Sunday, August 30, 2015
In 2010, we ominously warned the Obama Administration about the dangers of a "sunshine policy" towards the Castro dictatorship, akin to South Korea's failed approached to relations with its northern neighbor.
In light of recent events in inter-Korean relations -- and now that the Obama Administration has chosen to walk down this counter-productive path -- this warning remains more pertinent than ever.
In short, here's what the South Korea's "sunshine policy" entailed -- as per Max Fischer in Vox:
"The idea was that decades of hostility with the North hadn't worked, but maybe that taking a softer line would ease tensions. That included lots of political summits and official rhetoric about Korean unity, but it also meant opening up some trade with the North. But it turned out that North Korea was just exploiting the Sunshine Policy as a con. The greatest symbol of this was the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a big production center just on the North Korean side of the border, where South Korean companies and managers contract with North Korean workers. The idea was that this daily contact would ease cultural tension and that the shared commercial interests would give the countries a reason to cooperate. In practice, though, the North Korean government stole most of the workers' wages, big South Korean corporations exploited the ultra-cheap labor to increase profits, and North Korea didn't ease its hostility one iota."
Sound familiar?
That's precisely what we warned as regards Cuba:
(Note the op-ed below was written three years before Cuba's regime got caught red-handed smuggling 240 tons of weapons to North Korea -- the most egregious violation of U.N. sanctions to date -- which the Obama Administration chose to basically ignore.)
By Mauricio Claver-Carone in The Washington Times:
In light of recent events in inter-Korean relations -- and now that the Obama Administration has chosen to walk down this counter-productive path -- this warning remains more pertinent than ever.
In short, here's what the South Korea's "sunshine policy" entailed -- as per Max Fischer in Vox:
"The idea was that decades of hostility with the North hadn't worked, but maybe that taking a softer line would ease tensions. That included lots of political summits and official rhetoric about Korean unity, but it also meant opening up some trade with the North. But it turned out that North Korea was just exploiting the Sunshine Policy as a con. The greatest symbol of this was the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a big production center just on the North Korean side of the border, where South Korean companies and managers contract with North Korean workers. The idea was that this daily contact would ease cultural tension and that the shared commercial interests would give the countries a reason to cooperate. In practice, though, the North Korean government stole most of the workers' wages, big South Korean corporations exploited the ultra-cheap labor to increase profits, and North Korea didn't ease its hostility one iota."
Sound familiar?
That's precisely what we warned as regards Cuba:
(Note the op-ed below was written three years before Cuba's regime got caught red-handed smuggling 240 tons of weapons to North Korea -- the most egregious violation of U.N. sanctions to date -- which the Obama Administration chose to basically ignore.)
By Mauricio Claver-Carone in The Washington Times:
No comments:
Post a Comment