's military has heavily invested in strategies to blunt the superior technology, firepower, and expertise of the American military in the unlikely (but plausible) event of a military conflict between China and the U.S.
Case in point: a variant of the Dong-Feng 21 (DF-21), a two-stage, solid-fuel rocket with a single-warhead China's been developing for decades. The DF-21 is a medium-range ballistic missile with nuclear capability meant to sink carriers and damage carrier fleets.
As China increasingly asserts itself in the South China Sea and elsewhere (like its Senkaku Islands dispute with Japan), a more engaged American military, coupled with THAAD, seriously complicates its ambitions.
China may use its trade relationship with Korea as leverage to, at the very least, hurt Korean economic interests as punishment for THAAD's deployment.
So be it. China could and should do much more to curb North Korean aggression; and as the DPRK's sole trading partner, it has some power to do so. It has not.
THAAD's deployment was as certain as the sun, and I'm all for it.
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.
