Biden Hosts South Korea’s President, Earth Day, UN Addresses Haiti, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, President Biden hosts South Korean President Yoon for a state visit, a warming world celebrates Earth Day, and the UN Security Council discusses Haiti. It's April 20th, 2023, in time for The World Next Week.

I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, let's begin things at the White House, the White House soiree perhaps. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol will be meeting with President Biden for a state visit next Wednesday. They are going to mark seventy years of the U.S.-South Korean Alliance, and they have a growing set of pressing issues. So what are the issues at the top of the list, you think?

ROBBINS:
So like all state visits, we're going to see a lot of pomp and glitter. I've been to two state dinners in my time, including the last one for a South Korean president in 2011, and they're pretty fabulous. And in fact, some early reports suggested that Lady Gaga and the South Korean girl group BLACKPINK might perform, though it doesn't look like that's true. We'll have to wait and see. The first time I went, but this was before 9/11, they let us park our cars on the White House lawn, which I actually thought was hands down like the coolest thing you've ever seen in your life. And Yo-Yo Ma played. I mean, really, we're talking these things are really fabulous. And as my husband said, "All the portraits in the White House look like they were on postage stamps." But I digress. 

So anyway, Yoon, who is a conservative and has a much harder light on North Korea and China than his predecessor, and you recall, Moon Jae-in was the one who helped arrange President Trump's first meeting with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. And that was love fest days. Anyway, Yoon is seen as a far more reliable ally for the United States. And Biden is certainly seen in South Korea as a far more reliable ally than Trump was. Trump spent much of his administration trying to bully Seoul into raising its contributions. One point, he was demanding that the South Koreans, I think they increase it by 500 percent and was threatening to walk if they didn't. 

So I think relations were going to be a lot easier than they could possibly have ever been before. That said, there's a lot of potential tension starting with the fact of these recent intelligence leak that show that the U.S. was eavesdropping on top South Korea national security officials. They're also going to focus on the question of what South Korea's willing to do for Ukraine. And of course, the ever present issue about how to handle North Korea. 

Among these intelligence documents that leaked online by this 21 year old Air Force National Guardsman, three of them show that the South Koreans have been struggling to figure out whether and how to meet U.S. demands, that they send artillery shells to Ukraine without provoking Russia into sending arms or nuclear technology to North Korea. And Yoon has been downplaying this. The people around him have been saying that all of these documents were faked, but I suspect they're pretty furious about it and it's going to add some personal tension to the dynamics even as they sip their Prosecco and toast each other.

On Ukraine, as the leaks noted, South Korea produces artillery shells, they have a huge supply of them stockpiled in anticipation of a potential war with the North. And Ukraine has a desperate need, as we've talked about a lot, Bob, for ammunition. The U.S. whose own stocks are running low as it supplies Ukraine, has been trying to figure out how to persuade Seoul to ante up, and that's probably going to be a big focus of the conversation. Seoul may now be ready to do more. When they have these summits, it's all about "deliverables", and I suspect that Yoon is going to want to make Biden happy on this. And he even gave an interview to Reuters this week saying, "Well, if the situation, terrible humanitarian situation, terrible attacks on civilians, we might be willing to do more." Well, that's the very definition of what's going on in Ukraine right now.

And North Korea, of course, North Korea's the thing that you usually talk about, and Pyongyang has just been out of control. They've ratcheted up the rhetoric, they've been test testing ICBM solid fuel rockets. There's plenty there to talk about.

MCMAHON:
So Carla, you're right. And just on the defense front alone, whether it's their own protection or whether it's contributing to Ukraine's protection, I wonder if they will get into any kind of public discussion of South Korea's nuclear capabilities, such that whether it's ramped up coordination drills with the U.S., which seems to be the focal point, or even talking about deploying any tactical nukes on the peninsula. Are you seeing anything on that front?

ROBBINS:
Well, it's fascinating. I mean, Yoon declared in mid-January that if the threat from North Korea grows, that Seoul might ask the U.S. to return nuclear weapons to South Korea soil, or even build them itself. That's a pretty big threat. I would suspect that Biden is going to try to get him to chill out on that particular issue. But a sense of exactly how threatened they're feeling from the North, Biden can't be particularly reassuring to him on any count here because they don't have much of a policy for North Korea.

For Obama, the policy was so-called strategic patience. In other words, "Please, let's not talk about North Korea. We'd rather not deal with it." Biden has this alleged policy of, "We'll go anywhere, anytime, and talk to you." But there haven't been any conversations, and the North Koreans continue to shoot off missile tests and get more and more sophisticated in what they're capable of doing. So I don't think Biden can be very reassuring to Yoon, and I don't think the rest of the world can be very comforted at the notion that the South Koreans for the first time in a long time are talking about potentially developing their own nuclear weapons.

MCMAHON:
Carla, I should note our colleague Scott Snyder, he's a piece going up soon on CFR.org talking about all these aspects of the alliance, and also an increasing stress on the economic integration involved in the alliance. Obviously, South Korea has a lot invested in the U.S. Just look around on the roadways and in your major appliances, I think we'll hear a lot about that as well at this state visit.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, let's move on to Earth Day. This Saturday will be the fifty-third celebration and the threat to the Earth has only gotten more serious and more urgent during that time. I don't mean to sound cynical, but does Earth Day really matter? And is there something that will set this year's celebration apart or give us a little bit more hope?

MCMAHON:
Well, sorry, you do sound cynical, Carla. That's okay. You talked about the lights out episode a few episodes ago, and so we've talked about these gestures that don't always tend to add up too much. But this one is, I think it is certainly more globally significant than a lights out moment. And I will start-

ROBBINS:
So your one is more important than mine, is that what you're trying to say?

MCMAHON:
... I didn't want to go there, but I'm just circling that Earth Day is a global event of, as you say, of fifty-three years. So it's got a little bit more legs under it. And it certainly has been meaningful in the United States. It's, again, if you go back to the history, prior to Earth Day, there was no such thing as an Environmental Protection Agency or a Clean Air Act or a Clean Water Act. There wasn't an infrastructure that existed to systematically address some of these pressing environmental concerns in a sustainable way in the United States. And while those acts I mentioned and the EPA are not without controversy, certainly on occasion and certainly will be again, they help create the system. And I think you're hearing from a global fora now, all sorts of activists and actors in environmental issues crying out for a systemic change. And the big thing is obviously climate. Climate issues were not really on the table in 1970, when Senator Gaylord Nelson helped patch the idea of an Earth Day. But it certainly is now. 

I mean, we are in a period in which, continue to mark one extraordinary weather event after another. And increasingly, climate experts are linking them to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. I think the last eight years, for example, were the world's hottest eight years on record, and we're heading for an El Niño system that is apparently going to create even more records, even though we weren't in an El Niño for several years. So all sorts of alarming data coming out on climate and it all points to getting away from the carbon focused world, and yet, carbon emissions continue to grow. So I do think it's going to be, this year's Earth Day is going to be another important commemoration for what, globally, the world is planning to do to really change. And I think it's really the energy front that that is where all the action needs to happen.

Even while communities, my own included, are getting involved in all sorts of worthy causes like trash pickups and other things that are valuable for local environments and sort of civic pride and everything else, the big issues are the ones that have to be dealt with. I will add a positive note. I don't want to be all gloom and doom, Carla. So a couple of things that caught my attention this past week included the extraordinary flower bloom in California that was caused by extreme weather, actually. The atmospheric rivers that dump rain and snow in California have also yielded an incredible bloom of flowers that people are flocking to the countryside in California to take pictures of. So there are things like that that happen that are important to note and as something positive, although the drivers can be alarming. 

And also, there was a report about sort of the resiliency of nature this week that all of these massive floating piles of trash, especially plastic trash in the Pacific, have also spawned life that has not been seen outside of coastal areas. So crabs and anemones, for example. And this was picked up by some major media and some major scientific media as a real thing. And that's just to show that not that floating piles of trash can be great things, but that nature can be resilient also, as even as humans talk about building in a resiliency and adaptation to deal with the inevitable climate changes that we're already seeing.

ROBBINS:
So is there somebody who runs Earth Day? I mean, is there some NGO or international organization that is in charge of this activity?

MCMAHON:
It's a good question. To the extent it's run at all, it's certainly there's a driver of Earth Day activities and sort of organizing its earthday.org. You can go to their website, there's all sorts of very productive, busy activities. This year, there's a series of pledges and donations that they recommend. I'll just run through a few of them. You can get involved in petitions that say, "I will help end plastic pollution," or, "I will support sustainable fashion." Fashion industry has been pointed to repeatedly as wasteful and harmful in the environment. Or another one, "I will grow trees." You'll donate to a project called Canopy Project for tree planting, as well as, "I will attend a cleanup action." And that's simply to do just that, as I mentioned. Plenty of communities around the world get involved in cleanup actions.

So you get this combination of things that are galvanizing for political action, that are trying to get local action. Some of it, as I said, is I think builds civic pride, there's a little bit of an artsy craftsy aspect, and knit quilting, and so forth. But I think the big enchilada here is sort of getting action going on the climate front. As I understand it, is the energy sphere. 

As we're speaking, Carla, President Biden is meeting with other international leaders to talk about renewed pledges in climate action. I think he's going to put up something like a billion new dollars in that respect. And the Biden administration, it must be said, in two major pieces of legislation passed in the last couple years, will be sending hundreds of billions of dollars toward the renewable energy sphere. It's going to be very important that money not be wasted, for one thing, and unfortunately, we hear about that kind of thing happening all the time. But also directed in a way in which there is some sort of cohesive sense of building an infrastructure or building a transitional infrastructure so that people who want to move to electric vehicles can do it in an easier way while the government starts to nudge in that direction as well.

ROBBINS:
So electric vehicles, enchiladas, and quilting, altogether in Earth Day.

MCMAHON:
I threw out a lot of images there and you seized on them, Carla, so thank you. But yes, those are some things, if you take away nothing else on this discussion of Earth Day, it is those. But also, back to its origins, Earth Day did have an impact. Certainly in the U.S., it is this annual point of reflection and consternation, frankly. And this year, I think we'll kind of hear some more human cry about what to do on climate.

Carla, I'm going to take us to another intractable problem and that is the problem of Haiti. Next week, the UN Security Council will hear a briefing and consultation on the state of the UN Integrated Office in Haiti. This is called BINUH, for UN acronym fans. For years, Haiti has been drawing international attention. It suffers from a political impasse at the moment, a cholera epidemic, and years of economic recession. There has been a sharp rise in gang violence, such that some have estimated gangs control huge sectors of capital and the country. So can this UN Security Council get together enough to provide some sort of path for Haiti?

ROBBINS:
Bob, Haiti is a tragedy that just never seems to end. And right now, it's just a few steps away from complete anarchy. As you said, nearly all of the capital is under the control of gangs. The UN estimated 60 percent, pretty much everybody else thinks it's about 90 percent.

MCMAHON:
Wow.

ROBBINS:
And just the first three months of the year, more than 500 people were killed and nearly 300 kidnapped in gang-related incidents. Almost half of the country's population, some 5 million people are suffering from acute food insecurity. There's a resurgence of cholera with more than 20,000 cases reported by the UN. The country has no elected officials left. All thirty seats in the Senate and all 199 seats in the house are vacant. The prime minister's mandate ran out more than a year ago and it hasn't had a president since Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2023.

And as a further sign of their desperation, since last fall, the Haitian government has been calling for an international force to come in to help the Haitian national police combat these gangs. The UN Secretary General endorsed that call and submitted a report to the Security Council that called for one or several member states acting bilaterally at the invitation of, and cooperation with the government Haiti, to deploy a rapid action force to support the HNP.

The Biden administration, which is already dealing with a large exodus of Haitians and fears and even larger one, was pushing for Canada in particular to send troops under a UN mandate. But that idea was rejected by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and you can't really blame him because there's just been nothing but failure after failure after failure when people have sent in troops to try to fix the place. So that idea seems to have stalled. And next week, when the Security Council gets its regular briefing on the situation, and they now have a new special representative heading the BINUH, one can expect that there's going to be more bad news and probably not a lot of good ideas about how to try to fix this problem.

There'll be a UN humanitarian appeal that's expected to be twice the number from last year, some 700 million. And there may be a discussion about, once again, trying to gin up a peacekeeping force, but it doesn't seem like there's any country that wants to bell this cat.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it's a really important point about that country taking the lead because at the end of the day, those are the kind of steps that drive action. And it's fallen to the U.S. in the past, in various moments, in various junctures, to try to help Haiti because Haiti is this recurring problem, and it has its roots all the way back in the colonialism period. And Haiti, who's obviously had an initial period of independence and it was one of the unusual success stories of sort of a local driven revolution. But then it also fell prey to colonialism-

ROBBINS:
And the only successful slave rebellion.

MCMAHON:
... And the only successful slave rebellion. Exactly. We have a backgrounder around our side about Haiti that talks about how things went wrong and how it fell victim, though, to bigger powers over the succeeding years. And we're in a situation now where it's this combination of a inability to self-govern. A particular cycle of problems involving natural disasters, two devastating earthquakes in the last ten to twelve years, for example, and just an inability to kind of climb out of it.

On top of it, the UN itself was a cause of a problem that happened after the earthquake of 2010, the cholera problem that broke out, and that caused all sorts of recriminations and problems and distrust. But the UN is back again as the only game in town, in a way, in terms of what can the international community do to bring some semblance of aid of potentially shelter, and eventually security. And that last one is the really tough one I think, Carla. Do you see any sign that the U.S., because of, among other things, the flow of Haitian migrants into the U.S., that maybe the U.S. will take a special role in this?

ROBBINS:
Well, I don't see the United States sending troops. There's been nothing but failures on U.S. interventions going back for more than 100 years. I understand why the Biden administration tried to get the Canadians to do it. There were conversations with the Brazilians as well that led the last peacekeeping effort. I think there's been more than six years since the last foreign troops left. The Haitian police, such as they are, are going to need some sort of backing if they're going to get these gangs under control. And then there's this other issue here, which is this government, which is unelected. They've got some sort of transitional plan at work there. Supposedly, they're going to move toward elections, which is intended to bring more legitimacy, or any legitimacy to the government. But the ten parties, I think that got the most votes, are giving no support to it.

At a minimum, one would hope that the United States, which does have some credibility with some people in Haiti, would try to bring in or try to persuade this prime minister that he's got to talk to other political forces inside of Haiti, to trying to find some sort of Haitian solution here. The U.S. seems to be backing this prime minister without question, and that's probably a bad idea. There's this Montana group there that wants to have broader conversations about some sort of political solution.

So there's two things that really has to happen. One is, somebody's got to figure out how to back up the Haitian police to get the gangs out of control, and they've got to throw a broader net here to move forward for some sort of elections. I think the U.S. is probably going to have to give backing at least to find somebody to do both of those things. And right now, I just don't see either of them moving forward particularly effectively.

MCMAHON:
Ongoing sense of band-aids, but no sort of longer term solution in the cards at this point.

ROBBINS:
Well, the United States certainly has a strong interest. First of all, it's just morally unacceptable. The level of suffering in Haiti is an extraordinary thing, and it is so close to the United States. Second of all, we can just be really selfish about it. I mean, the Biden administration doesn't want that many people showing up on its shores. And Haitians are among the list of largest number of migrants coming to the United States. This administration came up with this idea of this parole. Was it Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, total 30,000 a month which they'll take in. But it's very hard. People have to have a passport to be able to apply for it. People, they overwhelm the passport office in Haiti such as it is, keeping in mind the collapse of the government that's there.

So there was supposedly a path there to try to contain things, but if you don't have a government on the ground, people don't have a path, which means they're going to take the illegal route. So the U.S. has a very strong incentive system to try to get some government in place there and to try to get some control on the ground beyond the moral incentive. And they've got to, I think, help broker some sort of political deal on the ground and try to figure out also how to back up the Haitian National Police. So far, I don't see a lot of progress on either of those.

And let me add one other things to this. Among the intelligence leaks, which there's been, this is the gift that keeps on giving. There were reports that the Russian Wagner Group, their mercenaries were talking about looking for business in Haiti and offering their good services. So if the United States didn't have additional reasons to get involved in Haiti, that was yet one more reason for them to back them off there.

MCMAHON:
Nothing like a big power involvement to get the attention, and something like that, yeah.

ROBBINS:
Well, Bob, I think it's time to pivot and discuss our audience figure of the week. Another very depressing story, which listeners can vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at cfr_org's Instagram. This week, Bob, our audience selected, "185 killed an 1,800 wounded in Sudan." I think those numbers have probably gone up since that vote took place. What's going on today there?

MCMAHON:
Yes, Carla, last I saw that the number of estimated killed was over 300 and wounded over 2,000. And conditions, humanitarian conditions are getting rapidly worse because you have two people who, until a week ago, were the top two officials in the country. The General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, head of the army, and his Deputy, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, who is the head of the paramilitary group, known as the Rapid Support Forces, which we'll be calling RSF. They are at loggerheads and in confrontation. The military controls the skies. You see a lot of footage out of Sudan of military jets flying over and bombs being dropped. The RSF controls lots of ground areas. They have forces sort of distributed around the country and in the capital Khartoum, and all of it is ripe for a stalemate that could be bloody and disproportionately affects civilians. And that's just what that part of Africa does not need. But unfortunately, what's brewing right now is a protracted bloody campaign. 

There has been a few attempts at a truce that unraveled almost as soon as they were announced. There are countries that are trying to get involved in brokering. Turkey's the latest from what I saw. There are also countries that have already picked sides. Cairo is supporting the armed forces of Sudan, although the Egyptian president El-Sisi says he's in regular contact with both sides. Meanwhile, Libyan militia has supported the RSF, and so they are getting some help from that side. 

What's at stake, according to many experts, are the spoils of running a country as vast as Sudan. And what precipitated this was a looming deadline to turn over to civilian control the country. And by doing that, there was a lot at stake for both of these leaders that I mentioned, and a lot of concern about the way in which they were going to be able to either apportion their share of certain patronage, or whether or not anybody was willing to give up anything.

So we are at a difficult spot. I think at this point, a lot of attention is being paid towards trying to broker some sort of truce. There has been increasing talk in the United States of threatening, if not levying sanctions on the two leaders who have lots of places and lots of interests that can be sanctioned by the U.S. But harking back to your previous conversation, there's also some sense that the Wagner Group from Russia might be looking to capitalize on the situation as well and play a hand in this.

So this is a big strategically located country in Africa that has been in a very kind of tricky state for a couple of years now. You had the toppling of Omar al-Bashir in 2019. You had the military overthrowing a power-sharing government in 2021, and as I said, they were supposed to be moving towards a transition that is not going to happen at the moment. So it's another question of, again, harkening back to our Haiti discussion of what broker can step in and start to make things happen here. And it's not clear what country holds sway at this point to be able to do that.

ROBBINS:
So there was hope when al-Bashir was pushed out, that there might be some actual civilian rule. Are there any civilian players here who can raise some hope?

MCMAHON:
It's a good question, Carla, but at the moment, with the fighting going on, the civilian players, who don't have their own militia to call on, are not going to be holding much sway. I mean, you really have to get the truce involved and observed before there can be civilian voices who can step in. There have been some civil society actors who've been playing an important role and a courageous role over the last several years, such that you had some cautious optimism that Sudan could be turning a page and emerging gradually into some sort of a quasi democracy. That's now seen as very premature. And again, you have to get the two leaders back talking together. 

Some of this you can't help but compare it to South Sudan, a fairly new country that split off from Sudan, because their top two leaders have been at odds for many years, almost since independence, and fighting has broken out multiple times there. And it required some major attention and undivided attention by international players to try to bring about a truce there, including the Pope at one point. 

But Sudan itself, at this point, it's hard to see actors beside these two military leaders exerting enough control and enough sway to bring a fighting to an end. They really have to muster the political will to do it, and then to agree to some sort of a plan going forward. We are still looking at rising chaos, frankly, and a toll from this that is going to get larger. And then they all shrugged and went off into the sunset. No.

ROBBINS:
It's just awful. I think... Anyway. It's so grim.

MCMAHON:
Well, Carla, that's our look at the world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. Muslims mark the end of Ramadan with the celebration of Eid. Brazil's President Lula visits Portugal and Spain. And, European leaders and EU representatives discuss sustainable energy at the North Sea Summit.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review while you're at it. We really do appreciate the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on cfr.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. Molly McAnany is our Recording Engineer. And special thanks to Sinet Adous and Rebecca Rottenberg for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Commons.

This is Carla Robbins saying so long, and let's hope for more upbeat news next week.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.