Difficult challenges await America’s new South Korea ambassador

A new U.S. ambassador is waiting in the wings to go to South Korea and deal with the winner of its hotly contested presidential election in March. Philip Goldberg, the ambassador to Colombia, is reported as the administration’s pick for the post, not filled for more than a year.

Goldberg still needs to go through the process of approval by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then the full Senate. He’s reputed, however, as a hard-liner on North Korea on the basis of his service more than a decade ago with the State Department trying to get the United Nations to enforce sanctions against the North for its nuclear and missile tests.

By the time Goldberg gets to Seoul, South Korea will have a new president and we’ll have a pretty good idea of the state of play of the confrontation between North and South Korea, including the latest convolutions of the South’s policy toward the North and the North’s drive to heighten tensions with missile tests and possibly a seventh nuclear test. Goldberg’s goal will be to preserve America’s “unbreakable bond” with South Korea while insisting that North Korea show substantive signs of giving up its nuclear program as a prerequisite for dialogue and a new agreement for easing tensions.

Interestingly, President Biden, no doubt on the advice of the National Security Council and State Department, did not  fill the ambassador’s post since the departure in January 2021 of Harry Harris, a retired admiral and former commander of U.S. Forces in the Pacific. Although no one officially has acknowledged why the post remains vacant, the reason often advanced in Seoul is that the U.S. has been waiting until the election of a successor to President Moon Jae-in, a liberal who yearns for a declaration proclaiming a formal end to the Korean War.

By postponing the appointment, the U.S. could quietly show its distaste for any end-of-war declaration that would lead to a peace treaty in place of the armistice signed in July 1953. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has refused to engage in dialogue with the U.S. or South Korea for nearly three years and, in defiance of sanctions, has ordered a rapid succession of missile tests seen as a prelude to the North’s first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile since November 2017. It’s even believed Kim may be laying the groundwork for the North’s first nuclear test since September 2017.

The Biden administration in theory would like to reverse the negative trend in U.S. efforts at reconciliation with the North, which soured with the failure of the summit in Hanoi in February 2019 between Kim and former President Trump. That was eight months after Trump, in the first meeting between a U.S. president and a North Korean leader, signed a vague statement with Kim in Singapore promising to work toward “a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.” Harris, arriving in Seoul in July 2019 as ambassador, upset the Moon administration by opposing any end-of-war declaration as long as Kim remained adamant against giving up his nuclear weapons and the missiles to send warheads to distant targets.

There’s no way that Goldberg can settle in as ambassador in Seoul before the South Koreans on March 9 choose between candidates with sharply differing views on North Korea, but he’ll definitely be watching carefully while deciding how to deal with the winner. The polls show a tight contest between the left-leaning Lee Jae-myung, former governor of the province surrounding Seoul, who undoubtedly would pursue reconciliation and appeasement with the North, and the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol, a former prosecutor who wants to “rebuild” relations with the U.S. and insists the North has to give up its nukes as a condition for a deal. 

Goldberg brings a long record of careful, calculating diplomacy as ambassador to difficult regimes. A Spanish-speaking Latin America specialist, he’s still ambassador to Colombia and served as ambassador to the Philippines before being replaced by Sung Kim, former ambassador to Korea who’s now special representative for North Korea policy. Goldberg is fully expected to pursue demands for denuclearization but may temper them with the lure of humanitarian aid and possible relaxation of sanctions in the hope of drawing the North into dialogue. 

Goldberg’s most difficult challenge will be to preserve the U.S.-South Korean military alliance as a robust antidote to North Korea’s dream of ending the alliance and abolishing the UN Command under which the U.S., South Korea and 16 other countries fought the North Koreans and Chinese in the Korean War. In the process, North Korea would hope to bring about the withdrawal of America’s 28,500 troops from South Korea. One particular goal would be to ensure the continuity of joint military exercises, conducted largely on computers since Trump canceled the exercises in 2018 after meeting Kim in Singapore. U.S. commanders say computer games are no substitute for on-the-ground maneuvers by U.S. and South Korean forces and they are eager to restore them to that level.

The job of ambassador, however, will go beyond North Korean issues. Victor Cha, who served as National Security Council director for Asian affairs in the George W. Bush presidency and is now a professor at Georgetown University, notes that the left and right in Korea “also disagree on important alliance issues; energy and climate change issues; dealing with China; and whether South Korea should pursue a seat at the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad), composed of the United States, Japan, India, and Australia.”  

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He currently is a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea. He is the author of several books about Asian affairs.