Speeches and Transcripts
Anti-American Sentiments in Korea and their Impact on the Bilateral Relationship
Alexander Vershbow
U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea
University College at Yonsei University
June 1, 2007
I would first like to thank Professor Kim Syng-ho for inviting me to speak to you today. It is always a privilege to visit Yonsei University. As you know, an American missionary named Horace Underwood opened Chosen Christian College, which later became Yonsei University, in 1915. Long ago, he already understood the importance of education, which is prized in both American and Korean society. During the Japanese occupation, when the name of the institution was changed to Yonhui College, the school that Underwood built was a wellspring of dissent, closely affiliated with the independence movements that supported freedom from Japanese oppression. This legacy of education and dissent is one you should be proud of.
Today, I was asked to speak on the topic of anti-American sentiments and their impact on the bilateral relationship. I must say this is probably a more appropriate topic for historians than diplomats, because my impression is that we are a long way away from the days when the United States was dominant economically and militarily in this part of the world.
Still, how we became partners is a good story to tell. Because, whether you look at our efforts to modernize our security alliance, symbolized by the upcoming transfer of wartime operational control to Korea, our close cooperation on the Six-Party Talks, or our joint work to conclude a groundbreaking Free Trade Agreement – one consistent theme is that we are working to transform our relationship into a partnership between equals. Pessimists highlight slight policy differences between our two countries and claim that anti-Americanism is on the rise. My response is that, in fact, anti-Americanism has been on the decline in recent decades, because both Americans and Koreans have come to the realization that our shared interests – as well as our shared commitment to the values of freedom and democracy – are much greater than the sum of our occasional differences.
I would like to demonstrate this partnership by taking you on a short tour of how our two governments work with each other on key security and economic issues.
On the security front,, our military alliance was formed to keep peace and stability on the Korean peninsula, and this is still the underlying foundation of our relationship. North and South Korea share a common heritage of culture and history, and we wholly support South Korea’s goal of peaceful reunification with the North. But North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons poses a real threat to the security of the region and is the most formidable obstacle to genuine reconciliation on the Peninsula. Thus South Korea and the United States share a strong interest in working through the Six Party Talks to achieve the complete denuclearization of North Korea.
Indeed, South Korea and the United States are working together, along with our other partners in the Six-Party Talks, China, Japan and Russia, to convince North Korea that it must denuclearize if it wants to create the conditions for a stable and peaceful Korean peninsula, and a better life for the North Korean people. If North Korea fulfills its commitment to completely abandon all of its nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs in accordance with the September 2005 Joint Statement, the United States is prepared to normalize relations with the DPRK and help it to revive its dysfunctional economy. We are also prepared to negotiate a permanent peace regime to replace the “temporary” armistice of 1953 and officially end the Korean War. A denuclearized North Korea would open the way to a ground-breaking new era of cooperation and integration in Northeast Asia and bring the citizens of the two Koreas closer to realizing their dream of a peaceful reunification.
You are probably aware that the current process is stalled because North Korea has not yet honored its commitment to shut down the Yongbyon nuclear facility. There have been technical difficulties with North Korea being able to retrieve its funds out of its Banco Delta Asia accounts. Experts are working on that issue. We are also encouraged by signals that North Korea is sending that it plans to follow through on its commitments as soon as the BDA funds are in hand. In short, the February 13 agreement remains valid, despite the unfortunate delay.
The shutting down of the Yongbyon nuclear facility is just the beginning. In the next phase, North Korea is supposed to disable all of its nuclear facilities, and then in the final phase, the North is expected to completely dismantle all of its nuclear weapons and programs. We believe it is possible to achieve all of these goals before the end of President Bush’s term in office. We are ready to fulfill all of our commitments and are currently waiting for North Korea to hold up its end of the bargain. The world wishes for North Korea to open up and become a responsible member of the international community. Should it denuclearize, North Korea would have many opportunities in business, culture, and education to become a more prosperous, developed country – rather than lagging further behind all of its neighbors in Northeast Asia.
Some people in Korea are skeptical that the United States is sincere in seeking a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear issue, and believe we have an interest in maintaining the division of the Korean peninsula. Let me state as categorically as I can that the United States has no interest in prolonging the division of the Korean nation for one more day. President Bush is firmly committed to using diplomacy to achieve a comprehensive solution to the North Korean issue.
Let me shift from security to economics. South Korea is already a prosperous, developed country. But it was not always that way. The startling fact is that Korea became prosperous and developed in the space of a generation – my generation. South Korea’s “economic miracle” has become a model for rapid development. Trade, and in particular trade between Korea and the United States, played a huge role in that miracle, and this brings me to the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, or KORUS FTA.
Many Koreans view the KORUS FTA as the way to sustain Korea’s rapid economic growth into the 21st century. At the same time, the conclusion of Northeast Asia’s first FTA is perhaps one of the best symbols of shared Korean and U.S. interests and of our maturing, more balanced relationship. The KORUS FTA reaffirms the strength of our bilateral partnership, and reflects its broadening from a primarily military alliance into a more complex set of relations in which trade and investment play an ever larger part in the achievement of our shared goals.
The KORUS FTA is first and foremost about economics, and creating a more prosperous future for both our countries’ citizens. I mentioned Korea’s 21st century economic aspirations. Those include raising the standard of living even further, to something closer to $30,000 per head in the near term; improving Korea’s competitiveness against countries like Japan and China; becoming an economic hub in Northeast Asia; and providing the means to care for a rapidly aging population. That’s an ambitious economic agenda, but economists agree the KORUS FTA is one of the best and most effective ways Korea can achieve it. A recent forecast by eleven Republic of Korea think tanks concluded that the FTA would cause Korea’s economy to grow an additional six percentage points over the next decade, boost foreign investment by two to three billion dollars each year, and create 340,000 new jobs over the coming decade.
Greater prosperity and consumer choice are important to all of us, but I think the significance of this Free Trade Agreement goes further. It demonstrates that the United States and Korea – two dynamic economies and thriving democracies – are going to play a leading role in the global trading system. We can’t run from globalization, as President Roh has said, but we need to make it work for our countries. It’s no exaggeration to say that with this agreement, and with its commitment to future FTAs, Korea has become the trade policy leader of Northeast Asia.
The KORUS FTA also provides concrete evidence that the United States and Korea continue to work well together. This is the biggest FTA the United States has negotiated since the NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico 15 years ago, and the biggest FTA Korea has ever negotiated. Some people were skeptical that our two countries could ever complete such a huge undertaking – after all, both our countries had previously launched negotiations on FTAs with other countries that were not successfully concluded. But not only did we successfully conclude the KORUS FTA, we did so more rapidly than has ever been done with a trade negotiation of this magnitude. Clearly the U.S.-Korea economic relationship is undergoing more rapid transformation than that of our other trade relationships in Northeast Asia. I think that demonstrates that the United States and Korea are natural partners.
We can look forward to a vigorous KORUS FTA ratification debate in both the U.S. Congress and the Korean National Assembly. Ultimately, however, I remain confident both legislative bodies will see the overall economic and consumer benefits of the KORUS FTA and ratify the agreement.
The legislative debate I just mentioned exemplifies how democracies sort out the key questions that concern them in reasoned debate. Of course, some citizens didn’t want to wait for the legislative debate to make their views known – indeed, some of them didn’t even want to wait to see the text of the agreement before they were out in the streets expressing their opposition. That’s certainly their prerogative, although I think comments that are based more on ideology than on fact tend to shed more heat than light on a situation.
Some people asked me if I was concerned that the anti-FTA protests demonstrated that a lot of anti-American sentiment lurks beneath the surface here in Korea. But I think we should be careful of taking an overly simplistic analysis of the situation. First of all, trade is always controversial, all around the world – including in the United States. Many people feel threatened by trade and globalization as a general matter, whether it occurs through bilateral agreements with the United States and Korea, or China, or Japan – or multilateral agreements through the WTO.
Moreover, since the KORUS FTA is Korea’s biggest FTA to date, it’s not surprising that the negotiations would trigger a strong response by a lot of vested interests here, who fear the protections they currently enjoy would be taken away. There are many sectors of the Korean economy that benefit from the various protectionist barriers the Korean Government has erected over the years – not just farmers, but lawyers, broadcasters, pharmaceutical makers, and telecommunications operators. For individuals associated with those vested interests to protest against the FTA is not just their right in a democracy, but it is in a sense economically rational behavior – although it’s a bad basis for public policy because it elevates the interest of the individual over those of society at large.
But I don’t take that personally, and I certainly don’t take it as evidence of anti-Americanism. I suspect that as the ratification process proceeds in the United States, there will be Americans who will be just as assertive in trying to retain their tariff protection, and block Congressional ratification of our FTA. I hope my Korean friends also understand that even if we disagree with what those people are saying, that is rational economic behavior for those individuals. That shouldn’t be interpreted as evidence of “anti-Korean sentiment.”
I think it’s also important to note, when we talk about some of the anti-FTA protests here in Korea over the past year, that the numbers involved were, all things considered, fairly small – and got smaller as the KORUS negotiating process continued. What was more interesting for me, and for Washington, was that while there were small groups protesting against the FTA – an expected part of the trade negotiating process nowadays – here in Korea, public support for the FTA continued to grow (and was generally higher than we see in most countries that we negotiate with). I think that reflects that the Government did a very good job of explaining the potential benefits the FTA would bring to Korea – but it also reflects that anti-Americanism was not the big factor that some people assume.
That said, there was a small core of people here who, despite not being personally affected by the economic adjustments the FTA would involve, were implacably opposed to the FTA anyway. Their opposition to the KORUS FTA was colored by their opposition to the Korea-U.S. alliance generally, and in that respect could be characterized as “anti-American.” That can be illustrated by the fact that the launch of our KORUS FTA negotiations attracted more protests than the launch of the very similar Korea-EU FTA negotiations last month.
Still, I think anti-Americanism is a very loose concept, and we need to be careful in using it as a label. Clearly the anti-Americanism I see in some elements of Korean society is different from the anti-Americanism I witnessed when I worked in Brussels, or in Moscow. If there is such a thing as anti-Americanism with Korean characteristics, it seems to be driven specifically by the unique circumstances of Korea-U.S. relations, and suspicions by some Koreans that the United States, as a much bigger and more powerful country, will never treat Korea fairly. Much of that is driven by history – not just of the U.S.-Korea alliance, but of Korea’s relations with many of the large powers that surround it. In that respect, the sensitivity is understandable.
That doesn’t mean that the protesters don’t travel to the United States, or have relatives in the United States, or want their children to study in the United States, or enjoy American films and rock and roll music. But they suspect that at the end of the day, Korea, as the smaller partner, will always get a bad deal in its relations with the United States. I honestly think the KORUS FTA, with its focus on mutual and reciprocal obligations and rights, is a genuine “win-win” – an agreement that provides an equitable balance of benefits for both countries. But I know that some people here remain unconvinced, which is a good professional challenge for me.
Nevertheless, the majority of Koreans that I meet – including Koreans of your generation – tell me that they believe a stronger Korean-U.S. partnership is critical to Korea’s long-term security in the region, and that the FTA will give a major boost to that partnership. The public opinion polls are just as encouraging. When the FTA was announced here on April 2, Korean public support for the FTA rose to over 60 percent – a two-to-one margin in favor of the FTA – and President Roh’s popularity rating increased by 10-20 percentage points. That, I think, is telling evidence of the broad support for further deepening Korea’s partnership with the United States.
Despite the favorable opinion polls, I know that ratification of the FTA by the Korean National Assembly is not guaranteed, and that opponents will try to muster all the arguments they can think of to persuade a majority of legislators to oppose the agreement. But having a healthy debate about an issue as important as this is a good thing. When faced with opposition to ideas and principles that one holds very dear, one has to hold fast to the core value of democratic debate. Dissent has helped shape Korea into the great democracy that it is today and helped lead its citizens to greater prosperity. Korea became a true marketplace of ideas when freedom of expression was enshrined as a basic right in Korea’s constitution 20 years ago.
Dissent has also been very important in the United States. Dissent led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War that led us to break away from our mother country of Great Britain. Dialogue and debate brought women the right to vote in 1920. Freedom of expression and the right to voice grievances led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that allowed African Americans and other minorities in the United States to enjoy the same freedoms that the majority of other Americans enjoyed. Freedom of expression continues to bring improvements to American society and democracy.
In fact, I believe that the greatest contribution to the decline in anti-American attitudes among South Koreans was made by the much freer debate on all issues in the South Korean press. Thanks to the robust print and broadcast media in this country, and the increasingly influential Internet media, South Koreans can discuss and debate any aspect of the U.S.-ROK relationship, ranging from security issues such as the transfer of wartime operational control to economic issues such as the safety of U.S. beef imports. This kind of open debate, along with an enormous increase in educational and cultural exchanges, has led to a deeper realization by South Koreans that our two countries share so many goals, interests and values. This is one reason why I am very optimistic about the future of our relationship and believe that it will become even stronger in the years ahead.
So, in closing, I want to remind you of the legacy that Horace Underwood began when he formed Chosen Christian College. Underwood’s legacy was one of education. Remember Yonhui College’s legacy of standing up for freedom and its contributions to the ideal of “human liberty” as the “whole human race’s just claim.” The Republic of Korea and the United States of America have so many shared interests and goals at stake, and I hope that each of you will be able to help further that legacy of close cooperation and mutual support.