South Korea, the Six Party Talks, and Relations with the Major Powers
225Not long after the inter-Korean meeting in 2000, however, relations
between the US and North Korea began to sour, and tension in the region
grew. Kim’s liberal position towards the North may have eased tensions
on the peninsula, but it simultaneously increased tension with the US as
the Bush Administration replaced the Clinton Administration. Under
Clinton’s presidency, the White House had tacitly supported the Sunshine
Policy, even as some hard-liners in Congress opposed the approach as too
idealistic and unrealistic in dealing with a potential nuclear state. With the
beginning of the Bush Administration, the hard-line neo-realists in
Congress were represented within the White House as well. In the 2002
State of the Union address, President Bush declared the North part of an
“Axis of Evil.”^16 Evidence suggests that the North was both unlikely and
unwilling to take actual threatening action against the United States at this
point. From a constructivist standpoint, however, it is easy to understand
how President Bush could benefit from implying that North Korea was a
legitimate threat. In order to justify pursing the Bush Doctrine of pre-
emptive war, it was necessary for the Administration to convince the US
public that there were very real threats to the American way of life.
Moreover, from a realist standpoint, South Korean bases provided an
important vantage point in the Pacific for the US to use as a transport hub
on the way to Afghanistan.
From a neo-liberal point of view, the war in Afghanistan (and any
possible future engagement with Iraq, Iran, or North Korea) was viewed as
necessary to protect US interests and to promote US values abroad in
order to establish democracies–which the US could argue would prevent
future war. It was this position which President Bush and his advisors
openly espoused, along with neo-liberal think tanks like the Project for the
New American Century (PNAC). In this way, the Bush Doctrine validated
pre-emptive war by claiming that establishing democracies in these
countries could lead to a possible future kind of Kantian perpetual peace–
but in order to achieve peace there first had to be war. This flawed logic–
of war being a necessary pre-condition for peace–continued to shape US
foreign policy, towards North Korea and elsewhere, throughout the first
term of Bush’s presidency. After the mid-term elections in 2006, in which
the Democrats gained a majority in the US Congress, the White House
was unable to pursue its policies as freely as it had in the first term.
Furthermore, the election of Democrats signified the unpopularity of the
Bush Doctrine among US citizens. Thus, while the Bush Presidency
continued to be characterized by neo-liberal rhetoric, it became less
(^16) Choe, “South Korea to Send...,” 2010.