PRESS RELEASE
South Korea Blowing Hole in Obama’s War Plan for Asia
Sept. 16, 2015 (EIRNS)—Former high level officials from South Korea, including three former Foreign Ministers, speaking at a forum at the Wilson Center in Washington on Sep. 15, tore apart the underlying assumptions of the Obama Administration and its neocon allies in trying to justify the US mobilization for war on China. Following just days after South Korean President Park Geun-Hye’s historic attendance at the Sept. 3 military parade in Beijing, in celebration of the Victory over Japan and world fascism, where she stood proudly with both Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin throughout the day, the attempt by several American speakers at the conference, to maintain the myth that South Korea will (or "must") stand by the US and Japan in a confrontation with China, was demolished by the Korean guests.
While Seoul still views its historic alliance with Washington as crucial, the speakers repeatedly emphasized that the US will not be allowed to break Seoul’s dramatic move towards close cooperation with both China and Russia in the "Silk Road" process. This includes both Korea’s contribution to China’s One Road-One Belt program for Central Asia and Southeast Asia, but also in creating a new Northeast Asia Development Bank (NADB) with all the nations of the region (and the US, if it were willing) to develop the entire region.
Dr. Ahn Choong-yong, Chairman of the National Commission for Corporate Partnership, ‘said explicitly that "the IMF and the ADB failed to finance the rapidly expanding infrastucture needed in Asia as a whole," and therefore Seoul has fully supported the AIIB and China’s One Road—One Belt Silk Road projects, while promoting the creation of the NADB, to meet the "common interests" of all the Asian nations. "The US should not have stayed out of the AIIB" he said. "The US should join in these huge investment projects. The more development banks we have, the better."
Dr. Ahn added that it is "not productive" that the US continues to "check China’s rise."
Former Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan said that "Japan is afraid of China’s rise, but to us it is an opportunity, a new frontier."
Dr. Ahn also hit hard at the vulture funds, when a reporter complained that his government just "threw Elliot out of the country" (Elliot, the same vulture fund trying to destroy Argentina, was just defeated by the Korean courts in trying to bust up the Samsung chaebol). "If foreign funds try to grab money and run, to destabilize our markets," Dr. Ahn said, "we need mechanisms to maintain stability."
Another former Foreign Minister, Kim Sung-hwan, following a diatribe by Princeton Asia-hand Gilbert Rozman about Chinese and Russian "aggression," supposedly trying to "restore the Cold War framework" by backing North Korea, said "many Koreans think" that it would be far better to "improve relations with North Korea, even if the nuclear issue were not resolved." If too much is demanded of North Korea, he said, there will be no motion.
Yet another former Foreign Minister, Gong Ro-Myung, said the US and North Korea must "co-exist peacefully," as was attempted with the Agreed Framework under President Clinton. "Some Koreans think", he said, that the US canceling of that Agreed Framework was intended to divide Korea, and the US "wants to keep it that way."
Three questions from EIR, one in each panel, met with fierce rejection from the neocons, but lively discussion from the Korean guests. Rozman railed in response to a question about President Park’s "Eurasian Initiative" that "the Silk Road and Rason [the North Korean city where Seoul, Pyongyang, and Moscow are jointly developing port and rail projects] are not as strong in Korea as you say." He added: "Park is not willing to go ahead with big projects with the North without total de-nuclearization—that would be a big break from Japan and the US—it would be a break of the alliance."
Indeed, if Obama continues with his geopolitical drive for war on Russia and China, it would be he that forces a break of the alliance.
