What is South Korea's strategic posture in East Asia?

After the Korean War ended in 1953, South Korea and the United States established a political and security alliance that has lasted more than half a century. "For a number of decades, South Korea primarily defined itself as a U.S. ally, with the enemy to the north," says Donald Gregg, president of the Korea Society and a former U.S. ambassador to Korea. However, South Korea is now trying to create a new role for itself in Asia. Seoul is exploring a growing economic relationship with China--which passed the United States in 2003 to become South Korea's largest trading partner--and its policy of engagement and growing cooperation with North Korea is pulling it away from the United States. "All we know for sure is that South Korea's role is no longer junior partner to the U.S.," says David Kang, a visiting professor of Asian studies at Stanford University. "The days when they would just unquestioningly follow the U.S. are over."

Kang and other experts say Seoul is beginning to shift its focus towards increasing regional ties with its Asian neighbors. The U.S.-South Korea relationship, while still strong, is not as exclusive as it has been in the past. "South Korea is still an ally of the United States ... nevertheless, it has been the most active country in promoting East Asian cooperation and integration, and will probably continue to do so," says Charles Armstrong, professor of history and director of the Center for Korean Studies at Columbia University.

What are South Korea's biggest foreign policy challenges?

Dealing with North Korea while preserving its relationship with the United States, maintaining relations with Japan, and addressing potential long-term military or economic threats from China, experts say. But "the major issue for Seoul is overwhelmingly North Korea, and everything else gets filtered through that lens," Kang says. South Korea looks to its northern neighbor with the goal of eventual reunification, and therefore seeks economic cooperation and political engagement to smooth relations and slowly move down that path. The United States, on the other hand, is primarily seeking to prevent North Korea from gaining nuclear weapons, and has refused to engage with Pyongyang until that issue is resolved.

Other experts see a disconnect between how South Korea views its role in the region and how other nations see it. South Korean officials talk of playing a "balancing" or mediating role in regional disputes, including tensions between China and Japan and the nuclear standoff between the United States and North Korea. But South Korea's "actual ability to mediate and balance is limited," says Armstrong. And while South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun has expressed hopes of building Seoul into a logistics and business hub for the region, existing tensions on the peninsula--including international fears that North Korea is amassing a nuclear arsenal--cloud any long-term economic plans. As things stand, South Korea has the world's 11th largest economy, but not a corresponding level of political clout.

How is South Korea dealing with North Korea?

Through a policy of active engagement. In 1998, Former President Kim Dae-Jung introduced the "Sunshine Policy" aimed at improving ties with North Korea while assuring Pyongyang that Seoul is not trying to absorb it. Since then, "the degree of economic interaction between south and north has substantially increased," Armstrong says. Kim and North Korean President Kim Jung-Il met at a historic summit in 2000, and increasing progress has been made on a range of issues, from economic--increased rail links and joint projects like the Gaesung industrial complex--to social and symbolic, including cross-border family visits and Korean athletes marching together under a single flag at the Olympics. Trade between the two countries reached $697 million in 2004, and South Korea is now Pyongyang's second-largest trading partner after China.

South Korea sees engagement with North Korea as yielding far more benefits than confrontation. "South Korea is reorienting itself toward reconciliation and eventual reunification of the peninsula," Gregg says. South Korean officials say reunification would reduce the burden on each side of maintaining huge armies, help improve living standards, draw international investment, create employment, and help avert the worst possibility: open war on the Korean peninsula.

What is South Korea's relationship with China?

South Korea is developing increasingly warm relations with its giant western neighbor. "There is a real fascination with China in South Korea, and the flow of investment, exports, students, tourists, and businessmen going to China from South Korea has exploded in the last several years," Armstrong says. Bilateral trade between Seoul and Beijing reached $90 billion in 2004, a 42 percent increase from 2003. The two countries also agree politically on issues ranging from opposition to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni war shrine, to accord on how to deal with North Korea's nuclear ambitions. China is also choosing the path of engagement with North Korea, and helping Pyongyang find a "Chinese way" to develop: that is, increasing economic openness without sacrificing political control. "On the whole, [South Korea and China] see pretty much eye to eye on the major geopolitical issues," Kang says.

Beijing, like Seoul, is investing in North Korea, which has ample natural resources--including coal, iron, and gold--and a low-cost labor force. In 2003, Chinese investment in North Korea was $1.1 million; in 2004, it ballooned to $50 million; and in 2005, it was expected to reach $85-90 million. The volume of trade between China and North Korea reached $1.5 billion in 2005, making Beijing Pyongyang's largest foreign trading partner. North Korean leader Kim Jung-Il, who rarely travels, emphasized Beijing's importance to his country by visiting China in January.

South Korea is positioning itself to be closer to an ascendant China, but trying to do it without jeopardizing existing ties with the United States. South Korea's biggest worry, experts say, is being pulled into a conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan.

What's the relationship like between South Korea and Japan?

"Very bad at the moment in terms of public diplomacy and popular opinion," Columbia University's Armstrong says. South Korean wariness of Japan dates back at least to 1910, when imperial Japan invaded Korea and ruled it as a colony for thirty-five years. During the occupation, Japanese efforts to suppress Korean language and culture earned Korean enmity. During World War II, the Japanese practice of using "comfort women"--women from occupied countries, mostly Korea, who were forced to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese army--increased the anti-Japanese feeling.

South Koreans, and others across the region, are also infuriated by Koizumi's annual visit to the Yasukuni shrine. The site honors more than two million Japanese war dead, but includes the remains of more than a dozen convicted war criminals. South Korea also has disputes with Japan over territory. Both countries claim a group of islands--and the fishing and mineral rights around them--in the Sea of Japan that the Koreans call Dokdo and the Japanese call Takeshima. And many critics in South Korea and across Asia accuse Japan of whitewashing its wartime atrocities in its grade-school textbooks.

But much of the South Korean conflict with Japan may be for domestic political consumption, some experts say. "Under the surface, I would say the degree of interaction [between Seoul and Tokyo] remains high and, in the economic realm, is rather good," Armstrong says.

How is South Korea dealing with the United States?

While experts say most South Koreans still consider the U.S.-Korean alliance the backbone of their security relationship, time has passed and attitudes are shifting. A new generation of South Koreans, assertive and nationalistic, are less mindful of the Korean War--and less grateful for American intervention in the conflict that left nearly three million Koreans dead or wounded--and more resistant to what they see as a U.S. attempt to impose its values and Washington's singular focus on terrorism. The United States has opposed South Korean engagement efforts with North Korea, and has also moved to increase its ties with Japan. The Bush administration's foreign policy, including the war on terror, its punitive stance toward North Korean nuclear weapons, and particularly the invasion of Iraq, is highly unpopular in South Korea, according to opinion surveys there.

South Koreans are also increasingly demanding more control over their country's military and political affairs. In 2004, the United States returned several military bases to Korean control, and agreed to withdraw 12,500 of the 37,500 U.S. troops currently stationed in Korea by 2008. U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had been pushing for South Korea to take more of a role in the defense of the Korean peninsula, to free up U.S. forces for deployment elsewhere. But, all differences aside, Seoul is still eager to cooperate with the United States. South Korea, with some 3,000 troops in Iraq, is the third-largest member of the U.S.-led coalition there, behind the United States and Britain.

What is the recent history of the region?

Poised between China and Japan, fought over by the United States and Russia, the Korean peninsula long has played a central role in Asia's geopolitical affairs. After World War II, Japanese colonial rule gave way to U.S. and Soviet trusteeship over the southern and northern halves of Korea, respectively. The peninsula was divided at the 38th Parallel. In 1948, the southern Republic of Korea and the northern Democratic People's Republic of Korea, under Kim Il-Sung, were established.

In 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea, starting a conflict that brought in China on the North Korean side and a U.S.-led UN coalition on the South Korean side. While an armistice was agreed to in 1953, a formal peace treaty was never signed. In 1954, the United States agreed to help South Korea defend itself against external aggression in a mutual defense treaty. U.S. troops have been stationed in Korea since then. In addition to this important security relationship, shared interests in the last fifty years have included fighting communism and, since the 1980s, establishing a strong democracy and fostering economic development. However, in recent years strain has emerged on a range of issues, none more important than how to handle Pyongyang.

His Excellency Sir David Manning, British Ambassador to the United States, delivered the 2006 Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecture: "Energy: A Burning Issue for Foreign Policy," on Monday, March 13, 2006 at 4:30 p.m. in the Bechtel Conference Center at Encina Hall.

Sir David Manning has been Her Majesty's Ambassador to the United States of America since September 2, 2003.

Sir David Manning's Biography:

2003 - present: Washington, USA (Ambassador)

2001 - 2003: Foreign Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister

2001: UK Delegation NATO Brussels (Ambassador)

1998 - 2000: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Deputy Under-Secretary)

1995 - 1998: Tel Aviv, Israel (Ambassador)

1994 - 1995: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Head of Policy Planning Staff)

1994:UK member of Contact Group on Bosnia (International Conference on Former Yugoslavia)

1993 - 1994: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Head of Eastern Department)

1990 - 1993: Moscow, Russia (Counselor, Head of Political Department)

1988 - 1990: Counselor on loan to Cabinet Office

1984 - 1988: Paris, France (1st Secretary)

1982 - 1984: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Deputy Head of Policy Planning Staff)

1980 - 1982: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Soviet Department, later Eastern Department)

1977 - 1980: New Delhi, India (2nd later 1st Secretary)

1974 - 1977: Warsaw, Poland (3rd later 2nd Secretary)

1972 - 1974: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mexico/Central America Department)

1972: Entered Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Pre-emption used to be the watchword of Bush foreign policy. The world's sole superpower would not hesitate to wield force against an imminent threat to its security. The old doctrines of the Cold War era -- of containment and deterrence of a potential enemy -- were disdained as weakness.

Now, facing the most serious national security challenge since the end of the Cold War -- the nuclear weapons programs of Iran and North Korea -- the administration is reaching back to those oldies but goodies.

The determination of Iran and North Korea to develop nuclear weapons has so far been largely unchecked by this administration. The North Koreans, since breaking out of the freeze agreed to during the Clinton administration, have been steadily producing plutonium, and presumably warheads. The Iranians, after the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reversed their deal to suspend uranium-enrichment activities, the crucial step toward nuclear weapons.

Diplomatic negotiations in both cases have produced little movement. But a military strike on their nuclear facilities is almost inconceivable. The danger of potentially horrendous retaliation and the sapping of American will and resources in Iraq have almost killed that option.

"As shaky as a policy of containment is, it is certainly preferable to confrontation, 'rollback,' or 'regime change' through military force,'' wrote conservative national security expert Thomas Donnelly in a recent analysis. "Containment is, in fact, regime change by tolerable means, and the solution to the problems of Iran and North Korea lie in an indirect approach.''

While we try to contain a nuclear Iran and North Korea, suggested Donnelly, we should surround Iran with movements for democratic change in Iraq and Afghanistan. North Korea, he believes, will be changed through Chinese influence.

Donnelly cautions that there may be circumstances when containment proves even more risky than intervention -- say if Iran tries to slip nuclear materials to Islamist terrorists. Iran is less stable than the Soviet Union, though it is worth remembering that the first 15 years of the Cold War brought us to the brink of nuclear war once and close to it several times.

For the administration, this is a stealth policy shift. That is no surprise. It flows directly from the mess in Iraq, a mistake the administration can never really acknowledge.

For those who once touted American global domination, it is still hard to face the reality that containment is impossible without allies and partners. By ourselves, we cannot press those regimes by cutting off their access to investment and advanced technology.

The administration is rightly moving to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council to seek a mandate to enforce the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency. North Korea is undoubtedly watching this carefully.

China and Russia, who have veto power in the Security Council, are reluctantly going along. But they still resist any move to impose economic sanctions against Iran. Nor are the Europeans, Japanese and others who depend on oil and gas from Iran eager to halt their investment and trade.

Similarly in the case of North Korea, the Chinese and South Koreans are not prepared to cut the flow of economic aid and investment into the otherwise isolated North Korean state. This is less a case of economic interests than a fear that sanctions will escalate to greater confrontation, even war.

"The strategic challenge the Bush administration faced was to convince the rest of the world that Iran is more dangerous than the United States,'' says nuclear proliferation expert George Perkovich. "They finally did it -- and it took Ahmadinejad to do it,'' referring to the inflammatory rhetoric, including threats to "wipe Israel off the map,'' issued by the Iranian leader.

The administration made some headway down the same path with North Korea by engaging in direct talks with that regime this past fall, dispelling the image that the United States was unwilling to negotiate. But that progress has been undermined recently because hard-liners inside the Bush administration pulled the plug on such talks.

Managing an effective containment partnership will be a huge challenge. And there is still tremendous resistance inside the administration to engaging and negotiating -- and compromising -- with the enemy. But that was always a part of making containment succeed, even at the height of the Cold War.

Containment is no silver bullet. It is merely, as Donnelly puts it, "the least bad alternative, but not by a lot, and not under all circumstances.'' And right now, it is the only game in town.

You burst into the room. Sitting on a chair, blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, is your prisoner. The room is dark, except for a lonely naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. He is sweating. He is afraid.

"Tell me where it is!" you scream. "Now!" You know there is little time left. Somewhere in your city, a time bomb is ticking. Whether it spits serin into the air, uranium into the water or atomic fire into the heavens, you do not know.

He does. But he is not talking. Involuntarily, you raise your hand as if to strike. What you are about to do violates the law and your conscience. And yet...

In peacetime, torture ranks next to murder as a primal sin. But during war, the debate begins over whether this evil can ever be justified to combat the seemingly greater evil of the enemy. Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz has said torture should be legalized.

In early October, the U.S. Senate voted 90-9 to ban it. Although Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush have both recently asserted that "We do not torture," five U.S. Army Rangers were charged in November for punching and kicking detainees in Iraq, secret U.S. prisons have caused anxiety in Europe, and Vice President Dick Cheney has battled to win the CIA an exemption from the torture ban. As late as December, the U.S. House of Representatives stood poised to defeat the White House.

Few of us will ever be asked to torture. But, indirectly, all of us have to make a choice: to support, as citizens, those politicians who back torture, or those who seek its prohibition.

The decision of an individual to support, or reject, torture seems at first to be a purely moral question. But what would be the long-term consequences to society if we were to make this radical break with the past?

One cannot do experiments with societies, or predict the future, but, it turns out, one can attempt to address this issue using the cold, hard tools of mathematics and logic. This story begins in 1963.

The United States and the Soviet Union are on the perpetual brink of war, balanced like two sides of an equation. On the American side are "game theorists" like Thomas Schelling, recently awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the strategy of conflict. On the Soviet side, there is the solitary mathematical psychologist Vladimir Lefebvre.

Just as mathematics could be used to describe logical reasoning, Lefebvre saw that mathematics could be used to describe ethical reasoning. If something was good -- for example, "church," "democracy," "prosperity," "kindness" -- it had value "1."

If something was evil -- "earthquake," "famine," "military defeat," "murder" -- it had value "0." But rarely were ethical situations so simple. For instance, "killing" is bad (0) but protecting one's country is good (1) -- so is war 1 or 0?

Lefebvre saw that, at the crudest level, there were essentially two types of ethical systems. Those that held that employing evil means to attain just ends was good, and those that saw that employing evil means to attain good ends was wrong.

There were also, crudely put, two types of relations between individuals: those entailing compromise (or cooperation) and those entailing confrontation.

Of course, evil people rarely see themselves as evil. So Lefebvre had to incorporate in his model of human nature the capacity of human beings to judge -- correctly or incorrectly -- the goodness or evil of their own acts, and to reflect upon their own judgments, and others'. "Reflexive Theory" was born.

It quickly became a paradigm within the Soviet defense establishment, with the publication of books such as "Mathematics and Armed Conflict." Nothing like it was known in the West.

With very simple assumptions -- for instance, that an individual who correctly sees his actions to be good when they are good, and evil if they are evil, is more highly regarded by society than an individual who incorrectly sees himself -- Lefebvre showed that in a society that accepted the compromise of good with evil, individuals would more often seek the path of confrontation with each other.

Lefebvre's insights were called upon by the State Department during negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. (And perhaps Lefebvre's model could be re-enlisted to help U.S. officials understand and negotiate with Arab and Muslim heads of state, who must also negotiate with their people.)

In support of Lefebvre's revolutionary new theory, a survey of Soviet émigrés and Americans was conducted in the 1970s. They were asked questions like, "Should a doctor conceal from a patient that he has cancer in order to diminish his suffering?" Overwhelmingly, the Americans would say no, and overwhelmingly, the Soviets yes. The Soviets accepted the compromise of good with evil; the Americans rejected it.

What does this mean? If Americans begin to accept the use of torture, American society might turn into a society of individuals in conflict.

Not uniformly, thanks to something called free will, but generally, with harmful consequences for society: Imagine two roads, with a stream of cars moving along each one. Each driver wants to reach his destination as quickly as possible; on occasion, drivers will impede each other.

On the first road, drivers rise in their own, and in other drivers', estimation if they yield. Drivers on the second road lose face when they yield. It is clear that traffic will move faster on the first road than on the second.

It can be argued that repressive states like Saudi Arabia, which bred most of the Sept. 11 hijackers, are on the second road. If the United States moved to accept torture, it could veer toward the second road, too -- the road of the Soviet Union.

And we know where that road ends. The Soviet Union no longer exists.