Will Pragmatism Equal Peace in Korea?

I may be a crazy, wide-eyed American optimist. But there could scarcely be a more convincing suggestion than last week’s astonishing political and economic developments that Asia today is not just the same dreary, provincial, self-defeating, bamboozled back-water for which it was once legendarily famous.

Yes, Asia still has problems, huge ones. But now it also has opportunities, and they’re huge, too. And it has opportunities mainly because of the remission of the region’s most punishing ideologies and crabby cultures and the millennial rise of a promising and potent new regional pragmatism.

That new pragmatism was in sight again last week when word came that peace talks between North and South Korea, perennially at hair-trigger anger since the 1953 Korean War armistice, would begin in Geneva Dec. 9. Such talks--on and off for months and in the hopeful stage for years--could defuse one of the world’s hottest tinderboxes and allow the Korean people to escape their tragic fate as the repeatedly trashed nation of Asia and realize their true destiny as one of the world’s great cultures.

Speaking of the new pragmatism, not so long ago the People’s Republic of China would not have stood for any reduction in Korean tension. Tension was the whole point of Chinese foreign policy. Indeed, the old weird Beijing never would have agreed to participate in these “four party talks.” But today’s China is fed up with the failures and inanities of its former ideological ally and wants to get on with its new life as an emerging world economic power. For the time being at least, China sees its national interest in cooperation, not confrontation.

A further example of how the new pragmatism is helping bury old hatchets is the growing sense that regional solutions to an individual nation’s economic problems must be found. No nation is an island. There even have been suggestions in Tokyo that Japan needs to do more than stand by as Seoul sinks in its debt, bad banking practices and churning chaebols, those Korean industrial giants now gasping for air. Until recently, the very idea of Japanese-Korean cooperation of any significance would have been a hilarious oxymoron. But just as great opportunity has brought post-Cold War Asia closer together--as mutually beneficial economic relations tend to do--so is the growing sense of economic crisis.

The very word “Asia” still is mainly a semanticist’s way of throwing linguistic arms around a very large and differentiated portion of the planet. Deep-seated hatreds and basic antagonisms will not disappear overnight; indeed, the Korean peninsula still could blow up, and the Japanese, enmeshed in their own serious economic difficulties, still could kiss off the Koreans even though it’s in their own self-interest not to.

The U.S. interest in Asia may not be as clear because of our current prosperity. But there is little doubt that the current Asian turmoil could harm us, despite the recent Financial Times headline quoting a top American financial official as saying: “No Threat to U.S.” When have we heard that one before? In fact, on the West Coast, everyone knows that PacRim economic development fueled our recovery from the long recession. Almost 80% of all the trade passing through Los Angeles is Asia-related. What happens to America if Asia changes from being a vigorous trading partner to an anemic economic patient?

Another reason for the emerging Asian pragmatism is that the region has been without serious international war for so long. That never would have been the case without the modulating, temper-and-temptation-reducing presence of the 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Asia. As Singapore’s Foreign Minister Shunmugam Jayakumar said after a speech to an Asia Society/L.A. World Affairs Council forum here last week, “The role of the U.S. has been and will remain critical for the Asia-Pacific. Indeed, if not for U.S. involvement in the region, I don’t think Asia-Pacific could even have developed.”

Whether it’s peace talks in Korea or financial talks in Tokyo and Seoul, your tax dollar is being well spent when there are American experts and officials, not to mention American troops, not far away, willing to pitch in--or step in.

Times columnist Tom Plate, an adjunct professor at UCLA, recently attended a conference in Seoul on Korean peninsula security. His columns usually appear on Tuesdays. E-mail: [email protected]