Commentary
South Korean leader's eclipse a sad lesson

By Tom Plate

The Bush administration played a key role in destroying the political fortunes of South Korean President Kim Dae Jung.

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung is, by any standard,a hero of Asian democracy. Advertiser libray photo • March 8, 2001

In East Asia now, a wise man in the autumn of his political life is finding his fate turning sour. A pioneering freedom fighter in his own country — hounded, jailed, nearly killed — he endured one military dictatorship after another until that glorious day in 1987 when South Korean democracy began to sprout.Ê

Even today, many Koreans accept that it was Kim Dae Jung's persistent opposition to military rule, as much as anything else, that helped father South Korean democracy. Thus, it was only fitting in 1998, after so many years out in the cold, that this strong-willed man became South Korea's third democratically elected president and only its second civilian one in modern times. That peaceful transition of power from one Kim (Kim Young Sam) to another seemed to close the book on Korean military dictatorships.

But, oh, did the clock so quickly strike midnight for this political Cinderella!

Beset and besieged on all sides, he now finds himself, at the age of 75, with a domestic popularity letdown from the once-stratospheric approval ratings to percentages in the tepid 20s. His ill-conceived March visit to Washington for his first meeting with George W. Bush ended in diplomatic disaster as the new U.S. president made little secret of his lack of confidence in Kim's policy of aggressive engagement with dangerous North Korea. That Bush-whack unclothed the wolves in Seoul, long drooling to sink their teeth into this near-legendary figure.

Then came the recent parliamentary by-elections, in which the government sustained losses so serious that Kim Dae Jung was forced to resign earlier this month as head of his own ruling Millennium Democratic Party — a tremendous blow to his prestige and power.Ê

Were South Korea not so important, who would care? But this country is one of the world's most industrialized nations, one of Asia's few practicing democracies and home to 37,000 U.S. troops who face the million-strong army of North Korea. The truth is, troubled South Korea makes anyone's geopolitical A list. But now Kim's once-promising "sunshine policy" of engaging the north is on ice, as is much of his government's trumpeted economic program, undertaken during the reformist fever of the Asian financial flu epidemic.

How did Kim become a downhill racer so fast? Yes, the man himself has been part of the problem. He's perhaps better cast as the crusading, idealistic outsider than as the subtle inside political ballplayer, for he often alienates with his imperial, standoffish style. But far from all of Kim's woes are of his own making. Even had he proved to be a magisterial Nelson Mandela combined with a Machiavellian Bill Clinton, South Korea would still have been blown off course by the devastating regional financial hurricane of 1998, which stuck a knife into so many otherwise well-heeled economic and political interest groups there. And how might his present standing differ had Kim the luxury of negotiating with a northern half far more susceptible to reason and logic than that stubbornly, stupidly Stalinist regime that just last week was charged — by the ever-helpful Bush administration — with developing germ weapons?

The eclipse of Kim Dae Jung has been as depressing to watch as his apotheosis was exhilarating to behold. Asia, at least as much as any other region, desperately needs wise and popular leaders to overcome the challenges ahead. To the extent that world opinion has held him in too much awe — he garnered last year's Nobel Peace Prize, the first ever awarded to a Korean, mainly for daring to aim audaciously for diplomacy and peace on his peninsula — South Korean domestic politics now, sadly, accords him too little respect.Ê

There is something deeply unsettling about a country that seems determined to level the domestic playing field by chopping down its tallest trees. In so doing, South Korea risks creating a culture of political suicide and fearful, low-grade leadership. To be sure, we in America have tended from time to time to do this to our own leaders. But not, it seems to me, with quite the same feral intensity as South Korea.

Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. He also has a spot on the Web.