Önder Özar Diplomasi Sevgisi: The Washington Post Today's Worldview by Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall April 26 2023

By Ishaan Tharoorwith Sammy Westfall

South Korea’s Yoon has a crucial, if awkward, summit with Biden

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in his office this month. The plaque on his desk was a gift from President Biden. (Jean Chung for The Washington Post/For The Washington Post)

The menu for the Wednesday state dinner at the White House is set. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will be treated to fusion fare — think Maryland crab served with a kimchi slaw, Korean “galbi,” or beef short ribs, alongside butter bean grits. “We hope to showcase the harmony of our cultures and our people intertwined,” first lady Jill Biden told reporters.

Beyond the dinner, President Biden and his South Korean counterpart will have plenty to chew on. The pair will discuss a diverse agenda, including the war in Ukraine, concerns over China, North Korea’s nuclear threat and a range of business tie-ups between the two countries’ major companies. Yoon’s tour through Washington is jam-packed. On Tuesday, he appeared alongside Vice President Harris at NASA’s Goddard Visitor Center in the Maryland suburbs to talk about space. After meetings with Biden on Wednesday, Yoon will on Thursday address a joint session of Congress, an opportunity reserved for the United States’ closest allies and partners.

South Korea certainly stands in that camp. Seoul has sheltered under an American security umbrella for the better part of a century and the presidents will mark the 70th anniversary of the alliance between their two countries, forged in the wake of the bloody war on the Korean Peninsula that has left the last conflict of the Cold War frozen along the 38th parallel.

“The most important thing [for this week] is for it to be an opportunity for the people of both countries to properly recognize the historical significance of the … alliance and its achievements,” Yoon told my colleague Michelle Ye Hee Lee in an interview in his presidential office in Seoul before leaving for Washington.

Still, the meeting does not come without its awkwardness. Yoon arrived in the United States in the wake of embarrassing revelations from a cache of U.S. top-secret documents leaked on a chat server that seemed to indicate U.S. officials had been spying on their Korean counterparts. The intelligence related in the leak surrounded the anguished deliberations among top aides to Yoon last month over American requests that Seoul greenlight the sale of ammunition to Ukraine, possibly via Poland in order not to directly transfer arms to a country at war.

The news created an uproar in South Korea’s polarized political scene, with Yoon’s conservative opponents pointing to his decision to relocate his office outside the country’s existing presidential compound as a possible national security threat. It also raised eyebrows over Seoul’s perceived acquiescence to Washington.

“As a sovereign nation, we must sternly respond to the spying of state secrets, even if it was committed by an ally with whom [South Korea] has bonded over blood,” said Park Hong-keun, floor leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, casting the incident as a “diplomatic humiliation.” An editorial in the right-leaning Chosun Ilbo suggested the incident should prompt South Korea to “reinforce our own spying capacities.”

The fallout over the spying scandal is less important than the more substantive matters on Yoon’s plate in Washington. Like countries in Europe, South Korea is wary of the Biden administration’s new industrial policies and intensifying economic confrontation with China, which has ripple effects for the entire global economy. South Korean companies producing advanced microchips may win billions of dollars in U.S. subsidies, but the stipulations of new U.S. federal legislation will impact how they can do business in China.

Yoon will be hoping to win waivers and concessions for Korean firms, while also pressing Biden for greater clarity and commitment on North Korea. The mixed signals from former president Donald Trump over the United States’ long-standing security presence in South Korea triggered something of a reckoning there, not least with the prospect of Trump’s return in 2025. According to polls, a majority of South Koreans now believe it may be in their country’s interest to develop its own nuclear arsenal to deepen its ability to deter North Korea, which has stepped up its missile tests and saber-rattling.

“On economic issues, Biden needs to reassure the South Koreans that his policies are also in their interests,” said Kim Hyun-wook, director general of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy, to the Financial Times. “On security, he needs to demonstrate a strong commitment to South Korea’s defense against the North, including if necessary through nuclear retaliation.”

In a briefing this week with reporters, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Yoon’s trip may conclude with a joint statement that “will send a very clear and demonstrable signal of the United States’ credibility when it comes to its extended deterrence commitments” to South Korea.

For its part, the Biden administration wants to secure further support for its efforts in Ukraine. These center on an urgent need to rush ammunition, in particular, artillery shells, to the front lines. South Korea has condemned the Russian invasions and placed sanctions on Moscow, but arms transfers to Kyiv may prove a step too far for a country that still has to calibrate its relations with Moscow and Beijing. “Ukraine is under an illegal invasion, so it is appropriate to provide a range of aid, but when it comes to how and what we will supply, we cannot but consider many direct and indirect relationships between our country and the warring countries,” Yoon told my colleagues.

The Biden administration also hopes to see South Korea step up as a close ally in the tense and evolving geopolitical chess match with China. To that end, it has welcomed Yoon’s efforts to ease bilateral relations with Japan, which has been locked for decades in political disagreements with South Korea stemming from the grim legacy of its colonial occupation of the peninsula almost a century ago. Yoon worked to resolve a controversial labor compensation dispute with Tokyo and, despite courting the anger of the South Korean left, last month became the first leader of his country to visit Japan in 12 years.

“Europe has experienced several wars for the past 100 years and despite that, warring countries have found ways to cooperate for the future,” Yoon told The Washington Post. “I can’t accept the notion that because of what happened 100 years ago, something is absolutely impossible [to do] and that they [Japanese] must kneel [for forgiveness] because of our history 100 years ago. And this is an issue that requires decision. … In terms of persuasion, I believe I did my best.”

Mended fences with Japan may allow sharper coordination on China. “If a clash erupts in the Taiwan Strait, the United States will demand various cooperation from its allies and partner nations,” Kim Han-kwon, a professor at the Seoul-based Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, wrote in February. “It sees its bilateral alliances with South Korea and Japan, in particular, as key regional strategic assets in connection with the Taiwan Strait.”

1,000 Words

At all hours the dump trucks arrive, hauling earthquake rubble in Turkey to what has become a growing mountain by the sea — of concrete and steel and blankets and bikes and, residents worry, a stew of toxic substances waiting to be released, reports Post correspondent Kareem Fahim. Next to one spreading mound is a tent camp for people who lost their homes in the earthquakes, where the eyes of some of the occupants have begun to burn.

It’s been about two-and-a-half months since two earthquakes killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and neighboring Syria. Thousands of buildings collapsed instantly and entire neighborhoods have been leveled. The catastrophe has created up to 210 million tons of rubble, the U.N. estimated. (Nicole Tung for The Washington Post)

Talking Points

• The Taliban killed the senior Islamic State group leader behind the August 2021 suicide bombing at a Kabul airport during the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, which killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 Afghans. The development spotlights the Biden administration’s newfound reliance on a former battlefield adversary to help confront terrorist threats, reports my colleague Dan Lamothe. The U.S. was not involved in the Taliban’s operation, according to two U.S. officials.

• Leaked intelligence documents reveal the increased importance space has in modern warfare, and that the United States is concerned about rivals’ space threats. The assessments, part of the Discord Leaks, say Russia’s troubled space program “very likely will diminish during the next decade” as it faces increased global competition, U.S. sanctions and the rise of SpaceX. At the same time, China has developed significant capabilities “to hold key U.S. and Allied space assets at risk,” and would deploy them in any conflict with Taiwan, another said.

• Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper group secretly paid a “very large sum” to Prince William to settle phone-hacking claims and stop the Palace from bringing further legal action, according to court documents submitted by the legal team of his brother, Prince Harry, in a case suing Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers in London for allegations including hacking his voice mails.

• Singapore is set to execute a man by hanging on charges of conspiring to traffic 2.24 pounds of cannabis that he is not alleged to have directly handled, in the final step of a case that has put the spotlight back on the Southeast Asian city-state’s harsh stance toward a drug decriminalized in much of the West.

• Daniel Ellsberg, 92, the person responsible for perhaps the biggest leak in U.S. government history, the Pentagon Papers, told The Post his thoughts about the Discord leaks. Ellsberg, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, has said he was trying to end the Vietnam War in 1971 when he leaked a huge cache of government secrets showing that multiple U.S. administrations knew the war was going badly while publicly declaring their optimism for victory. He is struck, he said, by that war’s similarities with the war in Ukraine: "The war [in Ukraine] is stalemated, that seems so obvious now except for the fact that both sides totally deny it. What these new leaks show is what the Pentagon Papers showed, that the insiders all know that. They know that they are fighting a stalemate.”

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Lucrative retirement plan

Army Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, arrives at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in June 2013. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Retired Army Gen. Keith Alexander, who led the National Security Agency under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, secured $2 million in consulting deals with foreign governments after leaving office, including a $700,000 contract to advise Saudi Arabia on cybersecurity after the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, newly released records show.

Alexander’s consulting firm also won a $1.3 million contract from the Japanese government to provide advice on cyber issues, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

Details of those lucrative contracts are among records disclosed by the Pentagon for the first time about retired generals and admirals who have leveraged their military service over the past decade to obtain work from foreign governments. The disclosures by the Pentagon came in response to The Post’s lawsuit and demands from Congress, which has scheduled a hearing on the issue Wednesday.

In an investigation last year, The Post found that more than 500 retired U.S. military personnel — including scores of generals and admirals — had accepted employment from foreign governments, mostly as contractors in countries known for human rights abuses and political repression. Under federal law, retired service members must obtain permission before they can accept any compensation from foreign powers, out of concern that the payments could compromise their allegiance to the United States. The U.S. government withheld virtually all information about the foreign jobs until The Post won a two-year legal battle with the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps and the State Department.

The latest batch of records shows that Alexander, who led the nation’s largest intelligence agency from 2005 to 2014, reported the most foreign compensation of any retired U.S. service member since 2012. The second-highest earner has been retired Navy Vice Adm. William Hilarides, 63, who since 2016 has won naval consulting contracts from the government of Australia worth up to $1.6 million, according to the Australian Department of Defense.

Hilarides served as a key adviser to the Australian government over the past 18 months while it finalized a landmark deal with the United States and Britain to build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. On Tuesday, Australia announced it tapped him to lead a review of the size and structure of the Royal Australian Navy’s surface fleet.

Hilarides has charged the Australian government $4,000 a day for his consulting services, according to documents released by the U.S. Navy in response to The Post’s lawsuit. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Alexander, who declined interview requests, is among 22 retired U.S. generals and admirals who have landed consulting contracts and other work in the past decade from Saudi Arabia. Most of those retired personnel have served as advisers to the Saudi Defense Ministry, which was led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman until last year. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, Mohammed approved the 2018 killing of journalist Khashoggi, a Post contributing columnist, as part of a brutal crackdown on dissent.

The oil-rich Saudis pay well. Retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, who was a national security adviser to Obama, reported in 2017 that he expected to collect between $40,000 and $60,000 a month as a consultant to the Defense Ministry, according to FOIA documents released by the Marine Corps to The Post. – Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones

Afterword

The Post’s Annabelle Timsit reports on the terrifying moment caught on camera by a skier in France’s southern Alps. After falling feet-first into the deep crevasse, the skier was able to hoist himself out, his mountaineering group told The Post. He even got back on his skis after taking a quick break.