now. And the government isn’t going to hang out the white flags anytime soon.”
Fowler and the others around the table knew what that meant. More demonstrations, more riots, and probably, more blood in South Korea’s streets.
Fowler sighed. “Okay, all of that makes our analysis of the Barnes bill even more important. Legislative Affairs still says the bill won’t make it to the floor, but it’s already getting more press attention than they’d predicted.”
He looked down at his notes. “Plus, I just got word this afternoon that the House Foreign Affairs Committee is planning to mark it up tomorrow morning.”
The others sat up a little more sharply. A bill markup was the action stage for a congressional committee. Hearings weren’t really important — markups were where the real work got done.
“Jesus, they’re moving pretty damned fast, aren’t they?” Captain Carlson sounded worried.
“C’mon, Ted. You know what the Foreign Affairs Committee’s like. If those guys bent any more to the left, they’d fall right over on their asses.”
Scott’s contemptuous assessment won agreeing murmurs from around the table.
The general continued, “And everybody knows that Barnes and that son-of-a-bitch Dugan are like that.” He held up two crossed fingers to represent the Trade subcommittee chairman and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Fowler and the others nodded. Barnes and Dugan were both from the same wing of their political party, and they’d been allies for years. They could be expected to trade favors. And the same could be expected from their counterparts in the Senate. Fortunately, though, the bill still had to run the gauntlet of the Armed Services committees on both sides of the Hill — and those committees, though less conservative than in past years, still leaned more to the right than the left.
Which was nice to know, but it didn’t move them any closer to putting out a single, consistent administration policy paper on the legislation.
Fowler tapped his typed agenda. “Okay, next item. The trade sanctions provisions our friend Mr. Barnes has in his bill. We’ve already agreed on language spelling out just what they would do to importers and exporters in this country. The key question is, will the sanctions work?” He glanced around the table.
Voorhees took the pipe out of his mouth. “You mean, will they force the South Korean government to reform?” The Commerce Department representative sat back further in his chair. “No. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I just don’t see it. The Koreans are too proud. Giving in to Barnes would seem as bad to them as surrendering in a war.”
Dolan backed him up — something that was probably a first. “Hell, the South Koreans are even more stubborn than the fucking South Africans. They aren’t going to do diddly damned all just because the U.S. Congress threatens them.”
Fowler stared down at his notes as the discussion rose and fell around him. Everything he’d seen during his year of postgraduate work in Seoul and everything the other Working Group members said tended to confirm Dolan’s offhanded assessment. And that raised an ugly scenario. If the Barnes bill somehow made it through the congressional gauntlet, the South Koreans wouldn’t meekly buckle under before its threatened sanctions went into place. They’d try to tough it out — at a potentially catastrophic cost to their own economy.
Over the last several years the South Koreans had run up a forty-plus billion dollar foreign debt to modernize their country. They’d produced an economic miracle with the money — building superhighways, ultramodern factories, universities, all the infrastructure of a powerful industrial state. But it was an economic miracle that rested on a single, somewhat shaky base: exports. Back in 1984 fully a third of South Korea’s gross national product had come from its sales overseas. To pay its foreign debts, South Korea had to run large trade surpluses with the rest of the world in each and every year.
If the Barnes trade sanctions went into effect, South Korea would lose most, if not all, of its single largest market almost overnight. And Fowler knew that the Europeans and Japanese would probably be close behind the United States in imposing protectionist tariffs on Korean products. They faced the same kinds of domestic political pressure groups as the U.S. Congress, and they’d already shown an even greater willingness to surrender to them.
And unlike South Africa, Iran, or Libya, where trade sanctions had failed miserably, South Korea didn’t produce any irreplaceable products. Its companies had prospered by being able to manufacture cars, computers, and ships more cheaply than their competitors. But nobody’s economy would collapse without access to Samsung TVs or Hyundai cars.
Fowler frowned. The economic risks for South Korea were clear. What would happen to a country whose whole economy rested on exports if the rest of the world suddenly turned off the cash flow? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be anything good.
He flipped to the next page of his notes, taking a discreet look at his watch while he did it. These meetings went pretty smoothly without having to listen to interminable speeches from the State Department’s Tolliver. Maybe he could have Katie “forget” to notify Tolliver about the next session. It was a tempting thought and he knew he’d have to work hard to resist it.
He studied the other men around the table. “We’ve all seen Ted’s paper analyzing the provisions in the Barnes bill that would force us to withdraw American troops from South Korea. He argues that the timetables for withdrawal would be difficult, if not impossible, to meet. Anyone have any questions or comments?”
The others shook their heads, but Carlson wanted to supplement his earlier written report. “Don’t forget that it’d be godawful expensive, too. You’re talking about shipping three squadrons of fighters, six artillery battalions, SAM batteries, helicopters, and a whole damned infantry division all the way across the Pacific.”
Scott whistled. “Son of a bitch. That’d tie up a pretty big percentage of our strategic sea- and airlift assets.”
Carlson nodded. “I’ve got my staff running studies now. We should have some hard numbers in a couple of days or so.”
Fowler scribbled a reminder to himself to follow up on that. “Okay. So we’d have trouble implementing the withdrawal provisions on time and they’d cost an arm and a leg. Plus, providing the ships and planes to move our troops would eat into our ability to respond quickly to crises in other parts of the world.”
He looked up. “Is that a fair summary?”
Mike Dolan answered for everyone. “Heap big white man from NSC speakum truth.” The others around the conference table laughed.
Fowler grinned. Trust Dolan to keep him from getting too comfortable in the chairman’s chair. He put his pen down. “That’s settled then. But do my Indian brothers have anything to say about the military effects of pulling the Great White Father’s soldiers out of Korea?”
That sobered them up.
General Scott spoke up first. “It’d be a damned big mistake — no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”
“I don’t see it, Denny.” Voorhees shook his head. “We’ve got, what, maybe forty thousand men over there. Okay, that sounds like a lot. But the South Koreans have more than six hundred thousand troops. They don’t need us to keep the peace anymore.”
“Bullshit.” Scott obviously didn’t believe in mincing his words. “Sure the South Korean military is tough. Hell, they’re very tough. But those bastards on the other side of the DMZ are just as tough and they stay put for one damned good reason.” Scott held up a single finger. “Because the last time they tried invading, we kicked their butts all the way back across the thirty-eighth parallel.”
Blake agreed with the general, but knew that he’d skipped over a few things — like the fact that it had taken three years of hard fighting and more than fifty thousand American dead to win the uneasy truce along the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Voorhees looked unconvinced.
Dolan broke in. “Look, Alan, the trouble is that the military threat South Korea faces has been growing dramatically over the last few years. There’s a lot going on up there in Pyongyang that we need to be worried about.”
“Like what? And don’t give me some kind of ‘need to know’ runaround. I’ve got Code Word clearance just like the rest of you.”
Dolan eyed Voorhees calmly. “Okay. Like the fact that the Soviets have been supplying the North Koreans with first-line combat aircraft. Like the fact that Kim Il-Sung and his boys are getting advanced tanks, artillery, and
