스포츠 매니아

On the eve of the opening of their own long electoral season, Americans would do well to ask themselves this question. After all, foreigners in every corner of the world have made a habit of following American politics for years, unable to vote, of course, but also ever more aware of the powerful ways in which America's choices affect life for everyone else on the planet.

Examples of this readily spring to mind in an era where an American-led war in Iraq and the war on terror shape much of the international political scene and where American deficits in trade and finance drive global markets.

But in order to be a powerful agenda shaper, one doesn't need to be the world's lone superpower, albeit one whose relative strength many experts believe to be in decline. And although it helps, one needn't even be a fast-rising power, like China, or a seemingly resurgent one, like Russia, in order to exert a strong influence on the ebb and flow of international affairs.

We have grown so accustomed to speaking of an interconnected world that the image itself has become a truism. Still, the fact remains that in this transitional moment between a roughly symmetrical order that was organized around two rival poles and an uncertain but surely more complicated future, few policies of any consequence are decided in a vacuum.

In recent years, South Korea, the prosperous, democratic half of a country once known as the Hermit Kingdom, has provided us with as good a reminder of this as anyone. When Roh Moo Hyun was elected president in 2002, few would have predicted that the ballot choices of his country's 35 million registered voters would have played a determining role in international affairs over the next several years. And yet that is exactly what transpired.

Roh is leaving office as a deeply unpopular leader, a man lampooned as ineffectual, undisciplined and, for some, even mischievous. Seen narrowly, such a reputation would suggest the slimmest of legacies.

At least one thing that Roh believed in deeply will prove to have mattered greatly and will very likely stand the test of time, however, lending unexpected importance to his role and to the role of his country well into the future.

The South Korean leader was strongly attached to the idea of rapprochement with the estranged northern half of his country. In the end, this meant holding his ground under the most trying of circumstances, including a gale of hostile language directed at Stalinist North Korea from Seoul's most important ally, the United States, whose president, George W. Bush, branded it a member of the "axis of evil."

Few Americans outside of the small community of specialists in East Asian affairs have any sense of the role played by Roh. Indeed, exasperated with Roh over other issues, South Koreans appear not to give him much credit, either.

What we do know now, however, is that the Bush administration spent the new few years, following the famous 2002 State of the Union speech in which he first pronounced the words "axis of evil," fighting a war in one of the constituent countries, Iraq, and steadily ratcheting up pressure on another, Iran.

For a time, tensions rose strongly with the third country, North Korea, too, especially after its leader, Kim Jong Il, expelled international atomic inspectors and exploded a nuclear device. Pyongyang's nuclear breakout surely helps explain why the United States has not chosen a more confrontational approach, as it did with the other so-called axis members, but one could argue that the behavior of the supposedly feckless Roh was equally important.

Under the circumstances, avoiding conflict and enhancing engagement required a huge dose of determination and considerable diplomatic skill. At times, Washington was furious at what it perceived as Seoul's appeasement of the North, so much so that people in both countries worried about irreparable damage to the alliance.

At considerable cost to his popularity back home, Roh, who was elected 11 months after the "axis" speech, bought diplomatic maneuvering space for himself, if not outright credibility in Washington, by becoming an early joiner of the "coalition of the willing" and sending troops to Iraq.

It is, of course, impossible to know what might have happened had South Koreans elected a more hawkish leader, or simply a more compliant one. It is not far-fetched to imagine, however, that the Bush administration could have taken a more confrontational approach toward North Korea than the path it ultimately settled upon.

What is certain, however, is that with an elected leader in South Korea insisting that his country would oppose any military solution to the North Korean crisis, Washington had few practical options other than to gradually reconcile itself to diplomacy.

North Korea profited from the interlude of saber-rattling to strengthen its negotiating hand, and in the end it was negotiations that eventually produced a rare diplomatic understanding between Washington and Pyongyang about nuclear proliferation and eventual normalization of relations.

South Korea has just elected a new leader, Lee Myung Bak, and it is far too soon to say what sort of impact he might have on this region's complicated diplomatic geometry.

For his part, Roh will soon shuffle off into history, reviled, belatedly celebrated, or perhaps simply largely ignored. And yet his was the kind of example that we must start being more accustomed to: the leader of a peripheral, medium-sized state having an outsized impact on the shape of our world.

SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 12 — A widening corruption scandal at the Korean electronics giant Samsung engulfed the government of South Korea on Monday when President Roh Moo-hyun’s next chief prosecutor and his top anticorruption agent faced accusations of accepting bribes from the conglomerate.

The accusations by Samsung’s former chief lawyer, Kim Yong-chul, are a further blow to Mr. Roh, who in his final months in office has faced a raft of bribery scandals, some involving his top aides. The departing president had proudly proclaimed a less corrupt government as one of his major achievements.

Mr. Kim, who worked as Samsung’s chief in-house lawyer for seven years until 2004, has said in the past two weeks that Samsung runs a vast bribery network that encompasses the government, the judiciary and the news media, and that he even bribed prosecutors on behalf of Samsung and its chairman, Lee Kun-hee.

Until now Mr. Kim had not disclosed any of the recipients of the bribes, but at a news conference on Monday several Catholic priests who have been serving as spokesmen for Mr. Kim accused three individuals with oversight of corruption cases of accepting bribes: Lim Chae-jin, who was appointed prosecutor general last month by Mr. Roh; Lee Jong-baek, a former prosecutor whom Mr. Roh appointed in August to head the Korea Independent Commission Against Corruption; and Lee Gui-nam, director of the Central Investigation Bureau, which investigates corruption charges against politicians and big businesses.

“They should be taken as a symbol of a government agency tainted by bribery,” said the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice, an influential religious group. The priests said the three senior prosecutors received bribes regularly from Samsung.

On Monday, all three denied accepting bribes. “I have never received any cash gifts or requests for favor from Samsung,” Mr. Lim said, according to his spokesman, who added that Lee Gui-nam also denied taking bribes. In a statement, Lee Jong-baek demanded that the priests and Mr. Kim unveil any evidence against him, and he threatened to sue them.

Samsung issued a statement calling the accusations “malicious and unfounded.”

Cheon Ho-seon, President Roh’s spokesman, said his office could not immediately investigate the accusations, made a day before prosecutors vowed to investigate thoroughly. But the priests accused prosecutors of dragging their feet, afraid to disclose “their deep-rooted collusive links” with big businesses. On Monday, some of the candidates for the Dec. 19 presidential election called on Parliament to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the scandal.

Mr. Roh, who leaves office in February, has been widely credited with fighting corrupt ties between businessmen and public servants, and he has been struggling to bolster his legacy by reaching out to North Korea. He held the peninsula’s second inter-Korean summit meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, in early October, and the prime ministers of the two Koreas are to meet in Seoul on Wednesday.

But his efforts have been sidetracked by a spate of corruption scandals. Jeon Goon-pyo, head of the National Tax Service, was arrested last week on charges of taking $66,000 in bribes from one of his deputies, who was seeking a promotion. Mr. Jeon denied any wrongdoing but resigned.

Also last week, prosecutors indicted Jung Yun-jae, one of Mr. Roh’s closest confidants, who served as his protocol secretary, on charges of receiving bribes from a building contractor in return for helping him evade a tax investigation. A provincial tax official was arrested on charges of receiving kickbacks from the builder.

Last Tuesday, a court in Seoul opened the trial of Byeon Yang-kyoon, Mr. Roh’s top policy adviser, who was arrested last month on charges of using his influence to win favors for a woman said to be his girlfriend. The woman, Shin Jeong-ah, was also under arrest on charges of using a fake Yale University diploma to get jobs as a college professor and museum curator in Seoul. That scandal prompted a nationwide investigation into counterfeit academic credentials, which were found to be widespread.

Social critics have said that a culture of corruption is so deeply embedded in South Korea that many here have come to consider small cash gifts, usually contained in white envelopes, as an essential tool for success. The most infamous among those gifts are “rice cake expenses,” cash envelopes that businesses are accused of doling out to government officials or politicians on major holidays.

The term made headlines again in recent weeks as Mr. Kim, the former Samsung lawyer, claimed that he had doled out cash envelopes to scores of senior prosecutors, giving each the equivalent of $5,500 to $22,000, three times a year.

On Monday, Mr. Kim said through the priests that Samsung had a secret vault in its headquarters in downtown Seoul where a bribery list was kept and that Samsung executives were assigned to bribe prosecutors with whom they had school or hometown connections. Samsung called the claim “absurd.”

Kim Sang-jo, a university professor who leads Solidarity for Economic Reform, a civic group, said the Samsung scandal was a typical case of a big South Korean conglomerate raising slush funds to help the son of its chairman take over management control and then bribe law enforcement agencies in case the irregularities were investigated.

Major corruption scandals tend to erupt during election years. A former business partner of the leading presidential contender, Lee Myung-bak, of the conservative opposition Grand National Party, is being extradited from the United States to face charges of embezzlement and money laundering.

Mr. Lee has denied involvement. But the possibility of a damaged conservative front-runner prompted Lee Hoi-chang, who lost to Mr. Roh in 2002, to declare his candidacy last week. He has since surged to the No. 2 slot in polls, splitting conservative support with Mr. Lee.