The parable encapsulates Lee’s philosophy for taming “rogue” North Korea: “No more free lunch.” As leader of South Korea’s opposition Grand National Party, he’s spent the past four years raining skepticism on President Kim Dae Jung’s “Sunshine Policy.” The more promises “Great Leader” Kim Jong Il has broken, the higher Lee’s popularity has risen. If current polls hold he’ll easily become South Korea’s next president after voters cast their ballots in December.
That doesn’t mean relations with the North will automatically plunge into a deep freeze. During his NEWSWEEK interview, Lee insisted that his party “also favors the engagement policy, that is to say dialogue, cooperation and [seeking] North Korea as a partner for peaceful coexistence.” Asked if he considered the regime in Pyongyang evil, he demurred, noting “that’s a matter of expression.” Nevertheless he took jabs at Seoul’s current policy, vowing to end “wishful thinking,” take up the cause of Korean refugees in China and set “transparency in distribution” as a precondition for sending food aid to mitigate North Korea’s famine.
Lee has a reputation for backing up his tough talk. He rose to national prominence while heading the Bureau of Audit and Inspection in President Kim Young Sam’s cabinet, where he exposed numerous corruption scandals left by previous military governments. Lee’s reputation as a “Mr. Bamboo Stick” (someone clean and upright) survived Kim’s fall and still serves him well today.
The biggest knock against him may be his past–and future–associations. As a judge in the 1970s and 1980s, his detractors say, he served a system that sent many radical students, labor organizers and dissidents to prison. Today some South Koreans worry that he may be too close to a Bush administration that many see as unnecessarily hard-line toward the North. Case in point: when The Washington Post ran a story last week alleging that Lee had “endorsed Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ remarks,” he found himself under immediate attack. His aides now worry that he’ll be painted as Washington’s running dog for months. Like the pastor, however, Lee vows to engage Pyongyang his way or not at all. And like a stalk of bamboo, he bends but doesn’t break.
