Politics & Power Quote by Kim Dae Jung

Strategic anxiety hides in the conditional. Kim Dae Jung isn’t predicting a tidy chain reaction; he’s warning that “withdraw” is the kind of word that sounds like peace but can read as abandonment. The sentence is built to make U.S. presence feel less like foreign occupation and more like ballast: remove it, and regional history starts sloshing dangerously.

The phrase “power struggle between such as China and Japan” is deliberately understated, almost bureaucratic, for stakes that are anything but. Kim is invoking the long shadow of Japanese imperialism, the unresolved wounds of the 20th century, and the reality that Northeast Asia’s rivalries don’t stay politely bilateral. South Korea, in this framing, becomes the arena where bigger powers test each other, not the sovereign actor writing its own script. That’s the subtext: a smaller democracy can be crushed not only by enemies, but by the friction of giants.

Context matters. Kim spoke as a Cold War and post-Cold War figure who survived dictatorship, fought for democratic legitimacy, and later pursued the Sunshine Policy toward North Korea. He understood that détente with Pyongyang still depended on hard security guarantees. The intent here is to lock the U.S. into a stabilizing role by reframing the alliance as regional public goods: deterrence, predictability, and a check on resurgent great-power competition. It’s also a message to domestic audiences wary of dependence: the alternative isn’t pristine autonomy, it’s exposure to other empires’ appetites.