Roh Moo Hyun Takes Center Stage

South Korean President-elect Roh Moo Hyun won office in December by tapping into a rising tide of anti-Americanism. Just days before the close of the extremely tight race, candidate Roh said he might favor neutrality if a war ever broke out between North Korea and the U.S.—the country that saved the South in the Korean War and still deploys 37,000 soldiers to protect it from its menacing neighbor.

It turns out ruling is a little more complicated than running. Roh, who takes his presidential oath on Feb. 25, has spent the past few weeks athletically backpedaling on his anti-Americanism as he bones up on the crisis with the North and becomes familiar with the intricacies of global power politics. As for placating his U.S. enemies, er, allies, in late December he persuaded anti-U.S. demonstrators to get off the streets of Seoul. Then he visited G.I.s at the largest U.S. base in South Korea, inscribing in the guest book: “We are good friends.” He also breakfasted with officials from the American Chamber of Commerce, and confided to a former president of the chapter, “It’s been a little bit of an adjustment for me suddenly becoming somebody important.”

The North Korea imbroglio involves big players—the U.S., Japan, China—and has resulted in Roh, who should be the important somebody at the red-hot center of this crisis, becoming the odd man out as he tries to balance the pacifist demands of the youthful 386 generation that voted him in and the more realist grumblings of the world’s political and economic giants. Indeed, if there is a middle in the North Korea crisis, Roh hasn’t come close to finding it. The former human-rights lawyer is a blank slate on foreign affairs: the only Asian trip he has ever taken outside of South Korea was to Japan in 1982—his agenda was yachting lessons. Appropriately, the most challenging government position he has held until now was Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries from August 2000 to April 2001.

Roh now takes office hooked to the five-year-old “Sunshine Policy” of predecessor Kim Dae Jung, which operated on the premise that engaging the North would make it a better world citizen—a notion that seems dangerously obsolete today. Despite the President-elect’s efforts to play nice, Washington hasn’t decided whether Roh is someone it can work with: a state visit expected by him to Washington soon after his inauguration seems likely to be put off.

The good news is that Roh has demonstrated that he is a dogged, quick study. He was born in the southern countryside province of Kyongsang to a family of humble farmers who managed to send him through high school, where Roh became known as a smart kid with a sharp tongue, a stubborn streak and a fondness for boozy boisterousness. Then came a succession of blue-collar jobs (including making fishing nets) before he decided to improve himself by hitting the law books, passing South Korea’s notoriously difficult bar exam in 1975 on his third try. In 1981 the tax lawyer agreed to defend some students who had got themselves on the wrong side of South Korea’s then authoritarian government, and he spent the next seven years advocating on behalf of persecuted labor organizers and human-rights victims. By 1988 he became nationally renowned as the tough-talking parliamentarian in televised hearings investigating human-rights abuses by the government, in the Korean equivalent of the U.S.’s Watergate hearings of the 1970s.

Although Roh is now wealthy, he plays up his humble country origins. The day after his election, he showed up at a public bathhouse in Seoul, saying that his house didn’t have hot water. Tourists are now visiting his childhood home. In his 1994 autobiography, Honey, Please Help Me, he forswore the wild habits of his youth, which included heavy drinking and physically abusing his wife, Kwon Yang Sook, explaining that his conversion arose from reading a book about women’s rights. His background, especially his renunciation of his previous darker self, has some speculating that George W. Bush will eventually warm to him.

“All Texas politics is local,” says Hahm Seung Duck, a political scientist at Korea University, “and all Korean politics is local. If they have a good personal relationship, everything will be fine.”

If, that is, Roh can somehow make the “Sunshine Policy” more palatable for global as well as local politicians. The Bush Administration has always seen the policy as appeasement of a dangerous communist dictator. There is talk in Seoul that Roh’s policy toward the North will be retooled and renamed: that Seoul will engage Pyongyang on cultural and economic issues but become much more cautious about the money that flows north and where it goes. (The South Korean parliament is starting to investigate explosive allegations that Kim Dae Jung sent $186 million to North Korea just before his historic trip to Pyongyang in June 2000.) But Roh’s transition team, a hastily assembled group with a notable lack of governmental experience, seems to have trouble appealing to resurgent South Korean nationalism without sounding anti-American. Roh still wants a rewriting of the agreement that allows U.S. soldiers on South Korean soil, and in a speech last week he again hit a few anti-American notes: “The press says my position is different from the U.S.’s. If it weren’t different, are you saying you want to risk a war?” In the past few weeks the President-elect has chosen to make public appearances dressed in a hanbok, the traditional Korean, baggy formal wear—a nationalistic gesture that seems weirdly mistimed. “He wants to convince the U.S. that Korea is no longer a weak, postwar country that some people envision it to be,” says one of his advisers. “The U.S. needs to meet him halfway.”

The Bush team is waiting for Roh to take the first step on that road. “I don’t think [the Bush Administration] is at all happy with the new regime,” says Selig Harrison, director of the National Security Project at Washington’s Center for International Policy. “They are very disturbed. But they don’t want the South Korean-U.S. alliance unraveling, so the two sides are talking.” Talking is good—now the two sides have to start communicating.