OPINION:
When it was originally announced that Lee Jae-myung, the newly elected president of the Republic of Korea, would meet with President Trump in Washington, I expected a totally positive event.
The United States has been committed to the defense of South Korea for 75 years. My father fought there in 1953 and went back in the 1960s in the U.S. Army to help protect South Korea. With our protection, it has evolved into one of the leading manufacturing countries in the world.
South Korean shipbuilding is the second largest in the world, surpassed only by communist China. In fact, South Korea builds about 35% of all the merchant ships worldwide annually.
I had written and talked about the potential of the very efficient and technologically advanced South Korean shipbuilding industry helping solve the current crisis of an obsolete, bureaucratic and inefficient American shipbuilding system. It has led the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard to a crisis of inadequate and increasingly antiquated ships.
On that front, this visit was a major success, as Mr. Lee brought a plan for South Korea to invest billions of dollars in modernizing the American shipbuilding system and helping modernize the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard.
What I did not foresee was how radical the new government would be in going after its political opponents and advocates of religious liberty. Mr. Lee clearly represented the left wing of South Korean politics, and his conservative opponents had warned again and again that he was too close to China and too comfortable with communist ideas.
I was skeptical of these charges, and in meetings in Seoul with Mr. Lee’s allies, I was repeatedly assured that they were exaggerations.
The recent all-out assault on political and religious liberty has been breathtaking. The new government has demanded the names of church members and the membership rolls of the Conservative Party. It apparently intends to match the two lists and then charge the churches with being political.
Major conservative and religious leaders have had their houses and offices raided on a gigantic scale. On one occasion, more than 1,000 police and prosecutors descended at 7 a.m. on the home and offices of a major religious leader.
Americans who watched the outrageous search at Mar-a-Largo, including a search of the first lady’s personal effects, will understand how even more insulting, intrusive and threatening having 1,000 government officials show up at your home and offices at seven in the morning would be.
The Lee administration has been so arrogant that it launched a raid on the South Korean part of a joint U.S.-Korean air base without telling the Americans who were there to help defend South Korea.
The arrogance of raiding a joint base without telling or coordinating with the United States led Secretary of State and acting National Security Adviser Marco Rubio to cancel his scheduled meeting with South Korea’s national security adviser, Wi Sung-lac, and cancel a meeting between the U.S. and South Korean trade negotiators.
After being briefed about how bad things were, Mr. Trump went on Truth Social to say, “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA? Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there. I am seeing the new President today at the White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!”
Later, Mr. Trump was asked what his statement referred to, and he replied, “Well, I heard that there were raids on churches over the last few days, very vicious raids on churches by the new government in South Korea, that they even went into our military base and got information. They probably shouldn’t have done that, but I heard bad things. I don’t know if it’s true or not. I’ll be finding out. As you know, your new president’s coming in just a couple of hours, coming forward to meet him, but we won’t stand for that. We just won’t stand for that.”
Because Mr. Trump raised this issue directly with Mr. Lee during their meetings, there is no question but that the new South Korean president knows his government is on a path that will arouse great opposition from the United States.
The next few weeks will be important in seeing whether Mr. Lee has gotten the message and is pulling back from the totalitarian police state tactics (tactics which Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping could identify with) and return to the rule of law. The United States has worked for three generations (nearly eight decades) to foster that rule of law.
This is an important moment in the future of America’s relationship with the South Korean government.
• For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also, subscribe to the “Newt’s World” podcast.
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