Paradigm Conflicts among Allies: Historical Origins of the U. S.-ROK Split over North Korea

Abstract

IntroductionNorth Korea haunted the United States with its nuclear programs in two ways. It first jeopardized the U.S. efforts to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Secondly, the nuclear crisis encroached on the stability of the U.S.-South Korean military alliance. The allies lost the previous solidarity that they had kept for half a century. Some of the official remarks of disappointment exchanged between the allies until 2008 were rare in the history of the alliance, and seriously hurt mutual trust in bilateral or multiparty negotiations over the North's nuclear challenge.The relationship seems to have been improving since President Lee Myung-bak took office in 2008, but it is unlikely to be restored to the close rapport of the 1980s. President Lee's pragmatic foreign policy, even if it held aloft the torch of a new and revitalized U.S.-South Korean alliance, has yet to show an outcome of consequence that will help to regain a unified voice between the U.S. and South Korea over North Korean issues. In less than two years of his presidency, President Lee's ideas about rebuilding the U.S.-South Korean alliance based on the prerequisite of the North's nuclear renunciation has already shown some serious practical limits.1Relative to the crisis in nuclear proliferation, however, the deteriorating U.S.- South Korean alliance has been less investigated. The uniqueness of North Korea was so pronounced that most scholarly projects delved into its idiosyncratic ideology and politics. Monographs of policy prescription as well as theoretical analysis adopted the views presented in the case studies and ascribed the unsuccessful U.S. containment of the North's nuclear development to the lack of information about the enemy, North Korea. Few of them have attended to problems intrinsic to the alliance between the United States and South Korea.2The damage caused by the widening split in the alliance has been obvious. For the past decade or so, each ally has had to pay the cost of pursuing separate goals- a cost that would not have been felt otherwise.3 South Korea has had to buy its sunshine policies from North Korea in the absence of full support from the U.S.; and the United States has become more vulnerable to North Korea's demand of a return in response to its nuclear freeze, while South Korea has just stood by and become more relaxed about the nuclear threat. Worst of all, the enemy could fully exploit the split: North Korea could make the best of the split to gain time to ease its economic distress without relinquishing its nuclear ambition. Thus North Korea could demand more assistance from South Korea with the threat of alienating the South from the nuclear negotiations, while using the South Korean card to beg for more economic aid from the United States. More recently, the exploitation of the weakening alliance by North Korea culminated in its 2009 nuclear test, for which the lack of policy coordination between the allies, or an expectation of it, would provide the only rational explanation.This paper seeks an explanation of why the two allies split. It does not, however, seek an answer in the end of the Cold War or South Korea's rapid democratization as many studies have already done; the causality of the international or domestic political factors was not as strong as it has been argued to be.4 Instead, my research highlights the conflicting paradigm that exists between the two allies as the cause. The allies have perceived the enemy (North Korea) differently: South Korea has understood and treated the North as a misbehaving brother, whereas the United States has recognized it as just one of a number of security competitors. Such a normative-versus-rational standoff loomed large in closing the first round of negotiations and became obvious by the time of the second North Korean nuclear crisis.To support the argument, this study first explores cases of collision in the halfdecade history of the alliance. …