No tears for Romney

Now Mitt Romney can go back to doing what he does best, making hundreds of millions off other people’s sweat and tears, investing billions overseas and shipping away the jobs to go with his investments. And he can stop that nonsense about the “blind trust” in which he’d put his fortune, come out of the closet and resume his place among America’s richest.

The sad news about the whole extravagantly expensive U.S. election process was how close the voters came to falling for a fast talker who looked presidential but had to have been one of the most forked-tongue super salesman ever to run for America’s highest office.

Those who think he’d have gotten tough on China’s huge trade surplus, as he promised, only have to look at the record of his company in making a fortune off China to see the hypocrisy of his words. Now it will be interesting to see how quickly Romney returns to shipping money and jobs overseas – and doing whatever he can to oppose President Obama’s not too successful efforts at redressing the trade imbalance.

The biggest complaint about Romney, on a gut personal level, was how a man who made multi-millions only had to pay 15 percent of his income in taxes ― all the while donating 20 percent or so into the mysterious coffers of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Most people I know pay at least that much in taxes while battling to stay in the ranks of a diminishing middle class. Too bad, now that he’s out of the picture, probably we won’t ever get the thoroughgoing look at his recent tax returns that he avoided divulging in serious detail.

Nor should anyone be fooled into thinking that Romney, as a conservative, would have been any tougher than Obama in addressing foreign policy crises. A paradox of the American presidency is that liberals can be quite conservative when it comes to military confrontations around the world.

The conservatives, as in the case of both the Korean and Vietnam wars, were the most reluctant to keep fighting. That’s relevant in northeast Asia today since Obama has pursued quite a strong line vis-à-vis North Korea while Romney essentially said nothing other than to talk vaguely about China’s trade surplus.

It’s not likely, in fact, that U.S. policy on Asia would have changed a lot had Romney won. The options are limited. The U.S. cannot do much about Korea other than to keep hoping for real negotiations with North Korea while following through on promises of military support of South Korea.

We won’t really know the depth of America’s deepest commitment in these parts unless conflict flares and Washington has to make serious, quick decisions about how far to go to keep its promises to its allies, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Until then, the U.S. will reaffirm, ad infinitum, its commitments while trying mightily to avoid getting entangled in disputes between Korea and Japan over Dokdo and between Japan and both Taiwan and China over the Senkakus.

For South Korea, that means the U.S. for sure needs to align closely with whoever gets elected in the presidential election coming up here in six weeks. You won’t hear anyone in Washington who knows anything about Korean politics taking sides between the conservative Park Geun-hye and her two liberal foes – or one liberal foe if one of them bows out. The last thing Washington wants is the kind of falling-out that frayed U.S.-Korean relations during the overlapping presidencies of George W. Bush and Roh Moo-hyun.

Paradoxically, of course, Bush turned out to be a weakling on North Korea. After the big talk of the early years of his presidency, when he famously put the North into an “axis of evil” extending to Iran via Iraq, Bush wound up vacillating and compromising. With his blessing, the U.S. in 2007 fell for fantasy deals-made-to-be-broken with North Korea under which the North was to give up its nuclear program in return for multi-billions in aid.

North Korea over the next year can be expected to wage another peace offensive ― punctuated by threats, missile tests, perhaps another underground nuclear blast. Romney never said a word about any of that stuff while cynically exploiting the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans by Al Qaeda terrorists and just as cynically going to Israel and hinting how eager he was to destroy the nuclear threat posed by Iran.

For Romney, the Middle East and Northeast Asia mattered to the extent of their value as vote-getters. For him, there was no point in wasting breath on North Korea and Japan when American voters didn’t want to know about them. As president, he could have been expected to show the same disinterest. At least Obama, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, formed solid relationships in these parts on which the U.S. can try to build during his second term.

One thing no one needs is a U.S. president who talks tough and then shows his weakness by signing deals with people who are not going to keep their word. Romney forgot about Korea. Maybe his company wasn’t investing heavily here or he didn’t see Korean-American votes as counting all that much. Americans, and Koreans, can be thankful the U.S. has a president who appreciates the issues ― though what he can really do about them is another story. <The Korea TImes/Donald Kirk>