Description
On August 14, 1945, in anticipation of the imminent formal surrender of the Japanese Empire, officials from the Pentagon’s Strategy Policy Committee proposed division of the Korean Peninsula into American and Soviet trusteeships, using the 38th parallel to grant Washington the southern half and Moscow the northern. Korea had been under effective Japanese rule for four decades from 1905, and in the immediate aftermath of Tokyo’s defeat had seen popular people’s committees formed across its territory to establish a People’s Republic of Korea – a short-lived state that would be abolished once Soviet and U.S. forces fully took control. The beginnings of a distinction between the two halves of the Korean Peninsula would emerge with the vastly diverging policies between the Soviets and the Americans, with the former allowing the people’s committees to remain and granting a great deal of autonomy to local nationalist forces which had previously resisted Japanese rule. The latter employed military force extensively to abolish all those associated with the People’s Republic, instead relying on Koreans who had governed under the Japanese, and a number who had resided in the West, to form a new state.
Opposition to the new order in the south resulted in five years of intensive civil war which at the most conservative estimates killed two percent of the population as insurrections broke out across the country. Entire population centers were either massacred or placed in concentration camps, which by 1950 housed up to 1.2 million people or over 5 percent of the population.[i] With the new establishment solidifying its authority, headed by 20-year resident of Washington D.C. Syngman Rhee, who had been hand picked to rule by the U.S. Army, it was able to declare the formation of the Republic of Korea on August 15, 1948, which claimed to be the sole government of the entire Korean nation including all territory north of the 38th parallel. The government in the north, headed by the leaders of the guerilla movement that had for decades fought Japanese rule, subsequently declared the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on September 9. With the division of Korea thereby officialized, two further years of civil war in the south and escalation tensions along the 38th parallel culminated in the outbreak of full scale war between the rival governments on June 25, 1950, for which each side blamed the other.
With South Korean forces effectively disintegrating within 72 hours, the United States would play a central role in fighting North Korea over the next three years, leading a vast coalition of predominantly Western militaries. In September, Washington made the controversial decision to invade the north in an attempt to abolish the state and extend the authority of Sygnman Rhee’s government. The invasion would in hindsight widely be seen as a reckless error – one which forty years later would be a primary factor influencing Washington to refrain from invading Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War – particularly after U.S. forces pushed up to the Chinese border and provoked Beijing to intervene on North Korea’s side.[ii] The result after almost three more years of fighting was a stalemate roughly along the 38th parallel and the conclusion of hostilities in an armistice. While Chinese forces completely withdrew from North Korea once reconstruction was complete in 1958, and Beijing would normalize relations with South Korea in 1992, U.S. forces would remain in the south indefinitely with Washington continuing to refuse to form diplomatic ties with North Korea or to recognize its existence. It thereby implicitly continued to endorse the south’s claim of sovereignty over the north.
North Korea and the United States have remained officially at war for over seven decades, representing by far the longest war between any two industrial nations in history. With the U.S. having since 1950 waged well over a dozen other hot wars, from Panama and Grenada to Iraq and Somalia, all of which were resolved in small fractions of the time of the yet unresolved Korean conflict, this aspect alone has made North Korea stand out among America’s adversaries. This book explores the conflict’s evolution in the 35 years following the end of the Cold War in 1989, after it entered an entirely new phase with North Korea’s isolation and the emergence of a unipolar post-Soviet global order, before shifting into a new era as the unipolarity that characterized post-Cold War geopolitics gradually diminished.
JEREMY KUAMAROV –
“Abrams’ book ultimately makes clear that David (North Korea) has defeated Goliath (the USA)—after withstanding biblical scale devastation.” JEREMY KUZMAROV, COVERT ACTION Magazine CovertAction Magazine