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Current US-China
Relations
By
Henry C.K. Liu
Part I: A Lame Duck-Greenhorn Dance
Part II: US Unilateralism
Part III: Geopolitical Dynamics of the Korea Proliferation Crisis
Part IV: More Geopolitical Dynamics of the Korea Proliferation Crisis
Part V: Kim Il Sung and
China
This article appeared in AToL on September 16. 2006
The official biography of Kim Il Sung, paramount leader of
the DPRK from its founding 1948 to his death in 1994, describes the Kim family
as one with four generations of activism for independence in opposition to
Japanese imperialism and occupation of Korea, with the head of each generation
escaping from Japanese persecution to Siberia and Manchuria. In 1920, the
family moved to northeast China where Kim attended school in Jilin province.
The Korean Communist Party had been founded in Shanghai in 1921, but soon
disbanded due to internal strife between the Shanghai faction and the Korean
section of the Russian Bolshevik Party in Irkutsk. A second Korean Communist
Party was formed in 1925.
In 1932, the northeast
region of China was occupied by Japan which turned it into a puppet state as
Manchukou. Changchun, capital of Jilin province, was made the capital of
Manchukuo. After the WWII defeat of Japan in 1945, Jilin, together with the
rest of northeastern China was liberated by the People’s Liberation Army. With
captured Japanese military matèriel, the northeast became the staging ground
from which the Communist Party of China eventually liberated the rest of the
nation.
It was in Jilin
under Japanese occupation that Kim came to reject the Confucian feudal
mentality and approach of the older generation Korean nationalists as
ineffective against Japanese imperialism.
He began looking to communism as the effective path for Korean nationalism. Kim joined both the Korean Communist Party
and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). His formal education ended when he was
arrested as a student by the Japanese and jailed for subversive activities
against the collaborator government. He later joined anti-Japanese guerrilla
groups in northeast China, eventually in 1935 becoming a member of the
Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, a guerrilla group led by the CCP, rising
to the rank of unit commander in 1941.
When the Japanese drove the guerrillas from northeastern
China in 1937, Kim escaped to the USSR and was sent to a camp near Khabarovsk
where the Korean communist guerrillas were regrouped with Soviets advice. Kim
joined the Soviet Red Army and served in it until the end of World War II,
rising to the rank of captain. When he returned to northern Korea in September
1945 as a member of Soviet forces, Kim became head of the Provisional People’s
Committee as most of the other leaders of the Korean Communist Party were in
the south under US occupation.
On October 13,
1945 the North Korea Bureau of the
Communist Party of Korea was established. Kim Il-sung was elected
chairman in December, 1945. In late spring of 1946 the “North Korea Bureau”
formally became the Communist Party of
North Korea (CPNK) with Kim Il-sung as leader, reflecting the onset of
the Cold War with the partition of the Korean peninsula into two separate
states of opposing ideology along the 38th Parallel. On August
28-30, 1946, the Workers’ Party of
North Korea was formed while in the south, the clandistine Workers’ Party of South Korea, despite being
banned by the US occupation, ran an extensive network of underground
units with connsiderable popular support.
South Korea under US Puppet Singman Rhee
On October 12, 1945, General MacArthur, looking for a Korean
puppet leader to pose as an indigenous democrat to fight communism, accepted
the recommendation of Chiang Kai-shek and ordered the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), the war-time forerunner of the CIA, to
stage the “election” of Syngman
Rhee, an anti-communist Christian who had been in exile in Hawaii, as the
democratic leader of South Korea. Rhee’s autocratic presidency left an
atrocious legacy of recurring massacres of Korean dissidents. In 1947, the WPSK launched a guerrilla campaign
against the Rhee government.
The OSS wrote in
a report dated March 10, 1948: “The
Korean leadership is provided by that numerically small class which virtually
monopolizes the native wealth and education of the country... Since this class
could not have acquired and maintained its favored position under Japanese rule
without a certain minimum of collaboration, it has experienced difficulty in
finding acceptable candidates for political office and has been forced to
support imported expatiate politicians such as Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku. These, while they have no pro-Japanese taint, are
essentially demagogue bent on autocratic rule.”
In post-war Korea, similar to situations in defeated Germany
and Japan, the only respectable leaders who enjoyed popular support were on the
left, forcing the reactionary US occupation to man the “democratic” government
it set up with mid-level war criminals released from prison, led by a returned
exile of no local stature in the person of Syngman Rhee support for whose came only from the Christian Right in the US.
As repression of
leftist activities in the south under the autocratic Rhee government
intensified, many leaders of the WPSK moved to Pyongyang to direct resistance
activities from there. The WPNK held its Second Congress on March 27,
1947 paving the way to the formal declaration of a separate North Korean
socialist state. In 1948, both North and South Korea formally established
themselves as separate independent states, the former as the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea and the latter as the Republic of Korea (ROK). They both
claimed the entire peninsula as their territory and both claimed Seoul as their
capital, each receving recognition from its ideologically supportive governments
on opposite sides of the Cold War.
In June 1949 the
WPSK and the WPNK were merged into the Workers’
Party of Korea (WPK) with Kim Il-sung as party chairman and with Pak
Hon-yong, who had been leader of the WPSK as well as the earlier Communist
Party of Korea, becoming deputy chairman.
Korea Civil War Started by South Korea
Many knowledgeable figures with direct involvement in the
situation, such as the late Channing Liem, Princeton-educated former ROK
ambassador to the UN from 1960-61, had since acknowledged that the Korean War
did not begin as a sudden outbreak of fighting on the Korean Peninsula in the
early morning of June 25, 1950. Indeed, forays by the two fraternal adversaries
of the civil war into both halves of the peninsula nation artificially divided
along the 38th Parallel took place continuously for a period of several years
prior to that fateful morning, and increased in intensity throughout 1949 - as
pressure grew more intense by the South to get the job of invasion of the North
done, as a response to US policy of only helping those who helped themselves.
In fact, some scholars of Korean affairs contend that the civil war actually
started in a fierce battle in May 1949 when South Korea launched six infantry
companies and several battalions, taking a toll of 400 North Korean and 22
South Korean soldiers. The division of the country had been the work of the US
and the USSR, not of the Koreans themselves regardless of political persuasion
who had never accepted the division as legitimate or permanent, regardless of
ideology. By October 1949, the USSR had already tested its first atomic bomb in
August and the Communist Party of China (CPC) had liberated the entire mainland
of China, with the Nationalists, or Guomindang (GMD, or Kuomintang, KMT, as it
is alternatively transliterated), fleeing to the island of Taiwan, some 90
miles off the coast of Fujian province, taking with them US$300 million of
fresh US aid funds from the national treasury. These developments generated a
paranoid mentality in the US leadership, whose geopolitical psyche dictated
that the US did not fight World War II only to lose half the world to
communism, notwithstanding that the communists worldwide had been its most
reliable allies in the war against fascism and had incurred the heaviest costs.
(See: US-CHINA: QUEST FOR PEACE - Part 2: Cold War links Korea, Taiwan)
Roosevelt and
Anti-Colonialism
Recorded in Franklin
Roosevelt Conversation with Charles Taussig (Cornell University football
star, New York lawyer and New Deal advisor) on French Rule in Indochina, March
15, 1945, from Major Problems in American Foreign Policy, Volume II: Since
1914:
“The President [FDR] said he was concerned about the brown
people in the East. He said that there are 1,100,000,000 brown people. In many
Eastern countries, they are ruled by a handful of whites and they resent it.
Our goal must be to help them achieve independence--1,100,000,000 potential
enemies are dangerous. He said he included the 450,000,000 Chinese in that. He
then added Churchill doesn't understand this. The President said he thought we
might have some difficulties with France in the matter of colonies. I said that
I thought that was quite probable and it was also probable the British would use
France as a “stalking horse.” I asked the President if he had changed his ideas
on French Indo-China as he had expressed them to us at the luncheon with
[British secretary of state for the colonies Oliver] Stanley. He said no, he
had not changed his ideas; that French Indo-China and New Caledonia should be
taken from France and put under a trusteeship. The President hesitated a moment
and then said--well if we can get the proper pledge from France to assume for
herself the obligations of a trustee, then I would agree to France retaining
these colonies with the proviso that independence was the ultimate goal. I
asked the President if he would settle for self-government. He said no. I
asked him if he would settle for dominion status. He said no--it must be
independence. He said that is to be the policy and you can quote me in the
State Department.”
OSS Supported
National Liberation
William Donovan, head of the OSS during World War II,
enjoyed close ties to Franklin D. Roosevelt who was openly unsympathetic to
colonialism. With instructions from FDR, the OSS provided covert support to
national liberation movements in Asia to resist Japanese invasion behind the
backs of the imperialistic European allies of the US. When France was under
German occupation during World War II, the Free French led by Charles De Gaul
were US allies and the OSS worked with the French resistance. Northern France
was administered directly by the German occupation, while the southern half
plus Algeria was administered by the Vichy Government set up by Germany. The
British attacked the Vichy naval fleet in July, 1940, turning French sentiment
against Britain. In Asia, the Japanese occupied French Indo-China in September,
1940. At the time, North Vietnam was known as Tonkin and South Vietnam as
Cochin. In Vietnam, the Vichy French were working with the British and a supposedly
neutral US against the Japanese, while in Europe Vichy France was an enemy of
Britain. The US froze Japanese assets on account of its actions in Indo-China
and three months later, on December 6, 1940, Japanese forces attacked Pearl
Harbor.
Linked to this geopolitical confusion was the situation in
China. In July, 1942 the OSS set up a guerrilla war unit in India for
operations in Southeast Asia and China. General Joseph Stilwell was Commander
of US forces in China, Burma and India and also Chief of Staff to Chiang
Kai-shek, a US ally. The only US military force in China was a volunteer air
force squadron called the Flying Tigers, headed up by General Claire Chennault.
After the war, in 1947, Chennault became the head of Civil Air Transport, an
airline owned and operated by the CIA.
In China, the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek were
engaged in civil war against the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong. The US
was officially neutral in the civil conflict with US conservatives supportive
of Chiang and many China experts showing sympathy for the Chinese Communists. General
Joseph Stillwell was made commander of the China-Burma-India Theater after the
Japanese overran most of British Burma. Stillwell was simultaneous named Chief
of Staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to urge the Chinese Nationalists to
continue to use US aid to resist Japanese aggression and not reserve it for
fighting the Chinese Communists after the war. Stilwell was privately critical
of Chiang’s half-hearted war efforts. Barbara Tuchman in her book Stilwell
and the American Experience in China suggests that Stillwell was relieved
of his command as a political expedient to appease Chiang for fear that Chiang,
already reluctant in risking costly offensive against Japanese forces, might sign
a separate peace with Japan, thereby freeing Japanese forces to fight US forces
in Southeast Asia.
With US approval, the Chinese Communists were supported by the
USSR, a US ally. The official US position was to be an ally with the recognized
Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, but the OSS trained about 25,000
of Mao's guerrillas and supplied them with 100,000 pistols.
The Chinese Nationalist Intelligence Chief, Tai Li, worked
personally with Donovan during the war. The British, operating on a policy of
appeasing Japanese aggression in China, arrested Tai Li in Hong Kong in 1941
for anti-Japanese activities months before Japan invaded Hong Kong, but he was
released due to a personal intervention by Chiang Kai-shek through Donovan.
In May, 1941 the Vietnamese, known at this time as the
Annamites met in southern China to set up a Vietnamese resistance organization
by the name Viet Minh. This organization was devoted to liberating Vietnam from
Japanese occupation and establishing a free, democratic government aligned with
the US. The OSS supported the resistance fighters in Vietnam just as it did the
Free French in Europe.
Ho Chi Minh –
Nationalist turned Communist
The leader of the Viet Minh, the nationalist resistance
organization, was Nguyen ai Qoc who was arrested and imprisoned by Tai Li’s
agents in August, 1942, under pressure from the Free French and the British who
were war allies of China. Nguyen ai Qoc
was not released until September 1943 and only after some complex intrigue in
Chinese domestic politics involving a former Chinese warlord on the
Chinese-Vietnam border. After his release Nguyen ai Qoc changed his name to Ho
Chi Minh in order to avoid Tai Li’s agents acting on behalf of the Anglo-French
imperialists who had imprisoned Tai Li himself only two years earlier in Hong
Kong.
For the last two years of WWII, Ho Chi Minh was the leader
of the Vietnamese resistance against the Japanese. He created an extensive
underground network in Tonkin, supplied intelligence to US forces, and aided in
the rescue of downed Flying Tiger pilots who were Americans. Ho Chi Minh and
his guerillas had full OSS support.
OSS support for Ho Chi Minh included sending a Deer Team,
including an officer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, who parachuted into his camp
with a supply of cash, and an OSS medic named Paul Hoagland who saved Ho Chi Minh's
life with quinine and new sulfa drugs, otherwise he would have died of a combination
of malaria, dysentery and other tropical diseases. The OSS also trained 200
elite officers for Ho Chi Minh's army commander, a man named Vo Nguyen Giap,
who later led the Vietnam forces to defeat the French in the 1950’s and the US
in the 1970’s.
The Free French did not love freedom enough to tolerate Ho
Chi Minh for being an anti-imperialist nationalist. If Ho should succeed in
liberating Vietnam from the Japanese, and establish a free democratic
nationalist government, the French lose their empire in Asia after the war. Despite
FDR’s anti-colonial policy, the US under Truman, Britain under Churchill and the
Free French led by Charles de Gaul negotiated with the USSR that, like Korea
and Germany, Vietnam was to be divided between North and South and the French
could have South Vietnam back as a colony. This meant that Ho Chi Minh had to transform
into a communist to lead North Vietnam.
On August 17, 1945 Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh with US
support took control of Hanoi from the Japanese. Ho Chi Minh was
accompanied on
his march into Hanoi by Paul Hoagland to whom he owed his life, and the
rest of
the OSS Deer Team that had parachuted into his camp. On that day, Ho
Chi Minh
broadcast the following message in accented English to OSS
headquarters: “National Liberation Committee on VML begs US authorities
to
inform United Nations the following: We were fighting Japanese on the
side of
the United Nations. Now Japan has surrendered. We beg the United
Nations to
realize their solemn promise that all nationalities will be given
democracy and
independence. If United Nations break their solemn promise and do not
grant
Indochina full independence, we will keep fighting until we get it.”
On September 2, 1945 a band marched through Hanoi playing
the Star Spangled Banner while OSS officer Colonel Archimedes Patti and Vo
Nguyen Giap (the general who would later defeat French and US forces) stood
side by side, arms held in salute. The two men are shown in this stance in a
photograph in Richard Harris Smith's book: OSS: The Secret History of
America’s First Central Intelligence Agency. Ho Chi Minh declared that day
Vietnam Independence Day, and he began his liberation speech with words taken
from the US Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.” Ho Chi Minh began as a resistance fighter
devoted to national liberation, freedom and democracy, supported by Donovan and
the OSS in a common fight against Japanese imperialism and French colonialism.
Similar to Kim Il Sung of Korea, Ho Chi Minh was forced by
events to learn the truth observed by Lenin, that imperialism was an advanced
stage of capitalism and that the only path to resist imperialism is through
communism. For several months after the end of the War, Donovan, as a FDR New
Deal progressive who saw WWII as a struggle against tyranny that included Western
colonialism in the Third World, worked in Vietnam trying to rebuild the
destroyed infrastructure, channel post-war US economic aid to Vietnam, and to
establish a nationalist progressive democracy led by Ho Chi Minh. This effort
was shut down by Truman who in the name of anti-communism chose to side with
neo-colonialism over national liberation and the stage was set for the Vietnam
War a decade later. Truman was the man who helped prove Lenin right about the
link between capitalism and imperialism.
Truman, Korea and the
Cold War
The progressive OSS was disbanded in 1945 and reconstituted
as the hawkishly anti-communist Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947 at
the beginning of the Cold War by Truman.
The insecure accidental occupant of the White House switched FDR’s
mandate of helping nationalist freedom-fighters against imperialism to a Cold
War order of helping to restore post-war colonialism as bulwark against the
spread of communism. This policy by Truman provided the nationalists with concrete
proof of the link between capitalism and imperialism.
After his surprise victory in the 1948 election, Truman was
faced with global developments unfavorable to what he perceived as US ideological
interests. On January 14, 1950, Ho Chi Minh declared the founding of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a communist state. On January 27, Truman
declared the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to
resist Soviet threat to Western Europe where post-war de-Nazification programs
were abruptly halted and former fascist politicians were rehabilitated and put
in position of power by US occupation authorities. On February 3, the US
recognized Bao Dai, the playboy king of South Vietnam, beginning a commitment to
a string of political losers in the former French colony that eventually led to
US involvement in the Vietnam War. On February 6, the US Republican National
Committee set its campaign slogan, "Liberty against Socialism" for
the 1952 presidential election. Ironically, Eisenhower won the election with a
promise to get the US out of the ill-fated Korea War.
National Security Council (NSC) Report 68, dated April 14,
1950, written at the request of Truman, under the direction of Paul Nitze, who
three months earlier had replaced George Kennan as director of the state
department’s influential Policy Planning Staff, concluded that “the Cold War is
in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake”, and
recommended massive military buildup, set at 5% of the annual gross domestic
product (GDP), in response to global communist expansion. One month into
office, on February 8, Nitze had identified Southeast Asia as a major theater
in the Cold War. NSC Report 68 identified the support for the collapsed
European empires against national liberation as the venue for the defense of
the “free world”. US foreign policy, fresh from victory in WWII and
underestimating the tenacity of nationalist resistance, a lesson since
forgotten from its own early history, was decidedly expansionist in using
neo-imperialism to roll back global communism.
Containment did not replace expansionist transformation to become US
policy until after the costly lesson of the Korean War and lasted all through the
Cold War. After the Cold War ended with
the implosion of the USSR, the US revitalized a policy of global transformation
through regime changes by force.
NSC Report 68 embodied much of Kennan’s Cold War perspective
of exploiting anti-communism as a pretext for global US political hegemony,
although it tilted heavily toward military expansion, over the protests of
Kennan, who advocated a balance of economic aid, the forerunner of today’s
advocate for “soft power.” Whereas
Kennan saw anti-communism as an opportunity to enhance US hegemony, Nitze
justified US hegemony as a necessary tool for anti-communism. Nitze went on to build a highly successful
career in government as a strategic nuclear hawk in the Cold War.
At the time, before globalized markets, world peace was not
a condition for US economic growth.
Some, such as Nitze, even argued that local limited wars were good for global
business as WWII had been for US business, a development warned by Eisenhower
regard the emerging military-industrial complex. As it turned out, the Korea
and Vietnam Wars set the US fiscal budget on a recurring deficit and the US
economy on the path to persistent inflation. This protracted inflation
eventually caused the US dollar off the gold standard and forced the US to
resort to dollar hegemony to financially exploit the rest of the world in order
to sustain its domestic prosperity. It turned the US economy from the potential
of a positive engine of growth to lead the world economy into prosperity for
everyone to a bottomless sinkhole to drain already underdeveloped resources
from the world’s poor, causing anti-US sentiments everywhere.
Notwithstanding subsequent manipulation of public opinion, declassified
official documents show that the post-WWII US military buildup preceded events in
Korea in June 1951 - and not a response to them. On January 30, 1950, six
months before the events in Korea, Truman approved the development of the
hydrogen bomb, and ordered a re-evaluation of US policy that resulted in NSC
Report 68 by April 12 - in the context of which the events in late June in
Korea were viewed by Truman and his advisers. On July 3, Truman asked for and
received US$260 million ($11 billion in 2005 dollars) for the H-bomb program,
an amount roughly equal to desperate US aid to the KMT in its final phase of
collapse.
Under Truman, domestic politics had hijacked US foreign policy and tragically
misconstrued legitimate national liberation struggles against Western
imperialism around the world as Soviet-sponsored communist expansion and as
evil incarnates against freedom that must be stopped at all cost. And the cost
of protecting freedom far outstretched the feared cost of communism. If the US
only gave each Vietnamese what it spent in the Vietnam War, Vietnam would be a
rich country where communism would not have much appeal. The US spent almost
$600 billion in 2005 dollars in the Vietnam War, about $30,000 for each of
South Vietnam’s 20 million people in 1970. That comes to $360,000 in 2005
dollars, and for a family of four it would be $1.5 million. Still it would not
have paid for the barbaric destruction of the Asian country, the loss of lives
and the damage to the environment through military deforestation.
In the end, the US still had to retreat in dishonor. Communism
prevailed in Vietnam while domestic US politics became drastically radicalized.
With the war finally ended, the anti-war press turned on the president who
ended it and forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon over the
Watergate affair in the name of obstruction of justice, halting the momentum of
Nixon’s opening to China, permanently delaying a resolution of the Taiwan
situation, preventing a full normalization of US-China relations.
Starting with Truman, institutionalized by John F. Kennedy,
liberalism in US domestic politics has to be balanced by belligerent
anti-communist foreign policy, with Munich being held up as a war-causing
appeasement lesson not to be repeated by the “Democracies”. The rationale was
to start a limited war now to prevent a bigger war later. US anti-communist
policies unwittingly and counterproductively served Soviet expansion by forcing
legitimate national liberation movements into the geopolitical open arms of the
Soviet state which by definition places state realpolitik ahead of ideology. National liberation against
imperialism was then officially branded as the enemy of freedom by US
propaganda. In the process, not only did the US create untold misery and
destruction around the world for half a century after the war to end all wars
ended, but the malignant policy also transformed the US itself into an
oppressive regime in betrayal of its own founding ideals. It took a life-long
anti-communist like Richard Nixon to restore relations with communist China.
The current global war on terrorism appears to be revisiting the same worn-out
path, replacing anti-communism with a clash of civilizations in the form of
Islam extremism.
<>Concurrently, a garrison-state mentality was systematically forced on the threatened
socialist world, turning it into a collection of harsh societies that mutated
into the self-fulfilling prophesy propagated by anti-communist belligerence.
This history is now being repeated with the hijacking of US foreign policy by
neo-conservatives backed by an extremist Christian right in a fundamentalist
crusade against non-Christian civilizations disguised as a global war first on
“rogue states”, then on an “axis of evil”, and finally on global extremism in
the form of insurgent terrorism. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, is to be
avenged with a kill ratio of more than a thousand to one in distant lands
before this "war on terrorism" is over, indiscriminately victimizing
as collateral damage millions of civilians who are no more involved with
international terrorism than the average civilian in Middle America. This
approach unwittingly justifies and radicalizes more terrorism in escalating
cycles of senseless killing and destruction. The communist states never
resorted to terrorism because states do not need terrorism as a vehicle to draw
attention to its discontent. States enjoy the venue of diplomacy to address its
grievances. The main source of terrorism comes from groups deprived of what
they claim as legitimate statehood or legitimate control of their own state.
Six decades after the end of WWII, US posture on Korea and Taiwan
remains basically the same, to prevent the unification of the two Koreas and
the ending of the Chinese civil war with a no-war, no-peace status quo to
prevent two major Asian nations from normalizing their war-time anomalies. All
the talk about defending democracy and preserving stability is merely “to put
ourselves [the US] into a defensible position,” as Acheson so aptly put it half
a century ago. And the Korea nonproliferation/missile crisis is merely a
pretext to escalate this on-going conflict. US strategy puts the cart before
the horse. The solution is not to selectively prevent proliferation of nuclear
weapons from nations hostile to the US; the solution is to make such nations friendly
to the US with a change of US foreign and economic policy. This is because as
long as the US refuses to engage in nuclear disarmament and to declare a
doctrine of no-first-use, global proliferation of nuclear arms will continue.
Korea and Taiwan Cold
War Anomalies Continues after the Cold War
The first five
years of the WPK's rule over North Korea were dominated by the Korea War. Similarly,
the Korea War dominated the early years of the history of the People’s Republic
of China. A quarter of a century after the United States normalized
relations with China on January 1, 1979, US-China relations are still plagued
by residual Cold War issues of war and peace that were created six decades ago.
On the top of the list are the linked problems of Taiwan and Korea - two
unfinished civil wars in Asia into which the US interjected itself at the
beginning of the Cold War and linked as key elements in its policy of global
containment of communist expansion. The Taiwan issue was created by the US in
response to an escalation of the Korean civil war. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the recurring crises over Chinese military warnings on
escalating Taiwan maneuvers toward independence is also linked to a mounting
crisis over the North Korean nuclear-weapons program.
The 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice from a military stalemate in an
undeclared “limited” war. Fifty years later, that uneasy truce is still all
that is technically preventing the DPRK and the US from full-scale resumption
of hostilities, as no peace treaty has ever been signed. Both sides regularly
accuse the other of violating the armistice agreement over the course of five
decades. While relations between North and South Korea have de-escalated,
tension between the DPRK and the US has escalated in recent years over North
Korea’s nuclear program. If history is any guide, there is little reason for
optimism that the current crisis over the Korean nuclear/missiles issue can be
defused or that the Taiwan issue can be resolved peacefully without fundamental
changes in US policy. An international conference in Geneva in 1954 designed to
thrash out a formal peace accord for the Korean War ended without agreement.
The symbolic historical image of the conference was that of US secretary of
state John Foster Dulles publicly refusing to shake the hand extended in
conciliation by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai.
Next: Korea under
Park Chung Hee
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