There is a common failing of Americans, especially when they gaze out from behind their protective oceans at disputes agitated not merely by decades but by centuries of complex animus -- vicious sectarian wars in the Middle East, fierce border wars in South Asia, tribal/religious wars in Africa, -- to wonder why the combatants can’t just "move on."
Donald Trump’s administration is no exception to this. For example, in the most recent flareup of tensions between two of the United States’ most erstwhile allies in the Pacific region – South Korea and Japan, the President’s primary misperception lies in seeing the rising tensions as nothing more than merely a trade dispute. In this he has surprisingly bipartisan company. His Democratic Party predecessor, Barack Obama, opined that both disputatious nations had “to look forward,” as if history was merely something that happened long ago rather than a force that pervades daily life and shapes streams of consciousness several decades after slights and perceived or real injustices began to accumulate.
It’s a strange myopia, since Americans clearly still carry the wounds of their past, notably slavery’s taint, which continues to animate their domestic politics, culture, economics, and society. The myth of the melting pot exerts such a strong force that, in many corners of life, it’s actually come true—and where it hasn’t, it has allowed many citizens to indulge in the fantasy that it somehow has. Maybe that’s why they have avoided a resurgence of civil wars. Maybe that subconscious avoidance, brought on by evasion, lies at the heart of what has been euphemistically termed “American exceptionalism”—though now with the US in its current state of foment its citizens are increasingly wondering how long that can be sustained.
Many other countries face the force of history all the time. South Korea and Japan are particularly unusual in that they’re divided by this force yet at the same time are both staunch American allies. No Indo-Pakistani – both countries with shifting associations with the US – ambivalence here. The challenge, which previous post World War Two presidents have taken up to some degree, is to recognize this fact, to confront its complexities, and to help the countries contain their historical tendency for conflict: in short, to act like the leader of an alliance, not just for their benefit but for its own.
This is a particularly hard task for the current administration, with its “America First” focus. Having embraced disruption against pre-established diplomatic norms as a key tenet of policy and sought to remake diplomacy in more bilateral terms, White House officials were suddenly blindsided by the recent tensions between South Korea and Japan which recently erupted into public view. Like most Americans who seldom follow Asian politics, they seemed unaware, or unfazed, that these strains had indeed erupted periodically (and predictably) for the past 70 years—and that these moments have invariably been quelled by American mediation.
The issues between the two countries have been the same for generations. What’s different, this time around, is that Donald Trump—unlike all previous presidents—has had, until very recently, no interest in stepping in. In fact, much like his attitude to the G7 summits when he wondered aloud if there were better things to do with his time, Trump mused about the number of things he had to get involved in.
Part of the issue lies with Trump’s continued manifest lack of understanding in the role of US President. By its nature, the modern presidency has evolved into more than just being CEO of the world’s strongest economic and military power. It’s. in effect, being de facto president of the planet, and that the outsized nature of American influence on world events has consequently meant that whoever leads must also exercise wildly disproportionate influence on global events. Thus, while the US does not want to be drawn into what might be termed “other people’s messes,” it really has no choice.
The background to this particular situation is complex: In 1910, Japan forcibly colonized South Korea as a result of defeating China’s Qing dynasty, recruited laborers at abysmally low wages, and, during World War II, forced South Korean women to serve as “comfort women”—essentially sex slaves—to Japanese servicemen. The memory of this history is still both politically potent and persistent, remaining the root cause of current tensions.
For a brief moment, it seemed that this sordid chapter had been closed. A treaty signed in 1965 obligated the Japanese government to reimburse the underpaid workers (many of whom were still alive at the time, though only few remain today). Another treaty, signed in 2015, compensated the surviving comfort women and many families of those who had passed away. Many South Korean citizens protested the limited terms of the “comfort women” agreement upon its signing, and when President Moon Jae-in took office in 2017, he shut down the foundation that had been distributing the Japanese funds. Moon has always maintained a somewhat schizoid attitude to Japan, pursuing an uneasy mix of statesmanlike and activist approaches which has not found much succour when coupled with Shinzo Abe’s unapologetically nationalistic approach. When Moon confronts issues related to the troubled history between both nations, he seems to default to his previous incarnation of a student activist turned left-wing politician, quick to heap criticism on Japan. This in an approach guaranteed to inflame the sensitivities of an Abe who seeks to rekindle his nation’s warrior spirit and amend its pacifistic constitution.
In 2018 a lawsuit was filed in South Korean court on behalf of the underpaid laborers, seeking reimbursement from Japanese companies that had participated in the occupation. The 1965 treaty—which also happened to establish diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan—had explicitly placed liability strictly on the Japanese government. It also set up an arbitration board—consisting of one person each from Japan, South Korea, and a third party—to hear and resolve any complaints. The lawyers for the laborers argued that individuals should have the right to sue for damages from the offending companies. (Under the treaty, Japan paid the South Korean government, which, rather than distributing the money to the underpaid laborers, poured it into industrial investment, which spurred enormous economic growth.) The judge sided with the laborers. In a split decision, which took everyone by surprise, the South Korean Supreme Court upheld that verdict.
The Japanese companies, backed by the Tokyo government, refused to comply. The Seoul government then threatened to seize Japanese assets in South Korea. Last month, Japan restricted exports of materials critical to South Korea’s semiconductor and flat-panel industries, while also removing the country from its “whitelist” of trusted trading partners. South Korea removed Japan from its own similar list. As is their wont, events escalated to tit for tat actions driven less by logic and more by domestic political concerns. Both South Korea and Japan have nationalistic press, and politicians there as elsewhere, have found the lure of whipping up such distractions from domestic issues all too tempting
South Korea cancelled a treaty with Japan that was signed in 2016 (under heavy prodding from the Obama administration), under which the two agreed to share top-secret intelligence information with each other.
The consequences both for the US and the wider world are profound. A widening gulf between the two allies will also make it harder to devise a common approach on negotiating with North Korea, assuming that, at some point, a U.S. president is actually interested in negotiating, rather than letting Kim Jong-un do whatever he wants as long as he stops short of test-launching long-range missiles.
As part of his pivot” toward Asia, Obama created a quarterly meeting among the deputy foreign secretaries of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. As in most previous administrations, U.S. State Department diplomats engaged in dialogue with their South Korean and Japanese counterparts, seeking to proactively contain bush fires before they erupted into full-scale conflagrations. All of this came to a halt under the Trump administration. In fact, Ambassadors and assistant secretaries for the region weren’t even put in place until very recently.
Recently U.S. emissaries proposed a “standstill” agreement between the two governments, but Moon and Abe essentially ignored it and suffered no rebuke from Washington: a clear signal that the United States was no longer willing to exert leverage to effect compromises. Earlier this month, Trump finally said he was “concerned” that the two allies were “not getting along with each other.” Yet he proposed no agenda or demands, so nothing is likely to happen. The President has a trade war with China, a potentially weakening global economy, Venezuela, Iran and most importantly, his re-election campaign to deal with, and besides, his likely “solution” would be to threaten slapping tariffs on both countries anyways unless they resume talking.
The dangerous feud between both nation festers. Not even the prospect of a Trump re-election in 2020 offers respite. The only “winner” for the moment is Kim Jong-un’s North Korea with its strategy of playing off the divisions among its larger neighbors. The widening gulf between South Korea and Japan gives Kim much more room to play.
The next surprise is very likely to come from him.