Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 4
Korea is in the news again, and it’s ugly news. North Korea may or may not have the capability to make nuclear weapons, and North Korea’s aging dictator, Kim Il Sung, is unwilling to let international inspectors find out. The United Nations is talking of sanctions. The United States is pointedly scheduling military maneuvers with the army of the Republic of South Korea. Some of the media’s self-chosen secretaries of state summon us, from their word processors, to sturdy firmness. Others warn that the unpredictable Kim should not be cornered, lest he provoke a second Korean War.
I don’t know if that last is an impossible scenario. But the mere idea gives me the feeling of being trapped in a rerun. Nearly five years after the Cold War ended, we are talking about possible renewed hostilities with a chief character from its early phases. Kim is the oldest surviving Communist boss. He goes back beyond an era already ancient—the days of Khrushchev, Eisenhower, Adenauer, de Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh—to an almost paleolithic time when World War II strongmen like Truman, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek still walked the stage.
A great many people know nothing whatever about the original Korean War. It is a barely commemorated conflict, buried between the heroics of World War II, the “good war,” and the torments of Vietnam, the bad one, which we lost. And it partakes of both traditions. It started as a neat epilogue to the great war against fascist aggression and ended as a curtain raiser to the frustrations of an age of limited power. It was full of surprises, almost all of them unpleasant.
To begin at the beginning, North and South Korea, like East and West Germany, were political fictions créâted by the post-1945 failure of the wartime Soviet-U.S. alliance. Korea was a single nation, divided into temporary Soviet and American occupation zones pending a final peace treaty with Japan, which had seized and annexed Korea.
The little peninsula was a rich prize, half of which fell into Stalin’s lap cheaply in August of 1945, when the U.S.S.R. entered the war against Japan in its final days. Moscow’s forces got to occupy Manchuria and northern Korea and help themselves to “reparations” from both places. In Korea the Soviets also dominated the political reorganization that was supposedly the prelude to all-Korean elections that would at last set up a free, single, democratic Korea. Kim Il Sung, a veteran of Korea’s Communist underground, emerged at this time. He was thought by Americans to be a totally obedient Stalin puppet, but so was every Communist leader in those days—a somewhat simplistic assessment, as events showed.
In South Korea the reawakening of independent political life brought back a long-exiled figure, Dr. Syngman Rhee, who was seventy years old at the war’s end. Rhee was a veteran nationalist, jailed and tortured by the Japanese in his youth. He was a popular autocrat whose limited brand of “democracy” had America’s