US envoy attack highlights Korean tensions

Media reports and images showing the US Ambassador to South Korea, Mark Lippert, with his own blood visible on his head, hands and his tie, after being slashed on the face and wrist by a knife-wielding Korean nationalist with a 10-inch blade on Thursday, are shocking in every way. Despite the fact that the highly unusual daylight attack on a foreign envoy is very rare in Seoul, it has revealed the long-term chronic strain that is inflicted by the ongoing tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula.

The attacker surnamed Kim, whose actions led to Lippert receiving 80 stitches to his face, is now under arrest and facing charges including "attempted murder, assaulting a foreign envoy, and obstruction." 

Kim's call for the reunification of the Korean Peninsula and condemning the "war exercises," a reference to the annual US-South Korean military exercises that began last week, has undoubtedly showed the capriciousness of the Korean nationalists, but more importantly, in the wider perspective, the dire consequences that the US-South Korean alliance could bring to the Peninsula.

The incident soon triggered a fierce debate between the two Koreas. South Korean President Park Geun-hye condemned it as being "not only a physical attack on the US ambassador, but an attack on the South Korea-US alliance." But Pyongyang, unsurprisingly, applauded the attack as a "deserved punishment on war maniac US" and referring to the blade as the "knife slashes of justice."

Unquestionably, the US-South Korea alliance has contributed to the fact that the two Koreas are still divided after the end of the Cold War. And the long-standing presence of the US military in South Korea plays a significant role in maintaining the tensions on the peninsula.

However, is it fair to say that the US-South Korea alliance and their joint military drills are the root cause of the confrontation between the two Koreas in recent years, or is the opposite true? It seems to be a "chicken and egg" question and the two sides keep accusing each other of increasing tensions.

For Seoul, the threat comes from the North, so it hopes to keep having the US around to maintain a balance of military power on the Peninsula, to respond to North Korean missiles and nuclear tests  and to keep itself safe. That is the whole point of the routinely conducted joint military exercises with Washington.

Indeed, some people from South Korea are against their alliance with the US and they take extreme actions occasionally to express their anger over what they see as the damage that the alliance has brought to the peninsula's prospects for reconciliation. 

Since most South Koreans believe that the annual exercises could help bring them peace, they have no choice but to accept them, even though they don't like them that much and even though they also look forward to unification. 

They hope for unification even though they know the drills routinely provoke angry responses from the North Korean government, as it considers the exercises to be "dress rehearsals for invasion."

In such circumstances, neither the joint military drills, nor the alliance between the US and South Korea will be affected by the vicious attack. 

The alliance will continue, the exercises will go on, South Korea will probably take steps to appease the US due to this attack, and the two countries will probably get closer, as long as the long-standing tensions on the peninsula still overshadow the two nations' security considerations and the peninsula's reunification.