One of America’s iconic media stars was last week brought down on sex charges while in the Korean Peninsula, the North and South Korean summit was a dramatic media show, and in Beijing, foreign and defence ministers of the increasingly influential Shanghai Cooperation Organisation met. In Washington, US President Donald Trump hosted French President Macron that also was more showy gestures but then became a display of policy divergence between the two countries.
Last Thursday, in a Pennsylvania state court, comedian and world renowned television personality Bill Cosby became America’s highest profile personality to be criminally convicted of sexual assault. Many readers will recognise Bill Cosby as one of America’s most awarded television actors and cherish memories of his many comedy shows. In the US Cosby is also admired as one of a few African-American show stars to reach that level of success.
Today, his case is being hailed up as the most successful criminal prosecution to date against a showbiz personality for crimes of sexual harassment and assault in which the women victims endured much hostile attitudes and mistrust to come forward with their plaints. Once the first few such plaints became public, other women victims also came forward with their stories. Ultimately over 50 women have accused Cosby of various types of sexual harassment and assault over forty years.
Convicted on three counts of ‘aggravated indecent assault’, Cosby faces up to 30 years in jail.
Cosby joins a list of a number of big US showbiz personalities who have, in the last two years, either faced criminal charges or civil plaints or have had to resign their careers or even been summarily discontinued from lucrative showbiz positions due to their culpability in sexual harassment or assault cases.
While the US President himself is embroiled in unsavoury incidents of sexual intrigue, he also has to deal with continued chaos in his administration with yet another candidate for a cabinet post, the US Department of Veterans’ Affairs, last week withdrew his candidacy. White House Medical Director Dr. Ronnie Jackson, who had been nominated by Trump to head the Veteran’s Department, backed down after facing numerous mismanagement and poor performance criticisms of his current work.
More than a year since assuming the Presidency, Trump has still to fill all cabinet positions and hundreds of second and third rung political positions are yet to be filled in many departments. The worst hit is apparently the State Department.
Distracted as he is by all the sordid aspects of his floundering presidency, Donald Trump must concentrate on preparing to accomplish the most high profile political meeiing of his presidency to date: the proposed summit meeting between himself an North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The meeting is scheduled for either late May or early June.
Last week the world watched as the Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in greeted each other across the wartime ceasefire line that divides the two Koreas since the bloody Korean War ended in stalemate in 1953. This is the third time that leaders of the two Koreas have held meetings.
The two leaders walked towards each other from their sides of the border, shook hands with each other before Kim crossed over to hold the summit talks in the highly fortified border crossing township on the South Korean side.
The one day summit ended with a formal banquet in which the two leaders toasted each other in the name of a future peace. The summit declaration statement was full of general statements of good intentions, the most geo-politically important of which was their mutual commitment for the complete de-nuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.
For North Korea, if nothing else, the summit’s pro-peace posturing will buy time in terms of world diplomacy surrounding the complex Korean peace and security issues. For South Korea, too, such high profile conciliatory gestures serve to distract from war tensions and the impact that has on overall Peninsula security and economic stability.
Opinion surveys among South Korea’s youth indicate that the younger generations, with no memory of that devastating war of the 1950s, is not interested in issues of national re-unification, a goal so cherished by the older generations. But the youth certainly want a reduction in regional tensions so that they could set about their own social goals without fear of war or economic instability.
South and North Korean social expectations, however, are not necessarily in empathy with the geo-political designs of Washington. The US elite seems to be yet dreaming of wielding the kind of influence it once did in north-east Asia soon after World War 2 when the US set up bases in the region to support capitalist Japan, Taiwan and South Korea against the ‘Communist threat’ from China and the Soviet Union (now Russia).
Hence Donald Trump will likely push for something more concrete pertaining to nuclear disarmament of the North Korea – Washington’s objective being an emasculated North Korean communist regime. If Seoul’s priority is a reduction of politico-military tension in the neighbourhood rather than outright military downscaling, the West, far from the theatre of conflict, is less concerned about regional stability than with a return to regional dominance. The West will have to learn.
Given the dramatically changed geo-politics of east Asia, nothing of the sort is likely. Hence Trump may either back out of his intended summit or will have to settle for much less than specifics.
Part of the radically changed power configurations in the Asia-Pacific region is the emergence of China as the region’s great power and the decline of Japan’s influence. Now that China has become the dominant economic dragon, those smaller ‘economic tigers’, namely South Korea, Hongkong, Taiwan and Malaysia, are now dwarfed. The US which has been the principal backer of the ‘tigers’ now finds itself no longer wielding the previous super power influence it did earlier.
The emergence of China is no better demonstrated than by the holding in Beijing last Tuesday of the foreign and defence ministers’ meetings of the expanded Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Originated by Beijing, the SCO initially grouped China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. At last week’s 15th meeting of SCO defence ministers, for the first time India and Pakistan’s defence ministers participated as full members.
India was represented by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and Pakistan by Defence Minister Khurram Dastgir-Khan.