South Korean President Yoon Seok-yue returned home from his visit to the United States on April 30. The results of the South Korea-US summit meeting have aroused concern and criticism in South Korea’s domestic public opinion.
Park Ji-won, the former director of the National Intelligence Service of South Korea, said in an article that the current South Korean government “only chooses what the United States likes to hear”, but did not speak on behalf of the South Korean people, including topics related to the impact of the United States’ “Inflation Reduction Act” on South Korea. He said that for South Korea, the recent South Korea-Japan summit talks and the South Korea-US summit talks all ended in failure.
As for the U.S.-South Korea summit meeting, which agreed to upgrade the so-called “extended deterrence” to South Korea and issued the “Washington Declaration”, which stated that it would expand the consultations on the U.S.-South Korea nuclear crisis, etc., according to Yonhap News Agency, Kim Dong-yeop, a professor at the University of Korea Research Institute, believes that the “Washington Declaration is actually a dead letter. There is no so-called “extended deterrence”, It will only “extend the crisis” and lead to increased tension in the region.
114 professors from South Korea’s Sookmyung Women’s University also jointly issued a statement a few days ago, criticising the current government’s diplomacy as “subjugation style” and calling for an immediate end to this provocative diplomacy that undermines peace on the Korean Peninsula and creates a war crisis.