Doug Bandow gets it completely wrong on the US military commitment in South Korea

Over at Forbes, Doug Bandow, regurgitated the Korea-defend-yourself rant. A snippet:

However, Seoul has precious few responsibilities in return. ROK forces never have been stationed in America. There were never plans for the South to assist the U.S. if the latter was attacked by the Soviet Union. No South Korean ships patrolled the sea lanes and no South Korean aircraft guarded the sky.

In the early days there was little the ROK, an impoverished dictatorship, could do. Seoul could not protect itself, let alone anyone else. But then, Washington should not have maintained the fraud that the security tie was mutual.

The South since has joined the first tier of nations. It obviously can do more, much more. Nevertheless, the treaty remains a one-way relationship. The ROK occasionally has contributed to Washington’s foolish wars of choice, such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, in order to keep American defense subsidies flowing. But this is no bargain for the U.S., which is expected to protect Seoul from all comers.

As you can guess from my past posts, this article had me throwing things at my computer monitor. The nicest I can put it is that this article is so fraught with inaccuracies and lack of understanding, Forbes should be embarrassed for allowing it to be printed.

The assumptions that underpin Mr Bandow's ignorant rant — that South Korea does nothing for its defense, pays nothing for its defense, and does nothing to help — are all grossly inaccurate. I would excuse him for writing as if it's still 2005, but he gets even that wrong (he's also wrong about the Cold War being over, at least in Northeast Asia).

Even during the leftist Roh Moohyun administration, South Korea has consistently spent about 2.5 percent or more of its GDP on its military. That's not as much as the US, of course, but considerably higher than most of its allies.

This is almost all geared toward defense against North Korean attack, but increasingly more is spent on helping the US patrol against international piracy (as does neighboring Japan that also enjoys US defense commitments), as well as the US-led operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where South Korea had the third largest contingent of military personnel after the US and the UK.

More importantly, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans fought alongside their American counterparts during the Vietnam War. At any given time there were 50,000 ROK troops there, and the number of dead is officially over 5000. That's from a country one-sixth the population of the US. It is irrelevant that Mr Bandow thinks these wars were "foolish," and that does nothing to diminish South Korean sacrifices.

Today, every South Korean male is required to serve in the military or do some appropriate government service. The typical commitment is over two years, in the prime of their youth. Again, this is geared almost entirely toward defense against North Korea, and it represents tremendous costs to the ROK government, its economy, and even its demographics (as it leads to delayed marriage and thus lower overall fertility in a country that is disastrously below population replacement levels).

So Mr Bandow is wrong on all those counts. Moreover, he utterly misses the point of the value of the US military presence in Northeast Asia. The deterrent presented by the US military in Korea, Japan, and Guam has kept the region free of major conflict for nearly six decades. Contrast that with the previous six decades, which saw four major wars fought on or over Korea.

Deterrence costs pennies to the dollars compared to what would likely result if the US vacated (and which the US would almost certainly get sucked into anyway). Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries in the region may not always see eye to eye with Washington, but the Pax Americana has helped foster democracy and open markets that both are highly beneficial to the United States.

And that discussion doesn't even get into the inherent reliance that South Korea has on the United States because it agreed not to develop nukes that would better insure its territorial security.

Not to mention the whole idea of allied deterrence is that North Korea might think it can get away with an invasion of South Korea if it punches really, really hard in the beginning (what they did in 1950), but they would be highly unlikely to do it if they knew South Korea's powerful ally would come to bear on them. Critics call it a "tripwire," but any thinking person would just realize it makes good sense.

Next time Forbes should leave the Northeast Asia analysis to Northeast Asia analysts and not ideological pundits paid by the pixel.

Note: Robert at The Marmot's Hole put something up on this before I had a chance.

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The Thesaurus Wars: Japan and South Korea trying to figure out who Obama likes better

So South Korea is the "linchpin" and Japan is "one of the cornerstones." This has apparently freaked some people out:

US President Barack Obama is certain to heap praise on South Korea and Japan as he attends back-to-back summits but some experts see a subtle shift as he views Seoul as the more dynamic ally.

In separate remarks this year that made diplomats run to their thesauruses, Obama called South Korea "the linchpin" of regional security and Japan "one of the cornerstones" of security throughout the world.

The distinction may seem academic but it has quietly concerned some Japanese policymakers who have long viewed their country as, well, the linchpin of US strategy in Asia.

Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said he has spoken with US officials who described Obama's "linchpin" remark -- made when he met South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak in June in Canada -- as a deliberate, if nuanced, sign of the administration's views.

Lee has been a steadfast US ally, coordinating moves in a standoff with communist North Korea. It is a striking change from Lee's liberal predecessor Roh Moo-Hyun, who openly criticized US troops and US policy toward the North.

In Japan, the center-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) last year ended decades of conservative rule and initially tried to win more concessions on a deal to move a controversial US air base on Okinawa island.

"Certainly under Lee Myung-Bak you have an administration that's far more forward-looking to transform the alliance into having broader responsibilities," Klingner said.

"Compare that with the DPJ government in Tokyo, which came into office downplaying the importance of the alliance and seeking a relationship that was more equidistant between Washington and Beijing," he said.

I've said this many times before: A lot of people looked at the very leftist Roh Moohyun administration and the right-wing Bush administration and saw the inevitable butting of heads as a sign the inescapable "death of the alliance." Now that there's a right-of-center president in Seoul and a pragmatically left-of-center chief in Washington, but a rare leftist in Tokyo, people are saying the same thing about Naoto Kan bringing an end to the US-Japanese partnership that they said about Roh Moohyun.

But it's nonsense. Like in Seoul, even the leftists in Tokyo know how important the US-led security umbrella is for Japan, and the good news for them — regardless of the meaning of linchpin or cornerstone — Japan will be a very welcome partner into the US-led alliance for as long as it wants to be. Indeed, if there is any rise in stature for South Korea, it is not because Japan has dropped, but simply because South Korea has been able to step up at a time when it was needed (and continues to be needed).

Being the diplomatic sort that I am, I'd like to say that both Seoul and Tokyo are linchpins in East Asia. And Tokyo and Seoul should be working together a great deal in that regard, particularly in things where Tokyo doesn't run afoul of its pacifist constitution, like protecting shipping lanes from piracy.

Besides, Japan should recognize it has something Korea never will: A town called Obama.

Piracy in Japan versus piracy in Korea

In my daily news troll, I ran across this article in the Los Angeles Times that suggests South Korea gets movies like Iron Man 2 in theaters ahead of Japan because of an effort to earn money before pirated copies take hold online and ruin the opportunity to make money off eyeballs:

As Moore noted, one of the countries that has the least amount of piracy is Japan. "There is a very low social acceptability in Japan for stealing copyrighted work -- you just don't see movies showing up online right away there," he said. So with that in mind, Paramount is holding back the release of "Iron Man 2" in Japan for several weeks, having little fear about the country being swamped with bootleg copies of the film.

However, when it comes to Korea, it's a different story. "For better or worse, there are certain countries -- notably like Korea -- where it's culturally acceptable to download movies online pretty much right away," said Moore. "By the third week of a movie's release, you're starting to see a large part of the audience who will start consuming the film online. It's why Korea has almost no home video business anymore."

So Paramount knew it couldn't afford to wait. It released "Iron Man 2" in Korea this weekend -- and is hoping for the best.

An interesting theory, one that seems to be uncritically accepted over at The Marmot's Hole, which also highlighted the article.

An interesting theory except that it may not be true. Or at least it's misleading.

I'm sitting right next to "M," a fellow public health student who hails from Kansai, to whom I asked, "Do people in Japan download movies illegally?" To which she answered, "Yeah, a lot of them do," and then she told me about sharing services like Cabos. That the movies may not pop up there immediately may have less to do with "social unacceptability" of viewing illegal downloads than the drive to be the first to get it online.

Given the often months-long lag between the US release and the Japanese release, a lack of publicity in Japan for a given film may also dampen demand for it to be seen online: You're not going to look for something which you don't know exists.

In fact, "M" and I had been discussing just a few weeks ago not why Korea gets movies so quickly, but why Japan gets them so late, often long after their North American, Korean, or European release dates. There's your question.

I also am a little disinclined to believe the boo-hooing of media companies that make grand claims of losses supposedly over piracy. A loss as they define it is full ticket or rental price for a movie viewed illegally. To me, a loss is the money they would have earned in a venue the movie would have been watched if the illegal download did not exist.

Those are a very different set of numbers. For starters, when something is "free," people experiment by viewing things they would not necessarily plop down money for. I have a legitimate Netflix membership that allows me to view many of their movies on line, and I'll tell you I "try out" far more movies than I would have if I had to pay for each one or can get them for free but have to wait to receive them by mail. People might also "re-view" something they had paid to see, or even check out something ahead of time that they plan to see.

Furthermore, the movie-going experience in Korea is incompatible with downloads, legal or otherwise. People in Korea are avid cinema-goers who like to watch movies for dating purposes or as group activities, and it's doubtful that that can be replaced by downloading. So the notion that they have to get the movie out quickly before the pirates take over is, well, highly suspect. As with many things involving Korea, I think we're looking at a facile interpretation for something that requires a far more complex explanation.