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During my eight-day trip to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, I saw a country that is clearly thriving but still reliant on the U.S. for safety and freedom. South Korea’s success is especially dramatic when compared to North Korea.
Seoul is an enormous city. It’s a very modern city. It’s a very prosperous city. They’ve really worked very hard to build up their economy.
And in fact, if you look at a map of the world at night, you can see literally where the 38th parallel is because north of it, there are almost no lights. South of it, the whole country’s lit up.
Now, what makes it doubly interesting is, not only do they have more lights in the south, they have more trees because where the north is so desperately poor, where people keep cutting down trees for firewood, in the south, they now have had a huge reforestation project and have done an amazing job of bringing back the country and, and, turning even within a mile of Seoul, there are forests, there are walking paths, there are lakes, you see people out enjoying life.
Beyond the borders, the South Koreans are very aware of China, which is far and away their biggest customer. They’re also very aware of Japan, which occupied Korea from 1905 to 1945, in what was a very nasty occupation involving a good bit of brutality. They see themselves balancing China, Japan and the United States to maintain their freedom and their safety.
And they would be extraordinarily worried if we were to leave because they would be afraid that it would send the signal to North Korea, which is a dictatorship, which has been working very diligently to get nuclear weapons and missiles, and which would be an immediate threat I think to South Korea, if they thought they could get away with it because the north is failing in everything except military power. It’s not a place you’d want to live. It doesn’t have any freedom. It’s not prosperous at all. It’s very, very poor.
My family ties to the Koreas go back to 1953 when my father fought in the Korean War in the U.S. Army, so it was rewarding for Callista and me to visit and reassess the state of affairs in that region.
