What's strange is that the U.S. for more than a year has had no ambassador to South Korea. Now it's reported that Philip Goldberg, a Latin American expert who's been ambassador to Colombia and Bolivia and worked on U.N. sanctions on North Korea more than 10 years ago, is the ambassador-designate.
What's taken so long to advance his name and when is he coming to Seoul? Are President Joe Biden and his team so consumed by Ukraine that they have not had time to ask, 'What are we going to do about conveying our confused thoughts to outgoing President Moon Jae-in, barred as he is by Korea's Democracy Constitution from running for a second five-year term?' And how worried should we be about whoever's next in the Blue House, the left-leaning Lee Jae-myung or the hawkish conservative Yoon Suk-yeol?
Even with Goldberg designated as ambassador, getting him to Korea won't be easy. Ted Cruz, the obstructionist right-wing senator from Texas, has been blocking the approval of dozens of ambassadorial appointments while calling on Biden to act decisively against Russia's dream of shipping natural gas through a new pipeline to Germany. As long as Cruz stands fast, the appointments don't get out of the Senate foreign relations committee and onto the floor of the Senate, where far more often than not, they're approved by overwhelming bipartisan vote.
Just because Cruz is gumming up the process, however, is no excuse for Biden not to have someone ready to take off for Seoul. OK, you don't really need an ambassador to fulfill most embassy functions. The charge d'affaires, an experienced diplomat with years of experience, can pretty well take charge day by day. The problem, however, is that real diplomacy, day to day, isn't always routine when you consider the difficulties between the U.S. and South Korea.
Right now, Washington and Seoul disagree on how to deal with North Korea. No, the Americans are too diplomatic to denounce this end-of-war declaration that Moon is demanding as nonsense. Instead, they say how close their historic relationship is, the unshakeable, unbreakable bond between the U.S. and the Republic of Korea. At every opportunity they echo Moon's calls for dialog with the North. And then they say what neither President Moon nor candidate Lee wants to hear, that North Korea has to get rid of its nukes before any deal is possible.
Nor is anyone saying the rift between the U.S. and Republic of Korea on how much to concede by way of appeasing North Korea is one reason for Biden to have been slow to name an ambassador. You won't hear anyone officially making that point, on or off the record, but the unspoken word lurking in Seoul is that Biden would have moved faster if Washington and Seoul were on the same page.
Yet another suspicion is that the Americans were waiting to see the outcome of the presidential election. It would be easy to conclude that Washington supports Yoon since he's calling for rebuilding great ties with the U.S. and, unlike Moon and Lee, demanding North Korea give up its nukes as a prerequisite to anything. Lee has shown how simpatico he is with North Korea by calling on Yoon to retract that statement, and North Korea is saying Yoon should retract his whole candidacy ― that is, not run at all. Wouldn't it be great, some Americans and Koreans are saying, if Yoon were to restore the U.S.-ROK alliance to the good old days?
This view has a few flaws. One is that Yoon's election might precipitate a North-South Korean showdown, replete with mounting threats and unpredictable incidents. Another is that Yoon, if elected, might backtrack and adopt a softer stance just to head off a potential crisis. For that matter, Lee, if elected, might not want to undermine or ruin the alliance with the U.S. by making concessions to the North without guarantees of anything substantive in return.
No one can be sure what's really going to happen between North and South Korea until, well, until it happens. That uncertainty is another reason for Washington to pursue a policy of watchful waiting, awaiting the outcome of the election. Goldberg, assuming he's finally approved as ambassador, should be arriving in time to see which way the winds are blowing from both Seoul and Pyongyang with a new man in the Blue House.
Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) writes from Seoul as well as Washington.