Do not squander your opportunities

By Eugene Lee

Our lives are full of opportunities. Some are small and are meaningless to our being ― it is ok, or even good, to pass on things like tasting a new food product for free in a supermarket, for example. However, some opportunities are like a lottery. They may come only once or twice in a lifetime, like marriage or getting into an institution to study. The guidance for our life choices may start from what our parents may have taught us or from what we call family values.

Then there are spiritual ways of getting some guidance: from the idea of destiny, as it is in major world religions, to using meditation whenever opportunities arise to help us guide our minds in a positive direction. And finally, there is the que sera, sera (whatever will be, will be) approach of letting the goddess Fortuna (or fortune) be your guide.

These are totally fine and applicable to our life choices. However, whenever it comes down to running a country, it is a totally different, if not dangerous, business. When one has to decide what a country should do, it isn't just yours, but everybody else's lives are at stake. At times, the impact of those choices may last for generations of your descendants to come ― just ask historians! In other words, in public administration and foreign affairs, things often come down to a simple calculus: you start figuring out what is best for everyone in the country and the country itself. In a worst-case scenario, if you are worried about making a mistake, you delegate or simply delay your action. My major discontent with the current administration is that it does none of those things!

For President Yoon Suk Yeol, the past month was full of opportunities. And it seems that his administration does its best to miss any of them. I'll start off with the controversial summit in Tokyo. Even if the forced-against-public-will summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was a bad idea in the first place, President Yoon made it even worse by squandering the opportunity to either straighten the history or rectify Japan's earlier historic wrongdoings. In terms of national interest, what everyone saw was a serious effort to prop up Japan's national interests without addressing any of our own.

Then there was an earlier in the month announcement by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy suggesting that South Korean battery makers will qualify for IRA subsidies in the United States, with the hope that those subsidies to be applied to every South Korean-made EV car sold in the U.S. The exhilaration, however, was very much a short-lived one, as just a few days ago, yet another guidance issued by the U.S. Treasury Department listed just six EV models to qualify for those subsidies, and none of them are South Korean.

Next, is the vetoing of the rice bill, which supports the state purchase of overpriced rice. The idea is bad because the grain act is marketed to the public as a so-called encouragement of local farmers, who do very little by producing artificially expensive rice. But it turns out that the president himself is jeopardizing national security, as historically, rice has been a strategically important staple food in most of Asia. Moreover, a majority of rice-producing states are heavily subsidizing its production.

The woes of the real estate market are being worsened by the government's inability to rein in fraud in apartment deposits. The signs of that malice were made public half a year ago when a ring of "villa kings" scammers didn't return their down payments to thousands of renters. And yet again, the administration has failed to act. And if it wasn't for the public outcry over a row of suicides among those renters, the auctioning of those apartments would have continued. Though the administration did put brakes on the process, it was just a temporary measure, as it did not address the issue at its core ― the priority of returning the funds to the renters.

No wonder the President's approval rating hit rock bottom, as he himself has become a recluse. His administrative approach of waging "investigation war" on everyone who disagrees is now bringing further political division and destabilizing the whole country by paralyzing the National Assembly.

In spite of the bleak picture I have drawn, there is a glimmer of hope. It isn't too late to fix things. And here is how. At the end of this month, President Yoon is set to travel to the U.S. for a meeting with President Biden and an opportunity to speak in front of the U.S. Congress. The recent leak of secret documents did put an extra strain on the relations between the two, but at the same time, it gave a very peculiar opportunity and weight to crafting better and more trustworthy relations by addressing major national security concerns for South Korea. President Yoon must use this one-time-only opportunity wisely! It must not be anti-North Korea only or placing South Korea as the lowest in the pecking order between the allies, but being equally respectful and promoting the peace, economy, and most of all unity in the country that we all crave.

Let me end somewhat differently. If you are a fan of Star Wars and watch the latest series, you will discover something interesting. In one of the last episodes, one character speaks about her destroyed world. She says, "Mandalore has always been too powerful for any enemy to defeat" and that "it is always our own division that destroys us." It reminded me of South Korea, the country that suffered so much at the hands of others, but whose primary role in that was its internal division. We need unity and alignment around shared goals, so let those be your guide, Mr. President!

Eugene Lee (mreulee@gmail.com) is a lecturing professor at the Graduate School of Governance at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Specializing in international relations and governance, his research and teaching focus on national and regional security, international development, government policies and Northeast and Central Asia.