The Case for a Pullout Date

On Thursday, the Senate narrowly passed a spending bill, already passed by the House, that ordered an October 1 pullout of US troops from Iraq. Bush has said he'll veto it. While I think October might be too early, I do think it is time we set a date. Rather than either immediate or indefinite withdrawal, setting a pullout date is the best policy for Iraq. Here's my thinking:

If we set a date, we will force key Iraqis to start worrying. Members of the government, if they wished to keep their jobs, would have to scramble to get security forces trained and functioning bureaucrats in place. It may be naive to imagine that the government can suddenly pull itself together. But it is equally so to think that given more years it eventually will. What the Iraqi government needs is more incentives, or perhaps disincentives.

But more important are the militias. The New York Times quoted Abdul Mehdi Mutairi, one of Moktada al-Sadr's officials, as saying, "In order to drive out the occupation, we need to build up the security forces; then we can have a timetable." Sadr is openly critical of the U.S. He stirs up resentment and, most probably, violence against U.S. forces and interests. But he still relies on the U.S. presence to prevent outright war. These semi-political, semi-organized militias don't want an outright civil war full of foreign influence and with an uncertain outcome. So let's give Sadr what he claims he wants. Let's set a pullout date, an end to the occupation. Sadr and co. would be forced to scramble to set up a stable system to fill the security void. The stability he seeks might not be the stability Bush originally had in mind, but right now any stability will do.

The main argument I've heard against a pullout date is that, given an exact date, the insurgents or the Iranians will simply wait until the U.S. leaves and then attack the fragile system that remains. If this is true, which I doubt (because I bet the insurgency would just continue), I think that would be a great result. First, many insurgents are simply incensed by the U.S. presence, and their anger may well die down after we leave. As for the more sectarian violence, if this really were temporarily halted, it could buy the Iraqis time to set up a functional system. I do admit that there should be some fear of Iranian influence, but hopefully we can count on a revived Iraqi nationalism to counter it.

The other argument against a date is, of course, that we would be admitting defeat. I don't know who is going to do the admitting--certainly not Bush who has already declared victory. But seriously, what were the criteria for victory? We got Sadaam. We ensured there was no WMD. We needn't worry directly about oil: it'll find its way to the market. (Who the money goes to and how they spend it does matter in the long term, however.) So stability is the only remaining goal. If I'm right, U.S. forces are actually standing in the way of stability. By setting a date and sticking to it, we will force the Iraqis to stop merely blaming us and start working while we provide security for the transition period. It's win-win. Neither immediate or indefinite withdrawal has those benefits.


Interesting to note: Lieberman voted with the Republicans, but Chuck Hagel and Gordon Smith (R-OR) voted with the Democrats.

Here is the bill: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR1591

North Korea as Linchpin

North Korea is the linchpin of East Asia--the stability of the region rests on Kim Jong-Il's maniacal shoulders. But, paradoxically, all this weight ensures the relative stability of the North Korean regime. No one can afford to have North Korea topple. So, it probably wont. The situation is remarkably clear--there is almost no reason not to deal with Kim, prop him up even. And Bush, who increasingly defines 'threat' as all and only Islamic fundamentalist governments, is increasingly willing to do just that.

I will look at the situation from the perspective of each of the regional players--the parties to the Six Party talks--to show that, for everyone's sake, North Korea must not topple.

Japan hates North Korea. Japan has a bloody colonial history in Korea--Koreans hate Japan back. Some in the South even feel some satisfaction every time the North puts a scare into the Japanese. So Japan might be a target for a nuke. It is useless at this point to say that Kim will not fire one off because of the threat of retaliation--the country is already devastated. Still, the possibility is more likely the less stable the regime gets. We should not assume that Kim or any of his generals will act for mere revenge, but if they decide that a major attack is necessary in order to establish their bargaining position, they may choose Tokyo or Osaka over Seoul. There's a lot of history over here. Japan, therefore, has incentive to keep N. Korea stable and less likely to start an international war. (By the way, some in Japan are pushing to get their own nukes, as a counter to the North).

China, for its part, doesn't mind the current situation at all, and would be terrified of a violent shake up. China is North Korea's largest trading partner--somewhat covertly developing mines and importing coal and iron ore. (Yes, North Korea does have foreign trade: $4.4 billion in 2005, especially "fish, clothing, coal, electrical appliances, and iron ore in that order" according to this article: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/24/bloomberg/sxore.php.) Given China's economic involvement in the country, and the complete lack of U.S. involvement, China is the likely winner after a collapse, establishing, perhaps, a more overt sphere of influence. (This sphere could encompass the South as well, whose largest trading partner is also China. The FTA with the U.S. could help to forestall this, which is another reason why we should support it.) Still, what could China do without Kim that they cannot do with him? China is able to deal with the North on an almost exclusive basis already. What interest would they have in opening the country up to other powers? Moreover, the collapse itself could be difficult. Millions of refugees, underfed, desperate, and vicious, would flood across the boarder. And China would have to get involved in the clean up, wasting valuable time and missing truck loads of resources. Can't this wait at least until after 2008?

Even though many people say they want it, South Korea is afraid of reunification. Because North Korea is full of weapons and starving criminals, the reunification itself would be devastating in terms of lives and property. South Korean rhetoric of late has emphasized the oneness of the Korean people, and some Koreans believe they would simply be joining hands with their brothers. But do not assume that the Northerners have been getting the same rosy view of the South. Some there, who still take the time to think about it, may view the South as imperially compromised, greedy capitalists whose property deserves to be plundered.

But even after the looting quiets down, or if it is managed properly, the cost of integrating the two societies, i.e. bringing the North up to a livable economic level, would be incredibly great. West Germany's economy was crippled for years after reunification, but East Germany was far more advanced that North Korea is today, and the West was, at the time, one of the most powerful economies in the world.

The U.S. has two obvious interests here: the safety and stability of South Korea and Japan, our biggest allies in the region, and the containment of Kim's WMD. Economic development of the North, while Kim is in power, serves neither of these goals. Every dollar north of the DMZ goes to the military. But, as we have seen, collapse also serves neither goal. South Korea's economic stability, at least, depends on maintaining the partition. And Japan may well be at risk if the regime dissolves. And all control over WMD would be lost, just as was the case with the dissolution of Soviet states. Some commentators have suggested that Kim could have been destroyed much earlier, and that the longer we wait, the worse the effects of his collapse. This may be true; but the damage would never have been zero. It always proved better to avoid any damage to the South or Japan, and to keep track of WMD, than to risk it. The U.S., therefore, is stuck with the track they have so far taken: keep Kim on his last legs perpetually.

Russia might be the only country that would not much mind a collapse--because of the damage it would do to the U.S. and China. But Russia does share a border with North Korea, and would have to deal with some refuges. And, suppose the U.S. or China somehow manages to effectively stabilize the country. Then this is just another example of a former Soviet client state that slipped through Putin's fingers.

After the nuke test on October 8, Philip Bowring pointed out that "The business pages record scant market reaction, even in South Korea where the share index has fallen less than 2 percent" because, he says, the markets agree with Kim's assessment that the U.S. would not attack because "his neighbors have far more interest in a stable northeast Asia than in risking chaos on the peninsula". This seems to be have been the right assessment.

And so, the status quo persists. For everyone's sake, North Korea must not topple...everyone that is except the North Korean people.

[A lot of my information came from this article: "When North Korea Falls" by Robert Kaplan.]

North Korea, from a North Korean Perspective: The Aquariums of Pyongyang

The Aquariums of Pyongyang
by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot
Translated by Yair Reiner
Basic Books, 2001 (new edition 2005)

For a book that documents, in graphic detail, the ten years the author spent in a North Korean labor camp, this was not overly disturbing to read. Let me clarify: Although some scenes, if properly imagined, can turn your stomach inside out, and although this is a book that you cannot put out of your mind perhaps ever, the author leaves you feeling somewhat removed from the action. His voice, filtered through interpretation and translation (the book was originally published in France) still holds a sort of numb calm that belies many horrors. It is as if his story, his years inside the camp, has been whitewashed: the contour of the facts remain, but the emotional color you would expect is absent. After he made it to South Korea, where he now lives, and told his story many times to the reporters, he writes "I occasionally felt I was trading my experience for a story that was no longer my own." It is as if Kang Chol-Hwan, the newspaper writer who owns Hyundai stock and a nice car stereo, was not really the boy who had been shipped from Pyongyang to the Yodok prison camp with his family thirty years ago.

In addition to detailing the camp, Kang explains how his family ended up there and how, after his release, he eventually escaped North Korea. His grandparents had immigrated to Japan during the occupation. In Kyoto, his grandfather had made a fortune running gambling halls while his grandmother helped run a Korean organization connected to Kim Il-Sung's government. They returned to Korea hoping to help build their homeland into a utopia. It is amazing how heedlessly Kim's regime could throw away its most capable and loyal subjects. But perhaps they were doomed from the start. One-party regimes work best ruling over a nation of peasants whose lives actually have been improved (through land reform, etc.) by the regime. Educated and skilled people notice when the country declines--they remember a better time and had hopes for a better life. So, these elements must be purged. But you cannot run a country with only peasants.

Kang is a good storyteller. The pre- and post-Yodok sections flow easily and coherently. But in the camp section he loses all narrative flow. The author repeats or gets ahead of himself. He sometimes introduces or dispenses with characters haphazardly. But this, I suppose, is how life goes, if you are living in a gulag. The entire family did hard labor for ten years, subsisting on a daily ration of corn supplemented by rats. They were forced to get used to death and forget about dignity. Still, Kang manages to remember and point out the little bubbles of hope and humanity in the people around him. Perhaps intended as an anti-Communist manifesto (Rigoulot is a journalist who has worked on The Black Book of Communism), the book is much more about the far-from-ideological struggle and will of Kang and his family. Kang's grandmother, in the end, still believes in Marx and Engels. But certainly not in Kim Il-Sung.

The book ends with a plea to do all we, the international community, can to help the North Korean people. Now, because of famines that have ravaged the country over the last decade, almost everyone in the country lives like he did in the camp. On the other hand, he wants to do nothing that could aide Kim Jong-Il (Kim Il-Sung's son) in any way. Unfortunately, Kim has ensured that we cannot really work on the former without also doing the latter. Still, Kang's testimony should give South Koreans pause before they rush to shake Kim's hand, as Kim Dae-Jung, then-president of the South, did in 2000. And perhaps we Americans should not be so eager to abandon our hard-line stance, as I had suggested we should in my previous post.

North Korea, from a Foreign Policy Perspective

Here's another something I wrote for Shannon's ADP site. It was originally posted on February 20.

The US has been reluctant to really deal with North Korea since the fall of the Soviet Union on the assumption that it would, at each crucial stage, soon collapse. It has not collapsed. As Richard Bernstein notes here, if Clinton had followed up on the 1994 Agreed Framework, we could have an embassy in Pyongyang today. Instead, he calculated that the Kim regime would soon collapse anyway, and so as long as there was no immediate nuclear threat, there was no reason to deal with it.

Bush almost certainly added N. Korea to the axis in 2002 because he needed a third for rhetorical value, and hating N. Korea is a politically neutral position in the US. The North's response was to resume building nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them. It took a full nuclear test for Bush to start taking directly to Kim. (The US prefers to deal with N. Korea from within the Six Party Talks--in order to, I think, force China and S. Korea to express their disapproval of the North.) As usual, we ignore N. Korea until they do something nuclear.

Richard Armitage (deputy Secretary of State from 2001-2005) and Joseph Nye just authored a report at CSIS titled "The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Getting Asia Right Through 2020". Their assessment of N. Korea is the same old story: Reunification will happen, with "high probability" by 2020, and it will happen because of "instability in North Korea". They write off the possibility of development with this: "Our bottom-line assessment is that Pyongyang's behavior since 1990 strongly suggests that it is trapped in its own political and economic system...Our conclusion is that the Kim regime would prefer to muddle through, despite the dim future for 21 million North Koreans, than to take the risk of opening up à la Deng Xiaoping."

Yet again the US concludes that there is no reason to deal with N. Korea because it will just collapse anyway, and Kim is too greedy and short-sighted to attempt to develop his country. We think that he thinks opening up is a "risk" despite the fact that the Communist party in China has had no problems holding on to power after reforming the economy.

I think we should consider changing our approach in North Korea. What if we could allow Kim to stay in power while developing the economy. This is the approach that China and the South have been taking, with rather limited success. We could get it off the ground. One problem with this is that we really don't know what Kim will do--does he still fancy taking control of the South, or is he just hoping to insulate his power at home? Would he take all profits from international trade for himself and his crew, or would he allow his people to develop their own economy? Still, we often accuse Kim of being stuck in the cold war, still seeing his situation as a fight against the capitalist, colonialist West. But if we refuse to deal with Kim simply because we have bad history with him and his father, we are the ones stuck in the cold war. I think our best move in almost any international situation is to use our economy as a bargaining tool. Lets open up our markets and our consumers. We can get more of the world in sync with our foreign policy if we get it in sync with our economy. Economic power is our biggest weapon, and we consistently fail to use it. This could be a strategy in Iran as well. China, and countries like Venezuela, have already figured this out, and are signing FTAs and using economic leverage wherever they can.

American Democracy Project

Shannon Powell's NGO is now all over the Internet, not just on Facebook. Here are the links:

TheAmericanDemocracyProject

Democratic Party site

Facebook

Island

On a lighter, but perhaps related, note:

My translation of a poem by Jeong Hyeon-Jong, from his book I AM THE STAR MAN. (See, I am learning a little Korean.)




Island

Between all people and things
there is an island.
I want to go to that island.



.

Thoughts about Virginia Tech

After the shootings at VT, people here and Koreans in the U.S. are worried about a backlash. While I really hope that is unlikely, this serves as a big reminder that racism in America is not gone, and that East Asians are not exempt. An interesting article here shows how much fear there is. When it was released that the shooter was an Asian, all the communities prayed "let it be some other Asian." I was surprised, although I shouldn't have been, to see how worried even sober-minded Korean-Americans (like a friend of mine) could get over this. We have to, yet again in America, decide to judge individuals rather than groups.

But it is interesting to note that it is a deep trait of Korean culture (and perhaps East Asian cultures generally) to judge groups rather than people. In the New York Times a Korean-American named Joseph Park is quoted as saying: "As a Korean, I apologize...I feel I need to apologize because innocent people were killed by someone from my same nation." 'Nation' in Korea means blood even more than land, and Koreans see themselves as a big family (e.g. they use the words 'little brother' or 'little sister' for all children, and 'grandpa' or 'grandma' for all old people).

I can never, never be a Korean, even if I learn the language and live her for years, and even, I suppose, if I managed to get South Korean citizenship. But a Korean can, I think, become an American. I love this about America. Or is America more exclusive than I realize? New York is wonderfully inclusive: even if there is sometimes violence and often hatred, everyone has to live together. But this, I know, is not typical of the rest of the country. What is the right way forward? How are we, in the U.S. and all over the world, best able to live together? How can we be both a nation and an individual?

It is customary to think of the U.S. is a nation of individuals. Koreans don't commit school shootings; individuals do. Perhaps Cho finally became American in carrying out this thing.

Osama as Gavrilo Princip

I might as well post this too. I wrote this in February, but it is still interesting, if probably completely wrong. Let me know what you think...

In 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, setting off the powder keg of ethnic conflict that was Eastern Europe. While I don't mean to suggest that bin Laden was directly responsible for the Iraq invasion (any more, really, than Gavrilo Princip was responsible for German trenches in France), I think we can tag him as the man who set off the powder keg of ethnic conflict that is the Middle East today. I'm not trying to place blame here. My point is this: bin Laden is a flash in the pan. The real threat, and the real story for the history books, is going to be the (World?) war kindled by the collapse of nation states and the dissolution of American influence in the Mid East. International terrorism is not the problem for the U.S. We should be much more concerned about an old-fashioned conventional war fought throughout the entire oil-producing, militant, ethnically diverse region. And there's no way for us to avoid it--they way we avoid, say, Darfur--now that we've set it off. We would be caught in the middle, as our troops are already there. And we have real interests, like the survival of Israel and access to Saudi oil.
I think we have little more to fear from bin Laden. But that is not to say he failed. Like Princip, he was hoping to bring down an Empire by striking a match. He doesn't want to destroy New York; he wanted to get the U.S. involved in a war we can't win and thereby drive us out of the region. We should, I think, forget about terrorism and start figuring out how to fight and win a real war in the Mid East. But first we have to figure out what winning would really mean. Democracy in Iraq is a daydream. Stability must be the goal.

In fact, the only circumstance in which we might be again in danger of being attacked is if we pull out of Iraq now. Bin Laden's strategy was to bleed the giant. He watched us go into Somalia with big guns, run into trouble, and eventually leave without having stabilized the country or achieved any of our objectives. It took some time, but the vacuum we left was eventually filled by a fundamentalist Islamic government. (A government which has recently been ousted by Ethiopian troops--on our suggestion. This could be a much more effective way for us to fight wars in the future...) If we leave Iraq now, we will have followed his game plan almost to the letter. Look for another attack in the U.S. almost as soon as our troops are safely home, in order to provoke us to come out again. We are vulnerable out in the open--not so much our soldiers, who are well trained, or our military, which is improving daily, but our political clout in the region and around the world.

So, my point is either we get mixed up in a war now--and bin Laden and co. are out of the picture--or we go home and risk a second major attack. Either way, the idea that we must be involved in a global war on terror, with Osama as the mastermind adversary, is not at all helpful.

FTA Update: Why Democrats (and everyone) should support the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement

The Bush Administration finally (and barely--25 minutes before the deadline) signed a Free Trade Agreement with South Korea on April 2. This was a major breakthrough--I had though that the negotiations might completely fall apart--and an important one for U.S. foreign policy in East Asia. Coupled with the recent thaw in relations with North Korea and the recently announced reduction of U.S. military forces in the South (and the handing over of the large Youngsan base in central Seoul), the FTA could cement our fraying relationship with a crucial ally in the region. A full deal with North Korea, including normalizing diplomatic relations (possible, if far fetched), could ensure a peaceful and friendly Korean peninsula for decades to come.

The Agreement must now be approved by each country's legislature. There has been mass demonstrations against the FTA in Korea, especially by unions and farmers, but it is still likely to pass in the Korean National Assembly. The deal is great for Korea's chaebol, or conglomerate corporations--like Hyundai and Samsung--who are still very powerful politically. Moreover, although Korea's president, who signed the Agreement, is wildly unpopular at the moment, he represents a coalition of left leaning parties. The conservatives are not going to stymie an FTA just to harm the already-lame president.

At home, there have been some Democratic Congress members who have come out in opposition to the FTA. It would be a nasty blow to Bush and his cronies to lose this one after such difficult negotiations. But to Koreans in favor of the FTA (a majority probably is, and certainly a majority of business leaders and politicians), a Congressional rejection would be a huge slap in the face. The (admittedly wishful) scenario above would be out the window. If the FTA is not ratified, we can expect to see increasingly tense relations and a migration towards China. It would be worse than foolish for the Democrats to forfeit an important ally just to annoy Bush--there are plenty of other ways to annoy him. But Democratic constituencies are also worried about specific aspects of the deal. I will here argue that the deal is on the whole favorable to U.S. interests, even leaving aside foreign policy. I don't know all the specifics of the deal; my comments will be based on initial reports released when the deal was signed.

Agriculture
The most vocal opposition groups, in the U.S. as well as in Korea, have been farmers. I previously argued that Korean farmers and their supporters had a point--the quality of U.S. agriculture has decreased markedly in the past 50 years, and given that cuisine is culture, Koreans relinquish their small, unique farms at their peril. Partly to allay those fears, the Koreans demanded that rice be left out of the FTA. That is, U.S. rice will still be heavily taxed, and Koreans will still pay 400 percent the world market price for rice. (The Korean rice industry is subsidised and inefficient, but food is important, and in Korea rice is especially so. Let them do what they want...) American rice farmers are predictably upset. But in exchange, U.S. beef will be allowed back into Korea, with the current 40 percent tariff eventually eliminated, pending a World Organization for Animal Health ruling in May. Koreans have not imported U.S. beef since a mad cow scare three years ago. Democrats are not happy with this situation. Sen. Max Baucus (D. Montana), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said, "I will oppose the Korea Free Trade Agreement, and in fact I will not allow it to move through the Senate, unless and until Korea completely lifts its ban on U.S. beef." The ban on U.S. beef has been more political than heath-related, but finally getting rid of it will be a boon to beef farmers. Probably the Koreans were keeping the ban just to use it as a bargaining chip, and probably the World Organization for Animal Health (abbreviated OIE...it's French) will clear U.S. beef. But it is worth noting that the whole FTA may sink if the OIE does not rule in our favor.

Automobiles
Taxes will decrease over time on both Korean and American automakers. This should be great for Hyundai and Kia as they fight Toyota for a foothold in the U.S. (Hyundai and Kia together have 4.5% of the U.S. auto market.) It will be less great for GM and Ford in Korea, since Koreans notoriously avoid foreign cars. Still, foreign cars are beginning to be seen as status symbols, so GM, who owns the Korean car company Daewoo and already has a foot hold here, might be able to gain some market share. On the other hand, both Hyundai and Kia are building factories in the U.S., so their cars would not have to face import duties anyway. And the American companies are going to have to shift more and more of their production abroad to stay alive. So, ultimately, despite the noise the UAW will make, I think autos should be a non-issue.

Textiles
Duties on textiles have been largely eliminated. U.S. companies like Nike and Levis (and also McDonald's and Starbucks) are already well-established in Korea. But, since most of their product is manufactured abroad, the FTA will have little impact on their profitability. Korean companies might try to break into the U.S. market, and compete with GAP for instance, but this is not going to bother too many people. But smaller U.S. companies, like American Apparel, which does manufacture its clothes in the U.S. and already has stores in Korea, could stand to benefit a lot. When the U.S. pursues trade agreements, and gripes about its trade deficit, we should think more about these small and mid-sized companies that actually produce product in the U.S. If we can help them out here and there, we might be able to chip away at the deficit in a healthy way--without lobbing insults and restrictions at China.

Entertainment
As it stands, Koreans limit the amount of time cable channels and theaters can devote to foreign content. The FTA would relax the limit (from 75 to 80 percent foreign content), allowing more U.S. films and TV shows to be aired. Many Koreans are already big fans of "Grey's Anatomy" and "Prison Break", and U.S. movies regularly top the box office charts (300 was the highest grossing movie for three weeks in March) . This agreement can only help Hollywood. Hollywood has certainly done its part to help Democrats; the least they could do is return the favor. But, if you'll allow me to return to geopolitics for a moment, there is a potentially more important consequence as well. The IHT recently ran a series titled "Vox Populi" about English as the global language. (This comes as no surprise to me: I am, after all, making good money teaching English to kids without knowing their native language and without knowing anything about teaching.) Leaving aside nineteenth-century British imperialism, I think English has become prominent because of three things that the U.S. is doing particularly well. 1) Brand building: Like Nike, Levis, McDonald's and Starbucks (and of course Microsoft), U.S. brands--even when they are completely multi-national and no longer rely on U.S. production--permeate the entire globe, bringing English with them. 2) Higher education: U.S. universities now lead the world in scholarship in almost every field, forcing academics and students to study in English. 3) Entertainment: And Hollywood is everywhere. Whenever people all over the world go to the theater, they are hearing English. These trends, I think, are absolutely crucial to securing our power in the coming century. Whatever we can do to promote Hollywood abroad should be done.

So that's the situation. I still think Koreans should be a bit sceptical about this FTA, but Americans should be over the moon. Although the beef issue is sticky, I think that the overall benefits--to small manufacturers, the entertainment industry, and the general political situation--vastly outweigh the drawbacks to the farming and auto industries. I hope Congressional Democrats will agree.

FTA?

Dear Reader,

Here is a little thing I wrote about the then-pending Free Trade Agreement negotiations between the U.S. and South Korea. I originally posted it, on February 18, on my friend Shannon Powell's American Democracy Project site, which can be accessed through Facebook. It is now outdated--a deal has been signed, it now awaits only Congressional approval. Please read this, and then read my next post:





I had been in favor of the Korean/U.S. FTA--from both the Korean and American perspectives--until I read this excellent article by Michael Pollan in the NY Times Magazine. The article, "Unhappy Meals", does not mention Korea or international trade at all, but Pollan's arguments about healthy eating changed the way I thought about the FTA debate.

First, some background. Korea and the U.S. are on their seventh round of negotiations. They are hoping to finalize by March of this year because the Bush administration's ability to negotiate a trade agreement without Congressional input expires in July. This "fast track" authority forces Congress to simply vote yea or nae on the finalized FTA; it is not allowed to tinker with it or attach its own provisions. This obviously speeds up the process considerably. If the FTA misses the July deadline, it will be a long time before its details can be worked out. In the meantime, Bush is trying to renew this fast track authority.

As the NYT notes: "The talks stalled over United States requests for greater access for American cars, rice and drugs, and over South Korea's demand that Washington change antidumping rules applied to South Korean steel, cars, computer chips and textiles." (Choe Sang-Hun, January 16, 2007). Antidumping rules are much-criticized duties placed on goods imported to the U.S. that are considered to be unfairly priced--either sold below-cost or below-market because they were subsidized at home. Many potential and current trade partners consider antidumping rules to be hypocritical protectionism--this is a big issue, but one I will avoid for the moment. Look here for some good info.

While the FTA is a huge issue in Korea, it is often overlooked in the U.S. (It has only been mentioned 5 times in the NYT in the past year.) This is a mistake, I think, not so much because the U.S. has a lot to gain economically but because it has a lot to lose politically. South Korea has long been an important ally in East Asia, but lately it has been distancing itself. An FTA would help to shore up a fraying relationship. Moreover, after the failure of the Doha round of WTO talks, the U.S. is looking particularly protectionist and, frankly, petty on trade issues. (This from a Republican administration!) Failed negotiations with Seoul would send another bad message to the world.

And until lately, I thought that an FTA would benefit Korea as well. There would be an immediate GDP increase, and most likely an increase in foreign direct investment. After 30 years of fast climbing, Korea's growth seems to have stalled leaving it just ahead of Canada (11th in the world) in terms of GDP, and only $24,000 per capita. If Korea wants to officially break into the upper eschelon, it needs exports, exports, exports. To this end, (and because a comprehensive world trade policy has not been established) Korea has been pursuing FTAs with many different countries and trading blocs. Korea has finalized bilateral trade agreements with Chile, Singapore, and the European Free Trade Association (Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein), and is exporting similar agreements with China, the EU, and Mercosur, along with the U.S. Any FTA will buy Korea's major exports--cars, steel, cell phones, ships--more market space, but one with the U.S. will be especially profitable, since the U.S. consumer appetite is so large and since Korea already has established brands in the U.S. that would suddenly be able to compete better (e.g. Samsung, Hyundai, Kia).

So what's the downside? Some people worry about GM or Ford gobbling up market share in Korea, but this seems highly unlikely. For one thing, the gains made by Hyndaie and Kia in the U.S. are likely to vastly outweigh potential losses to American brands at home. And Koreans are notorious for buying only Korean products. (See dip in import consumption around 1996-98 crisis.) GM has already managed to gain access to the Korean market, by buying Daewoo motors out of bankruptcy, but this just caused Koreans to be skeptical of Daewoo. And, I seriously doubt Ford's capability to capitalize on any opportunity presented to them. Toyota cars manufatured in the States would be left out of the agreement.

The big U.S. imports that would benefit are foods and drugs. Korean farmers--most of whom own small plots of land scattered between mountains and high-rise apartment buildings, personally selling their product at small markets in Seoul and other cities--would be seriously pinched by cheap U.S. imports of rice and beef and vegetables. Korean consumers, on the other hand, would get access to a wider variety of produce and processed food for cheaper prices. Bananas used to be only for rich people--until Dole and Del Monte started importing them from the Philippines. Now you can get a dozen for about a dollar fifty. Something similar would happen to foods like beef and asparagus that are now largely unavailable or very expensive.

So, a fair trade off, right? I mean, Korea gains GDP but loses its farms to the free market--and consumers benefit across the board and on both sides of the Pacific. Well, Korean farmers don't think so--they hold protests in Seoul almost weekly. But all Koreans would be affected. They would be eating differently. By losing their farms, they'd be losing their food--they would start to eat just like the U.S. They would lose, in a very concrete sense, their culture. This is what people mean when they talk about globalization's leveling effects and cultural meddling.

Is that so bad? Well, here's where Michael Pollan comes in. His argument, in "Unhappy Meals" is that the quality and complexity of American food has been subtly decreasing since the 1950s leading to unforeseen consequences in the population's health. Farms and food companies started finding cheaper and easier ways to make food that tasted good--from artificial flavoring to chemical fertilizers. While making food cheaper, it has been disastrous for quality. Pollan says "Since the widespread adoption of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has, according to U.S.D.A. figures, declined significantly."

The idea of nutrition has developed in tandem with the science of food production, convincing us to focus on the elements of the food we eat rather than the whole. We started eating protein instead of grilled steak or poached fish, eating carbs instead of bread or pasta. This allowed manufacturers to break foods down to their simplest components, simplifying the production process--and our diets. Simpler food is cheaper food, but if all we need is protein it should still be healthy food. Pollan argues that, given our declining heath, there must be something crutial, overlooked by nutritionists, left out of our diets. Our bodies have not learned how to cope with these changes and deficiencies.

My Korean acquaintance explained that when you are making kimchi (the Korean national dish, a sort of spicy sourkraut) or any other Korean food, the ingredients matter. Kimchi made with Chinese cabbage is just not the same as that made with Korean cabbage. You can taste the soil in the food, she said. If anything is different, the dish wont come off. Koreans have been cooking with food grown in Korean soil for thousands of years--they know what they are dealing with.

Pollan corroborates what, at first, sounded nationalistic or merely superstitious: "When the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk."

An influx of food from the U.S., if it threatens the current small-farm system, will change everything about Korean cuisine--not just the types of food used but the soil it is grown in, the flavor as well as the chemical, "nutritional" content. To be fair, Korea's small farms might be overrun even if there is no FTA. But let's stick to the subject: Should Koreans support the FTA?

Pollan advises, among other things, that we try to eat more like people from countries whose cuisines have been unchanged (mostly) for hundreds or thousands of years--for example, France, Japan, Greece, and Korea. By extension, these countries should try their hardest to avoid eating more like us.

Pollan notes "We think of culture as a set of beliefs and practices to help mediate our relationship to other people, but of course culture (at least before the rise of science) has also played a critical role in helping mediate people's relationship to nature. Eating being a big part of that relationship, cultures have had a great deal to say about what and how and why and when and how much we should eat." An FTA with the U.S. will fundamentally change what Koreans eat, will fundamentally alter their culture. And if our increasing levels of heart disease and diabetes are a product of our changed food supply, an FTA could be seriously detrimental to Koreans' health. Forget about GDP, Korea should avoid opening their market to American food products at all costs, even if this means abandoning the FTA. Koreans should not support an FTA with the U.S., and should even consider, perhaps, adding tariffs.

The U.S., for its part, needs to figure out ways to conduct diplomacy with its pen. We should sign an FTA even if it means allowing Korea to maintain protections on food products. But good luck slipping an Agreement of this sort past the farm lobby in Congress.

I'm back...

Dear reader,

I've been away for a long time because I was lazy. My apologies. My goal now is to mention all the little things I've learned about Korea--and am learning daily.

First entry: On all the Seoul subways in the morning, little old men like cockroaches run up and down the cars (one per train) collecting the newspapers that people leave in the seats or on the racks. They collect them in huge bags and sell them, I think, back to paper plants. This is their job. Other old men roam the streets all over Korea pulling big carts behind them that they fill with recyclables: cans; boxes, paper, even Styrofoam. Koreans have nowhere to put their garbage on this small peninsula, and new resources are not cheap, making these men's careers both viable and essential.

The men are all old though, which is really interesting. Their children must have missed the development boat, or else there is no way these guys would still be working. And no one from the younger generations, it seems, is willing to fill their shoes. Despite appearances--Seoul is so crowded and many university grads cannot find good jobs and I teach lots of little kids--Korea has an ageing, shrinking population. Koreans are used to homogeneity, but already you see Filipinos doing manual labor, especially construction. This is a trend that will have to continue. Koreans are ageing fast--their birth rate is decreasing as their life expectancy is increasing. And, the overall population is shrinking. According to the Korea Herald, "the population is predicted to decrease 13 percent to 42.3 million by 2050". So Korea will have to start to import its manual labor.

But the Filipinos here are hardly treated equally. They are often not granted citizenship. Mixed couples--and children--are looked down upon, making integration difficult. And many Filipinos do not even speak Korean, making integration nearly impossible. English signs are posted as much for the Filipinos (just as Spanish is posted in the U.S.) as for wealthy tourists.

Korea, once a peacefully homogeneous society, is on its way to becoming a radically stratified, like an Arab state that must import Indian laborers. Koreans seem reluctant to deal with this. But someone is going to have to collect their newspapers when these old men die. And it is not going to be a Korean.