Policymakers everywhere might want to consider three salient traits about South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who is making a high-profile state visit to Washington this week.
First, when she was in her twenties, she suffered the violent deaths of both of her parents. Her mother died at the hand of a North Korean assassin and her father, former South Korean president Park Chung-hee, was murdered by an aide five years later. Coping emotionally with that searing experience has surely put steel into Park Geun-hye’s spine.
Second, rising as a woman through the political ranks of South Korea, without question among the world’s most male-dominated societies, has been no mean feat. Park Geun-hye won her first election to the National Assembly in 1998 with 51.5 percent of the vote. She won her fourth election 10 years later with 88.6 percent of the vote.
Third, she seems to be a private, even mysterious person. After her mother’s death, she became her father’s official hostess, a duty she accomplished with charm and grace. However, after her father’s death she disappeared from the public eye for nearly 20 years before re-emerging into politics. She has never married.
The new president, the first woman to be elected to head South Korea, has made clear her intentions toward North Korea. She has called for building trust between north and south, but has asserted that this “rests on strong deterrence and it is not a policy of appeasement.”
And while she may propose ways to deal with the North that sound “soft,” her counterpart in Pyongang, Kim Jong-un, “should know that if push comes to shove, she will stare him down,” South Korean academic and adviser Lee Chung-min said.
Against this backdrop, several commentators, both from South Korea and the West, have already suggested that Park Geun-hye will turn out to be the “Iron Lady of Korea.”
Park Geun-hye met US President Barack Obama in the White House on Tuesday. The agenda apparently had no surprises: the North Korean threat, trade and other economic issues, ways to strengthen the alliance between the US and South Korea on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Korean War.
US defense officials and military officers have been quietly critical of previous South Korean governments, allegedly for failing to take full responsibility for the defense of their nation. In large part, that means resisting increases in military spending.
Perhaps the more interesting event was Park Geun-hye’s address to a joint meeting of the US Senate and US House of Representatives yesterday.
“Given the North Korean regime’s recent provocative actions, President Park’s address to Congress will serve as a vital and timely reminder that Americans and South Koreans will continue to stand shoulder to shoulder,” US House Speaker John Boehner said.
Most foreign leaders who are invited to address the US Congress have been established political leaders, not newly elected like Park Geun-hye; she was inaugurated in February.
In the past five years, those who have addressed the Congress have included former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, Park Geun-hye’s predecessor.
Others include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, former Mexican president Felipe Calderon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former British prime minister Gordon Brown and former Irish taoiseach Bertie Ahearn. In sum, Park Geun-hye will be in good company.
South Korean officials have suggested that their president will call for a multilateral initiative in Northeast Asia in which China, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, Russia and the US seek to resolve environmental issues. If such an effort was successful, members would step up to more difficult issues, such as maritime security.
Another if: North Korea would be invited to join the initiative if Kim could give assurances that his regime would live up to whatever agreements they made. Pyongyang’s record on this score is not good, which may be the understatement of the week.
In addition, Park Geun-hye has brought with her a large entourage of business executives from the chaebol, or conglomerates, who will be meeting with US executives to discuss trade.
This is significant as the US has long complained that Seoul blocked many US exports to South Korea.
Richard Halloran is a commentator in Hawaii.
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past