"With the current affairs such as the financial crisis and the Iraq War," Gi-wook Shin says, "the new Obama administration may not have the North Korea issues on its priority list for a while.  Lee Myung-bak administration, meanwhile,  is urged to revisit the workable policies of the past as well as to initiate the pragmatic diplomacy towards the collaboration between South Korea and the U.S."

In the waning days of the Clinton administration, the momentum for engagement with North Korea, building from the earlier agreement to freeze its nuclear program and a moratorium on ballistic missile launches, accelerated to the brink of full-scale normalization of relations. The U.S. presidential election in 2000 brought that diplomatic freight train to an abrupt halt.

Will the 2008 election bring yet another dramatic change in U.S. Korea policy?

The answer, based on the published positions of the two candidates and conversations with his senior Asia policy advisors, seems to be NO. There are important differences of emphasis in the approaches of both candidates, which I will discuss, but the bottom line is that both men are likely to pick up where President George W. Bush leaves off.

There are two fundamental reasons why U.S. policy toward Korea – and more broadly in Northeast Asia --- will not change dramatically. First, Asia will continue to suffer from a deficit of presidential attention. The arc of crisis – Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan -- will necessarily still command, as it has for almost 8 years, the attention of senior American policymakers. Even that will have to fight for space with the growing global financial crisis.

Second, both candidates agree on the broad outlines of an Asia policy, one that does not depart radically from the one pursued by the Bush administration. As a senior McCain advisor put it to me: “There is not a huge difference on Asia between Obama and McCain.” Privately, Obama advisors also stress that there will not be a huge break with current U.S. policy.

Both campaigns are critical of the lack of attention paid to Asia and the need for the U.S. to be more proactive to strengthen existing alliances and to join the discussion about new forms of regional integration. Both candidates support the need to engage, rather than confront, a rising China. Both men call for the U.S. to pay more attention to management of our alliances with South Korea and Japan. And both Obama and McCain support the North Korean nuclear negotiations carried out by President Bush in his second term, although privately both campaigns are critical of the deal that has been struck.

If there are differences, they can be found in two areas – support for the Korea US free trade agreement and the willingness to directly engage North Korea and its regime.

Free Trade and the KORUS Free Trade Agreement

If there is one single issue regarding Korea on which Senators Obama and McCain clearly part company, it is the future of the free trade agreement negotiated with the Bush administration. Senator McCain is an unambiguous supporter of the FTA, not only as a trade pact but also as a symbol of the broader partnership between the U.S. and South Korea.

Senator Obama also supports free trade but is critical of this and other agreements, such as NAFTA, for failing to ensure market access and the protection of labor rights and the environment. Privately, Obama’s advisors understand the symbolic value of the FTA to the alliance, but they plan to ask Seoul to reopen talks on market access, particularly for the automobile industry. Their position reflects the importance of trade unions and the role of some key states – Michigan most of all – in the election outcome. Even if Obama loses, the Democrats are likely to strengthen their control of Congress, making approval of the FTA difficult under any circumstances.

Negotiating with Pyongyang: Back to the Future?

Both the McCain and the Obama camps publicly back the Bush administration’s negotiations with Pyongyang, but both are also privately critical, though for different reasons.

The Obama team is heavily populated by former Clinton administration officials who were involved in the negotiation of the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea. They see the current deal as an inevitably flawed bargain, the result of the refusal of the administration to seriously engage the North directly until it had crossed the red line of nuclear weapons testing. With little leverage, not least the credible threat of coercion, we are left with containing the plutonium production of the North, and hoping that a grand bargain down the line can yield full denuclearization.

Obama recognizes the need for “close coordination and consultation with our allies South Korea and Japan,” as one of his advisors put it in a published interview, and supports continuing the Six Party Talks. But the emphasis is clearly on direct talks with North Korea, though conducted with a principled toughness that the Bush administration has not exhibited in its final months in office.

That readiness to conduct direct negotiations, up to conclusion of a peace treaty with Pyongyang and full normalization of relations, is where the two candidates part company. The Republican nominee is clearly uncomfortable with direct dealings with Pyongyang – his position resembles the first term of the Bush administration more than the second in that respect. His advisory team combines realists, mainly veterans of the Powell State Department, and neoconservatives, reproducing the divisions that thwarted coherent policy-making in that first Bush term.

In the end, the views of McCain himself may be decisive. He was an opponent of the Agreed Framework, an agreement he characterized as “appeasement.” He maintained this stance into the Bush administration, vocally opposing any direct negotiations with the North Koreans as long as they maintained the right to develop nuclear weapons. He has been critical as well of the main deal struck by President Bush in his second term – “I didn’t believe in the KEDO agreement that President Clinton made and I don’t believe in this one,” he said in January.

McCain, according to an interview with one of his senior Asia advisors, would “seek a return to the core principles of denuclearization known as CVID, or complete, verifiable, irreversible, dismantlement.” The demand for CVID was the watchword of the Bush administration’s earlier stance, in effect a call for Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear option as a first step. But that demand was dropped after Pyongyang called the Bush administration’s bluff by exploding a nuclear device in October, 2006.

McCain also wants to “broaden our policy goals related to North Korea” beyond nuclear issues, to including human rights, economic and political reform, and reduction of the conventional military threat from North Korea, goals also set out at the outset of the Bush administration. McCain has repeatedly referred to the North Korean regime, and its leader, Kim Jong Il, in harsh terms and embraced a policy of “rogue state rollback.”

Realistically, however, McCain offers no credible, practical means to reach these goals. He reserves, as does Obama, the option to use force. But concretely he comes back to the strategy of pressing China to bring North Korea to heel. Unfortunately the Bush administration also relied on China and found there were clear limits to Beijing’s ability to control or its willingness to press its North Korean client. In the end, McCain may have little option but to follow Bush to Pyongyang’s doorstep.

One Caveat – Events Matter

Despite the powerful impetus to maintain continuity in U.S. policy toward the Korean peninsula, no matter whom is elected in November, there is one important caveat to keep in mind – events matter. Unplanned, and unforeseen, developments could force Korea to the top of the President’s agenda. Already we have seen the reports of Kim Jong Il’s serious illness trigger fresh concerns about a possible collapse of political authority in Pyongyang. A simultaneous rush by China, South Korea and the United States to fill a vacuum of power in the North could upset all calculations. For South Korea, and President Lee Myung-bak, it is always best to prepare for the unexpected.

After the events of the past few days, I felt a need to update and expand on my note to you of last week about Dokdo.

First, as a preface for all that is to follow, I fully understand why Koreans feel very strongly about the Dokdo issue and, frankly, I personally sympathize with the ROK claim to the islets.

My basic understanding of the issue is as follows:

(1) The ROK has actual possession of the islets. Japan cannot take the matter to the international court unless the ROK agrees, and the ROK won't. Japan will not attempt to use force to take the islets. As far as I know, not a single country in the world wishes to get involved in the controversy between the ROK and Japan over Dokdo, and thus none will support Japan. In other words, there is no prospect that possession of the islets will ever change from the ROK to Japan (in fact, former Prime Minister Abe made a statement acknowledging this situation a few years ago).

(2) Because of (1) above, however, probably no country, much less the international community as a whole, is likely for the foreseeable future to formally support ROK sovereignty (as opposed to not challenging its actual possession) over Dokdo.

(3) Logically, therefore, the ROK's goals should be to (a) maintain actual physical possession of Dokdo, which, as explained above, is not a problem, (b) in the mid-term, persuade others in the international community that Korea's claim outweighs Japan's, and (c) thereby lay the basis, in the long run, for Japan's eventual dropping its claim and/or the international community actively supporting the ROK's claim.

(4) Given all of the above, tactically the ROK should take a confident, low-key, long-term, strategic approach toward Dokdo.

(a) Overreacting to offending Japanese steps or actions can play into the hands of the Japanese right-wing, both domestically in Japan where those Japanese not particularly interested in Dokdo may be offended and energized by Korean criticism of all "Japanese" and "Japan," and in the international community, where strong Korean reactions are widely reported and thus unintentionally result in increased publicity for the Japanese claim.

(b) Similarly, the ROK should take care not to "demand" that foreign countries support its position on Dokdo-for the time being that will not work and it risks offending those countries and thus hurting Korean interests overall-but confidently, diplomatically publicize its position based on the very best objective research on the issue.

(5) Regarding the recent controversy concerning the U.S., I agree fully that it was wise of President Bush to reverse the recent step by the Board on Geographic Names; the timing of the BGN step last week was extremely unfortunate. But for the ROK to develop a good strategy and good tactics on Dokdo for dealing with all countries, including the U.S., it is critically important for the ROK to correctly and fully analyze both the actions and the intentions of foreign countries.

As far as I can reconstruct what happened-and I caution that, as a former U.S. official, I have no access to confidential information and I am not a representative of the U.S. government-the BGN made a policy decision a year or more ago to note which territories are the subject of disputes around the globe.

Why then, the Korean media asks, did the BGN decide only last week to change the listing for Dokdo but not for other territories in the region, as has been asserted? It appears that bureaucratic procedures and resource limitations resulted in the BGN being very slow to make the actual changes mandated by its policy decision to specify territorial disputes.

What has not been noted in Korea, where the focus naturally is on the Dokdo issue, is that the BGN database has a huge number of errors and inconsistencies in its geographical listings, including territorial disputes, all over the world. Top U.S. government officials have publicly indicated that the BGN move was made by relatively low-level, technical officials who did not seek policy input from senior levels of the U.S. government. Clearly that was very unfortunate, and, for the U.S., the incident highlights the need for the BGN to seek such policy guidance in all cases.

As for the timing of the BGN change, it appears, ironically, that BGN officials were alerted to the controversy by media reporting about the strong Korean reaction to the latest Japanese step. (The Japanese step itself would have received virtually no coverage in the U.S. media if it had not been for the strong Korean reaction.) Acting without policy guidance related directly to Dokdo, the BGN officials apparently thought they were updating the database in response to the general policy change made a year or so earlier. I am aware of no indication that Japanese "lobbying" was behind the BGN move last week.

(6) I can thus easily understand why Koreans, based on their concerns and the information available to them, would construe the BGN action as "siding with" the Japanese position. But, in terms of developing ROK strategy and tactics, it is important, as I noted above, that the Korean government and people fully and accurately understand foreign intentions. In the U.S. case, it is clear that the U.S. government did not and does not intend to change its long-standing policy of not taking a position regarding Dokdo.

What happened in the U.S. was largely the result of pedestrian bureaucratic incompetence and failure to communicate internally within the government-not the result of a basic policy change, much less a conspiracy to support Japan. (I am reminded of the old and very wise saying that one should "never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be explained by stupidity.")

While Koreans of course want all countries, particularly their U.S. ally, to support their position on Dokdo, they should also recognize the fundamentally favorable situation of the ROK in regard to Dokdo: the international community, including the U.S., is not challenging and will not challenge the ROK's actual possession of Dokdo. Thus, as former Prime Minister Abe indicated, Dokdo will remain Korean, and Koreans can say confidently, "Dokdo is our land."