THE SOUTH FRENCH KOREANS ARE NOT A "STALWART ALLY"

Dan Drezner's been doing a bang-up job running Sulli's site this week. Truth be told, Sulli should watch out--he's going to have a monster on his hands.

But this graf from this post has me scratching my head:

What is mildly shocking -- from someone who knows a thing or two about economic sanctions -- is that companies from stalwart U.S. allies -- Poland and South Korea -- were also complicit in the sanctions-busting.

South Korea, a "stalwart ally?" Balderdash. Poppycock. Ever heard of the Hyundai scandal, Dan? The South Korean conglomerate essentially paid billions to the North Korean government in 1999 thru 2001, buying rapprochement between it and the South Korean government. That massive bribery scam netted a Nobel for then South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and helped drive a wedge between the US and the ROK on North Korea's nuclear program that lasts to this day. The "Sunshine" policy that led SoK to triangulate relations between the US and NoK--putting us more often than not into the bad guy slot--was an outgrowth of the massive Hyundai scandal. Hyundai's CEO was eventually indicted, and he committed suicide in August rather than face prosecution. Several SoK government officials have also been indicted.

South Korea is not a stalwart ally, and they haven't been for nearly a decade. South Korea's largest corporation, Hyundai, which does billions of dollars of business in US markets, paid Kim Jong-Il to stage a phony summit and did its best to damage the US effort to end Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. The South Koreans should be dubbed the French Koreans, for all the irritants they throw into US and Japanese plans to tame Kim Jong-Il. On the other hand Poland is a stalwart ally, and it's sanctions busting is a shock. But SoK's busting sanctions is just par for the course.

MORE: For an example of a real stalwart ally, look no further than Japan, which has announced forgiveness of most of its Iraqi debt. Unlike South Korea, Japan supported the war in Iraq from the beginning. Unlike South Korea, Japan has signed on to the Proliferation Security Initiative--the naval blockade of North Korea that netted Libya and forced it to disarm. Both Japan and South Korea are sending troops to Iraq, but South Korea has decided not to send its counterinsurgency troops, which are some of the best in the world and would be very useful in Iraq, though it has no constitutional mandate to stay out of combat. Japan is sending humanitarian troops to a live combat zone, only its second such deployment since the end of World War II. Only a constitutional prohibition against sending combat troops overseas is keeping Japan from sending troops to fight right alongside ours--and Prime Minister Koizumi is studying changing the constitution to allow such deployments in the future.

MORE: Bribery is apparently a way of life in South Korea.