Moon Jae-in of the Minjoo Party of Korea and Ahn Cheol-soo of the People’s Party are caught in the trap of national security set up by conservative presidential candidates. These former ruling party members have wielded a form of McCarthyism, the so-called ‘color politics’ amid the crisis in the Korean Peninsula. And Moon and Ahn have fallen into this trap as they move to the right in an effort to win the heart of conservative voters.

Ahn was the first to show this movement to the right. In order to attract conservative voters, he quickly and openly made a ‘right turn.’
Ahn said in a debate hosted by the Korea Broadcasting Journalists Club on 20th April, “[North Korea] is specified as our greatest enemy in the Defense White Paper, and the South and the North are now in a situation of confrontation.” He thus stated that North Korea is “our greatest enemy.” In a debate organized by KBS TV a night before, Yoo Seong-min of the Bareun Party asked Moon, “Is North Korea our greatest enemy?” to which Moon replied, “That is not the kind of definition a president of a country should make.” Clearly, Ahn was trying to differentiate himself from Moon, aiming to build an image of being ‘conservative about security.’
Yet unlike Ahn’s argument, the Defense White Paper simply says, “The North Korean regime and its military are our enemy.” It separates the regime and the army of North Korea from its people who are the ‘subject of peaceful unification.’ In the TV debate the day before, when Ahn was asked if he was going to succeed to the ‘Sunshine Policy,’ he avoided a direct answer saying, “There are merits and demerits.” On the same day, Chairman Park Jie-won of the People’s Party criticized Moon, “Our greatest enemy is North Korea. If [Moon] becomes our president, he will go to North Korea first, before he goes to the United States.”
The People’s Party has been posing as the ‘heir of Kim Dae-jung’s spirits’ based on the political support from the Honam area. Although the party’s current conservative shift is to attract middle ground and conservative votes in the absence of any outstanding conservative front runner, it is faced with a criticism that it has discarded its own party identity.
On the same day, Moon said, “North Korea is clearly an enemy that can pose a military threat, but it is also a target of peaceful unification under our Constitution. Our relations are complex.” He did not agree with the argument of ‘North Korea, the Greatest Enemy.’
However, Moon was also seen as having made the ‘right turn’ and took a vague stance in current security affairs to check Ahn from attracting conservative votes. In the KBS TV Debate, Moon stated, “If North Korea should push ahead the sixth nuclear test, the placing of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) will be unavoidable.” With this statement, he moved one step toward the THAAD placement, moving away from the previous stance that the next government must determine whether to place the THAAD or not. Yet some criticize that it is not logical to associate the sixth nuclear test with the placing of the THAAD, as the latter caused controversy even before the fifth nuclear test by North Korea. In an interview with the Time, Moon said, “I will not act unilaterally to have dialogue with the North [Kim Jong-un] without prior consultation with the U.S.” He basically declared that he will take actions in inter-Korean relations only in the scope permitted by the U.S.
In addition, the former opposition party including the Liberty Korea Party and the Bareun Party have led the old-fashioned color politics to draw conservative voters, and their actions influenced the steps taken by both Moon and Ahn. While these candidates intended to fight for more votes and to avoid the trap of the said color politics, they eventually made a right turn in the issue of national security.
With the so-called ‘civil war on security between two opposition parties,’ they both may be putting their necks into the noose tied by the conservative frame of discourse on national security. As great uncertainty prevails in the security of the Korean Peninsula, this competition to show a right turn can become an element to constrain the next government’s scope of actions in the end.