Day of reckoning: US has got work to do

By Eugene Lee

Rule No. 1 when conducting foreign policy is to leave your morals outside the door. It is your national interest that drives your judgment ― that has been the first commandment since the ancient Greeks, who laid the foundation for a proto-idea of a state. Yet, today, we see the world in very different terms, and we try to distinguish what is right and what is wrong. Essentially, international law after World War II was exactly about it.

If you open any newspaper or tune yourself to any news channel, you will find it full of information about President Yoon Suk Yeol's visit to Tokyo. There's nothing really particular about it, as it would be very much a common practice where a political leader is trying to engage a neighbor, but it is not that simple in South Korea's case.

Without a doubt, the United States has played an important role in Asia over the last century ― South Korea owes its existence to the United States as a country after experiencing brutal Japanese colonial rule. However, one should also recognize what type of existence it has been. First, it had a little say over who would be in its first government, shoving the Korean Provisional Government aside and installing Syngman Rhee, a dictator-to-be.

Later, the U.S. supported a row of authoritarian regimes not only in South Korea but across Asia. I do not even need to mention the Vietnam War, where millions of civilians lost their lives in the U.S.' fight for democracy. We have to look at the starting point when the U.S. detonated two nuclear bombs that killed millions of civilians in 1945.

And yes, we do have to look back at the much-praised Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who had bothered himself very little in really reorganizing the countries and setting them up for democracy. Instead, he took what was left of the colonial administrative "machinery" and simply turned it into a pseudo-democracy. Plus, the famous general insisted on negotiating a better outcome for the U.S., rather than a complete resolution and punishment of those war criminals through tribunals, similar to those that took place in Europe.

Many of those criminals escaped punishment and were honored by the Japanese government when they died. No wonder that whenever a political leader in Japan visits the Yasukuni War Shrine today, it irks the political circles of countries nearby, stoking the ghosts of those colonial times.

Even in today's setting, the U.S. remains very complacent and insensitive to what is going on in those countries which it has been heavily involved in. Instead of calling on Japan to reconcile with its past, it welcomes the rapprochement with Tokyo that the Yoon administration is making, forgetting one important thing: it is being done against the will of the majority of people. So much for your idea of democracy! Even on a bigger scale, the U.S., and especially Democrats, have remained silent on the attacks on people and democracy the Yoon administration has been making to this day.

The U.S. policy of non-interference has become a policy of complicity, as some think tanks in the U.S. are very vocal in expressing divergent opinions and further polarizing sides in South Korea. Today, if you try to criticize the administration, you run the risk of being labeled as a "commie" or pro-North, very much like McCarthyites in the 1960s.

The way I see it, in the last several decades, the U.S. has lost its moral compass ― the slogan of fighting communism and supporting democracies worldwide ― and has been trying to promote its national interests instead. Even its seemingly benign promotion of international trade has often turned into resource plundering and labor exploitation, and the word for it is offshoring.

Make no mistake, I am not trying to depreciate what the U.S. has done and is doing for South Korea and Asia as a whole. But, at the end of the day, as they say, what goes around comes around. Let us take a look at where the U.S. is today. Its own democracy is under threat. It is hard not to compare what is happening in the U.S., a developed country, where its former President Donald Trump is facing likely imprisonment, and, say, Pakistan, a weak developing country, where its former President Imran Khan is fighting off an arrest against unfair prosecution. Here, however, one must mention that in Pakistan it is an attack against democracy, whereas in the U.S. it is eroding the institution of democracy.

That brings me to my final note. The U.S. has persistently ignored culture, history and institutions in its foreign policy conduct in Asia. Hence, it is experiencing very much the same crisis domestically today. In its fight for democracy, the U.S. has done very little to strengthen the institutions that would promote and defend democracy itself. It should do better. But even before that, the U.S. must get real with itself.

No wonder anti-U.S. sentiment is being voiced across Asia. And once again, it seems like the ancient Greeks and Florentines were right: once you bring your morals into your foreign policy, get ready to be judged by them. And if you are saying what you do is all for the sake of democracy, so be it. Otherwise, democracy may perish one day.

Eugene Lee (mreulee@gmail.com) is a lecturing professor at the Graduate School of Governance at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Specializing in international relations and governance, his research and teaching focus on national and regional security, international development, government policies and Northeast and Central Asia.