Asia Unbound

This post was co-authored with Toby Dalton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Miles Pomper, senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. South Korean and U.S. negotiators are on the verge of concluding a new bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement to replace the current outdated one, which has been in place since 1974. This new agreement undoubtedly will be criticized by some in South Korea because it does not give Seoul unconditional approval to enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel. But such narrowly-focused criticism is misplaced, for it overlooks the importance of the agreement to Korea’s energy security and the future of its nuclear program. Judging the new nuclear cooperation agreement solely on single issues—such as the desire of some in Korea to puruse so-called pyroprocessing technology—obscures the very broad benefits it delivers to both Korea and the United States. It will satisfy President Park Geun-hye’s goals to enhance cooperation in assuring Korea’s fuel supply, managing nuclear waste, and promoting exports of South Korean nuclear power plants. It also will enable collaboration in the areas of safety, scientific research, and global nuclear nonproliferation policy. In some respects, the bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement functions as a load-bearing beam, supporting the entire infrastructure of U.S.-ROK nuclear partnership. U.S.-ROK cooperation on nuclear safety is currently the most valuable dimension of nuclear partnership between the two countries that is enabled by the nuclear cooperation agreement. Though such collaboration is probably underappreciated, the recent debate about re-licensing the Wolsong nuclear power station demonstrates that the safe operation of nuclear reactors is arguably the most important issue for the Korean public as they evaluate dependence on nuclear power. Approval of future construction of nuclear facilities in Korea increasingly will turn on whether local residents believe the facilities can be operated safely. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the Korean Institute of Nuclear Safety, and the Korean Nuclear Safety and Security Commission maintain very strong ties, sharing advice on regulation and maintenance of protocols that are critical to the safe operation of nuclear reactors. In the event of a nuclear accident in Korea, the NRC would likely provide critical advice on crisis management and management of consequences of an accident, in the same way that the NRC’s advice was critical to Japan’s nuclear operators and regulators after the 2011 Fukushima accident. The NRC also provides consultative advice to its Korean counterpart organizations so as to prevent nuclear accidents in Korea. In light of the Sewol tragedy and the earlier scandal involving falsely-certified nuclear reactor parts, this is a relationship that arguably should be strengthened. The regulatory capacity and oversight functions of Korea’s nuclear infrastructure need to be buttressed in order to assure the safe operation of Korean nuclear plants. In addition to facilitating critical cooperation on nuclear safety, the nuclear cooperation agreement provides a framework that enables scientific cooperation, for instance, on methods for storing spent fuel, joint development of next generation nuclear reactor technologies, and production of isotopes for nuclear medicine. Most immediately, Korea must find safe and effective ways of storing spent fuel beyond the on-site facilities that are forecast to reach full capacity by 2024. The United States too faces a growing spent fuel management challenge, and both countries have incentive to work together to find solutions to interim and long-term storage problems. In the future, the U.S.-ROK nuclear partnership will increasingly have a global dimension. For both commercial and political reasons, Korean reactor exports to the United Arab Emirates and other future customers are more attractive when U.S. firms are involved. The nuclear cooperation agreement ensures that companies like Westinghouse can continue to partner with Korean nuclear industry in such projects. Moreover, Korea also benefits from having its nuclear designs certified by the NRC, something which the NRC is now considering with Korea’s innovative APR-1400. In essence, NRC design certification provides a “good housekeeping” seal of approval that reassures potential foreign customers about the safety of the reactors. Korea’s nuclear safety, technology development, and international leadership in the nuclear sector have been enabled by strong and enduring cooperation with the United States over the last 40 years. Critics of the new nuclear cooperation agreement may charge that it compromises Korea’s energy security and independence over its nuclear power program, but such a narrative misses the important point that Korea’s program is inextricably linked to America’s. The new nuclear cooperation agreement will carry the mutual benefits of this partnership well into the future. A version of this post also appeared at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which can be found here, and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, which can be found here.

Ashlyn Anderson, Lauren Dickey, Darcie Draudt, William Piekos, and Ariella Rotenberg look at the top stories in Asia today. 1. Lee Kuan Yew, founding father of Singapore, dies. Lee Kuan Yew, who transformed Singapore into one of Asia’s wealthiest and least corrupt countries during his time as founding father and first prime minister, died on Monday. Lee was prime minister beginning in 1959, after Singapore gained full self-government from the British, until 1990. While his leadership was often criticized for suppressing freedom, his advocacy of “Asian values” and development models succeeded in making Singapore an international hub of business, culture, and finance. The funeral for Lee, to be held on Sunday, will be attended by many current and former world leaders, including India’s Narendra Modi, Australia’s Tony Abbott, Indonesia’s Joko Widodo, and a U.S. delegation that includes Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Thomas Donilon, and Kirk Wagar, the current U.S. ambassador to Singapore. 2. Indonesian president completes first bilateral foreign visits. This week, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo traveled to Japan and China, marking his first bilateral foreign visits since taking office last October. He started his tour with a four-day official visit to Japan, a fellow democracy and maritime neighbor, where Jokowi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed to boost security and economic ties and launched an initiative to increase Japanese investment in Indonesia. Jokowi was also wooed by Japan’s bullet train system and is considering introducing a Japanese system in Indonesia. On Thursday, Jokowi traveled to China, where he signed a number of memorandums of understanding. Courting controversy after some media outlets reported that he said China had no legal claim to the South China Sea, Jokowi clarified that Indonesia would remain neutral in the dispute. 3. South Korea announces intention to join China’s proposed development bank. South Korea’s Ministry of Finance released a statement on Thursday it would seek to be a founding member of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), through which Beijing hopes to fund infrastructure development throughout the region. While the United States has voiced concerns about the AIIB’s governance, South Korea’s statement makes reference to the importance of ensuring high levels of transparency and governing structure, tied into existing multilateral development banks. Seoul joins the UK, France, Germany, and Italy as U.S. allies that have announced their intention to be founding members of the AIIB. The move represents Seoul’s latest attempt to navigate increasing rivalry between China, its largest trading partner, and the United States, its security guarantor. Currently the U.S. ally is actively debating the U.S. military’s introduction of Theater High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense systems, which Washington promotes as a deterrent to the North Korean threat but Beijing claims is a thinly veiled U.S. attempt to constrict China. 4. Chinese police raid NGO offices. This week, Chinese police forces seized financial documents and computers from a high-profile nongovernmental organization (NGO). Members of the anti-discrimination group, Beijing Yirenping Center, said that twenty men in police uniforms burst into their offices before dawn on Tuesday morning. On Friday, Lu Jun, head of Yirenping, announced an ongoing investigation into the seizures, which he claims were illegal. Lu told reporters that the raid was likely in response to his organization’s campaign to pressure the Chinese government into releasing five detained women’s rights activists. Police administrators have not commented on or confirmed the raid. Since President Xi Jinping came to power, dozens of human rights activists have been apprehended as part of a broad crackdown on social activism and political dissent. The detention of the five activists on International Women’s Day captured the world’s attention, prompting calls from U.S. ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, demanding their release. 5. Okinawa’s governor orders halt to base construction. Early this week, Takeshi Onaga, the governor of Okinawa, ordered the suspension of work on a new American military airfield at Camp Schwab. The relocation of U.S. forces to a base near the village of Henoko has been delayed for years by local opposition, who fear the environmental impact of construction and the long-term implications of a new base for Okinawa’s future. Onaga, who was elected governor last December in part because of his promise to halt construction of the base, instructed Japan’s defense ministry to stop work after local officials found builders had damaged coral reefs. Tokyo has said it will ignore the order and continue with the project; Onaga has threatened to revoke a maritime drilling permit should survey work and construction continue. About half of U.S. military personnel—which total nearly fifty thousand—are stationed on Okinawa. Bonus: Burger King perfume soon to be on sale in Japan. For one day only, on April 1, Burger King will release a Whopper-scented perfume to the Japanese public. The fragrance, incidentally named “Flame-Grilled,” will not be the first Burger King scent to hit the market. Back in 2008, the fast food joint released “Flame by BK,” a body spray for men described as “the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat.” This year’s scent will be available for the budget-friendly price of 5,000 yen, or roughly four U.S. dollars.

In the wake of the death of Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, many obituaries lauding Lee’s role in transforming the city-state also have argued that Singapore faces high hurdles to continuing Lee’s revolution. As Forbes’ Joel Kotkin writes, Lee’s achievements during his three decades as prime minister were extraordinary, but in Singapore today the “durability of his legacy is in question.” Like many other commentators, Kotkin notes that Lee helped make Singapore one of the most attractive places in the world for foreign investment, but that investment started pouring in during the late 1960s, a time when China was closed to foreign investment and many other Asian nations also were unwelcoming to investors. “Once Asia had few places where advanced technology and services could be developed; now it has many. China alone has 13 cities larger than Singapore, many of them with breathtakingly modern infrastructure and far less expensive workforces,” Kotkin writes. He also notes that Lee Kuan Yew’s embrace of essentially technocratic government has left Singapore, in his view, a kind of soulless place in which earning an income is people’s highest goal, creating some kind of void. Indeed, Kotkin mentions a global Gallup survey which found that Singaporeans are pessimistic about whether their future will be better than Singapore’s past. Other commentators, such as the Washington Post’s editorial board, have noted that decades of restrictions on social and political freedoms in Singapore’s past will have to be abandoned as countries around Singapore democratize; some Singaporeans worry that Singapore’s restrictions have made the country too cautious and hindered innovation. But these worries are overblown. For one, Singapore’s political environment has opened significantly in the past decade; the country’s politics are no longer comparable to the situation in the Lee Kuan Yew era. In the most recent national elections, the opposition won a group-member constituency, and garnered about forty percent of the popular vote, its highest total in four decades. The growth of social media and the Internet in Singapore has fostered much more vibrant political debate, and reduced the influence of state-owned media outlets, which dominated discourse in the past. Even Lee Kuan Yew’s own son, current Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, has accepted that the country’s politics are changing and becoming more competitive. “It’s a different generation, a different society, and politics will be different,” Lee Hsien Loong told the Washington Post in an interview two years ago. “We have to work in a more open way.” Singaporeans’ pessimism also is not a high obstacle to growth and innovation. Many of the countries in the Gallup poll whose citizens have similar levels of pessimism---Germany, Finland---actually have done quite well economically, and continue to prosper. In these countries, sustained economic success has created high expectations---expectations that can be tough to fulfill. By contrast, some of the countries where people are most optimistic about the future---the Central African Republic, Sierra Leone---are places where the past was so desperate that citizens may assume the future simply couldn’t be worse. In other words, pessimism doesn’t really seem to have much to do with actual or future economic conditions. In addition, the rule of law that Lee helped create in Singapore---the country regularly is ranked by Transparency International as the least corrupt in Asia---continues to give it an advantage in attracting investment. It offers this advantage even in an era in which China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and even Myanmar have arisen as destinations for foreign investors. Thailand and Malaysia, regional competitors to Singapore, actually appear to be heading backward in terms of the rule of law, a major reason why investors are, for instance, fleeing Thailand. (According to a recent report by Reuters, Thailand’s manufacturing sector has shrunk for twenty-two consecutive months.) China, meanwhile, has in recent years become increasingly unpredictable for foreign investors. Nationalist sentiment, the increasing personalization of power around President Xi Jinping, and a host of proposed new restrictions on foreign investment have caused foreign investors to become more cautious about pouring into the country. Vietnam and India, for all their advantages, remain places where investment is hindered by regulation, opaque administration, and non-tariff barriers. What’s more, Singapore is becoming more innovative as the country moves up the value-added chain, the social and political environment loosens up, and some of Singapore’s best talent stays home. Bloomberg’s annual index of the world’s most innovative countries ranks Singapore in the top five in the world in terms of manufacturing innovation, and as the eighth most innovative country in the world overall. In the Bloomberg index, Singapore places ahead of other rich economies including the United Kingdom, France, and Canada, and only two spots behind the United States. The country certainly faces challenges---income inequality, population density on such a small island, immigration---but it is more prepared for the future than many of the naysayers admit.