With South Korea’s presidential election in full swing, the campaign teams of the leading candidates have spent the past week squabbling over how experts in the U.S. perceive their North Korea and foreign policies.
The controversy started last Friday when progressive Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party asserted in a television debate that his conservative opponent’s DPRK policy “heightens” the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula. Lee cited an opinion piece by retired U.S. Army officer and professor at the University of Illinois Chicago Choi Seung-whan, prompting People Power Party candidate Yoon Suk-yeol to dispute the writer’s credentials.
“That author is someone who is almost not recognized in the international politics academia at all and is famous for sharing nonsense takes,” Yoon said. “It is preposterous that you are citing a piece by someone like him at an occasion such as this presidential election debate.”
In an interview with South Korea’s NoCut News earlier this week, Choi fired back at Yoon for opting for defamatory remarks rather than focusing on ROK security.
“Someone who will be a president should not do that,” Choi wrote, calling for Yoon to check whether his policy aides have higher scores on metrics that measure academic impact and citations.
Soon after, Yoon’s foreign policy aide, former foreign minister Kim Sung-han, wrote on Facebook that one of Choi’s contributor pieces was “undergrad level.” Kim also accused Choi of believing in “Western intellectual supremacy,” contending that tools for measuring citations like GoogleScholar do not always record articles written in the Korean language.
The spat continued on Thursday when the Democratic Party issued an official statement noting “increasing” concern among U.S. experts about Yoon’s “irresponsible foreign policy,” again citing Choi’s opinion piece as well as analysis published by the Quincy Institute, a U.S. think tank. A second statement also cited both articles to claim that the U.S. is concerned about Yoon’s “security populism” and “outdated ideas such as ‘preemptive strike.’”
The People Power Party’s response on Friday questioned why the Quincy Institute and writers who share similar views are criticizing Yoon ahead of the election, alleging that they share the Moon administration’s position on signing a formal declaration to end the Korean War before the DPRK fully denuclearizes. The statement specifically named Jessica Lee of Quincy, Christine Ahn of Women Cross DMZ and Daniel Larison of Antiwar.com.
“Lee Jae-myung needs to be more thorough in researching what the authors’ past arguments are and what the relevant organizations’ [political] inclinations are before unconditionally citing things just because they are foreign outlets,” the statement read.
YOON LEADING?
The tug-of-war over U.S. experts’ views comes as a new poll suggested this week that Yoon has extended his lead in the presidential race to 9 percentage points, pulling ahead of the margin of error.
According to the National Barometer Survey (NBS) conducted from Feb. 14 to 16 on 1,012 respondents, 40% supported Yoon while 31% supported Lee. Meanwhile, 8% supported Ahn Cheol-soo of the People’s Party, and 2% supported Justice Party’s Sim Sang-jeong.
41% of Lee’s supporters said they do so due to his individual capabilities, while 71% of Yoon’s supporters said they will vote for him “because we need a change of government” from ruling to opposition party. The top reason for supporting Ahn at 21% was that “I do not want any other candidates to win.”
Of the total respondents, 18% said they have not decided who to vote for, according to the survey.
Edited by Bryan Betts
With South Korea’s presidential election in full swing, the campaign teams of the leading candidates have spent the past week squabbling over how experts in the U.S. perceive their North Korea and foreign policies.
The controversy started last Friday when progressive Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party asserted in a television debate that his conservative opponent’s DPRK policy “heightens” the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula. Lee cited an opinion piece by retired U.S. Army officer and professor at the University of Illinois Chicago Choi Seung-whan, prompting People Power Party candidate Yoon Suk-yeol to dispute the writer’s credentials.
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