The Korean Peninsula's Other High-Stakes Drama

To be clear, there’s never a good time for a crisis on the Korean peninsula. But this is an especially tricky time, as South Korea gears up for its presidential election on May 9. Unsurprisingly, North Korea policy is one of the major fault lines in South Korean politics: The country’s conservatives are more hawkish towards the North, its liberals more dovish. Liberals tend to subscribe to former president Kim Dae Jung’s “Sunshine Policy”—named for the Aesop’s fable about the wind and the sun trying to take off a traveler’s cloak—which advocates warm engagement with North Korea. The conservative counterpart is former president Lee Myung Bak’s “Massive Retaliation,” which promises a disproportionate, devastating response to any provocation from the North.

Since late 1990s, the liberals and conservatives have traded power in South Korea,” in her then-acclaimed delivered in 2014. Of course, the world now knows there was little substance behind Park’s bold pronouncement; Choi Soon Sil, a woman with only a high-school education and no official position in the government, was . This revelation, along with Park’s bizarre extortion of South Korea’s major corporations in order to keep Choi’s slush fund flush, led to the president’s impeachment and removal.