US misses history lessons on Korea
By Sung-Yoon Lee
Two days after the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War on June 25,
United States President Barack Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak
put on a firm show of unity against North Korea at a press conference on the
sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Toronto.
Speaking of the need for "consequences" in the wake of North Korea's apparent
sinking of a South Korean corvette in March, Obama announced that the US would
retain wartime operations control of South Korean armed forces until late 2015,
extending the deadline of a planned transfer by over three years.
In dealing with the ongoing North Korean threat, the Obama administration might
also ponder the trajectory of wars in Korea in
the 60-year period leading up to that day in June, 1950, when the North invaded
South Korea.
Between the last decade of the 19th century and the Korean War, patchily
remembered in America as the "Forgotten War" despite the loss of 54,246
American lives, there were four other wars in Korea and its vicinity. The US
was involved in only the fourth, the Pacific War (1941-1945). But taken
together, these earlier conflicts reinforce the lesson of the Korean War; that
a power vacuum in Korea is an invitation to aggression.
It goes without saying that how to prepare for the next geopolitical shift in
Korea - almost certain to emanate, as in June 1950, from Pyongyang - will be
imperative to keeping the peace in the region and honoring the sacrifice of US
soldiers who served in the Korean War.
Whereas an uneasy but de facto peace has held in Korea over the past 57 years
since the 1953 armistice, in the 56 years leading up to 1950 the Korean
Peninsula was engulfed in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the First
Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), and the
Pacific War (1941-45). In each of these, Japan was the principal actor, the
revisionist power driven by desire to change the geopolitical setting in its
favor.
By defeating China in 1895, Japan won Taiwan as its first colony and pushed
Korea out of the traditional Chinese tributary system, effectively ending the
centuries-old Chinese world order. By defeating Russia in 1905, Japan won
international recognition of its "paramount political, military and economic
interests in Korea", as enshrined in the Treaty of Portsmouth. By 1937, Japan
was in full control of its Korean colony and ready to utilize the Korean
Peninsula as a supply base and military platform for invading China.
Lacking strategic interests in Northeast Asia, the US chose to stand by as
Japan gobbled up Korea and advanced into Manchuria. However, Japan's success in
successive wars of aggression across nearly half a century came to a dead end
at Pearl Harbor. Imperial Japan was eventually brought to its knees by the
United States in August 1945. Yet, in that moment of triumph, the geopolitical
importance of Korea was not lost on the victorious allies. They partitioned the
peninsula at the 38th parallel.
With the occupation of defeated Japan and also one-half of liberated Korea, the
United States emerged for the first time as the key shaper of geopolitics in
Northeast Asia. Yet, despite having governed South Korea for three years from
1945 to 1948, and despite lingering misgivings about North Korea's intentions,
the US withdrew troops from the South by the summer of 1949 and returned to a
policy of benign neglect vis-a-vis the key strategic arena in Northeast Asia
that history had anointed as the Korean Peninsula.
Kim Il-sung, father of the present North Korean leader, took advantage of the
power vacuum and launched an invasion of the South on June 25, 1950. Kim's
attempt to unify the peninsula under his own communist control was thwarted by
a multinational coalition led by the United States and supported by 15 other
nations under the banner of the United Nations. Hence, South Korea was saved.
The US commitment thereafter to the defense of the South against North Korean
aggression has since kept the peace in Korea for nearly 60 years - a certain
cause for celebration. John Milton's adage that "Peace hath her victories, no
less renowned than War" is self-evident in the free and affluent modern state
that is South Korea today.
At the same time, North Korea has time and again shown its intentions as a
revisionist state in Northeast Asia, willing to take considerable risks to
overturn the strategic environment. Its apparent sinking of the Cheonan is
but the latest in a long history of bold attacks against South Korea and the
United States.
But the North Korean regime is in the midst of the most serious internal
political challenge in nearly 20 years. Facing severe economic stresses,
increasing infiltration of information into North Korea, ever more North
Koreans attempting to defect to the South, and the challenge of handing over
power to an unproven son only in his twenties, the allegedly ailing North
Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, must wrestle with profound questions of regime
preservation as time runs out.
Here lies a rare opportunity for policymakers in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo
to accelerate and effect positive changes in the North Korean regime. Engaging
the North Korean people rather than the regime through information operations
and facilitating defection, while constricting Pyongyang's cash flow, is the
best means to that end. It's also important for Washington to hold quiet
consultations with Beijing to envision and prepare jointly for a unified Korea
under Seoul's initiative, a new polity that will necessarily remain free,
peaceful, capitalist, pro-US and pro-China.
Hence, 60 years from now, as future generations ruminate on the meaning of the
Korean War, they may say that prudent and pragmatic policymakers a sexagenary
cycle ago, though not nearly as heroic or heralded as those brave soldiers on
the battleground in 1950, but by their creativity and courage, paved the way
for a permanent peace in the Korean Peninsula, and, ultimately, paid the
greatest honor possible to all those who served in a war that is forgotten no
more.
Sung-Yoon Lee is adjunct assistant professor of international politics at
the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and associate in
research at the Korea Institute, Harvard University.
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