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US-CHINA: QUEST FOR
PEACE
Part 2: Cold War links Korea,
Taiwan
By Henry C K Liu
Part
1: Two nations, a world apart
A quarter of a century after the United States
normalized its 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 five
decades ago. Among these are the linked problems of
Taiwan and Korea - two unfinished civil wars in Asia
into which the US injected 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 current crisis over renewed Chinese
war 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 North Korea, officially known as
the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and
the US from full-scale resumption of that war, 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, but the accusations
have become more volatile as the tension rises in recent
years over North Korea's nuclear program.
When
the armistice was signed on July 27,1953, talks had
already dragged on for two years, ensnared in testy
issues such as the exchange of prisoners of war and the
location of a demarcation line. If history is any guide,
there is little reason for optimism that the current
negotiations over the Korean nuclear issue will proceed
with less entanglement or that the Taiwan issue can be
resolved peacefully without fundamental changes in US
policy.
After three years of bloody conflict,
military field commanders from North Korea and China
signed the armistice agreement on one side, with the
US-led United Nations Command signing on behalf of the
16 nations participating militarily. South Korea,
officially known as the Republic of Korea (ROK), refused
to sign the armistice, which was only intended as a
temporary measure. The document, signed by US
Lieutenant-General William K Harrison and his
counterpart from the DPRK, General Nam Il, stated that
it was aimed at effectuating a ceasefire "until a final
peaceful settlement is achieved". However, that
settlement never materialized.
A conference in
Geneva in 1954 designed to thrash out a formal peace
accord 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. And the US, represented then by Dulles, had
virtually threatened to wage war on China. North Korea
has threatened to withdraw from the armistice, the most
recent threat being delivered on February 18, 2003.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea is the
world's most heavily militarized frontier with most of
the nearly 2 million troops of both sides deployed near
the border, including 37,000 Americans stationed in the
South. The armistice is still the only safeguard against
a shooting war on the Korean Peninsula, where a state of
no-war-no-peace has existed since its signing five
decades ago.
South Korea, having refused to sign
the armistice agreement, is technically in a continuing
state of civil war with North Korea. For security, Seoul
forged a mutual defense pact with Washington to keep the
37,000 troops there, the largest US contingent in Asia
after Japan, which has 45,000 troops in 39 bases. The
defense treaty with South Korea has kept the US, by
proxy, technically at war with North Korea for five
decades. The US-Japan Security Treaty was also signed
during the Korean War in 1951, at the same time as the
San Francisco Peace Treaty that formally ended the
Allied occupation of Japan. The security treaty with
Japan enabled US troops to remain in Japan and use
Japanese facilities as staging areas and logistics bases
in the war then being waged on the Korean Peninsula and
later in the Vietnam War.
US military bases in
Japan were seen as essential to containing communist
expansion in Asia, especially since the Soviet Union,
China and North Korea were viewed as a monolithic
threat. Throughout the Cold War, the US deployed more
than 500,000 troops outside its borders, not counting
troops directly engaged in shooting wars, such as Korea
and Vietnam. Even now, after the end of the Cold War,
the US military "forward deploys" almost 450,000 troops
in foreign bases, with large numbers in Europe
(112,000), East Asia (82,000) and the Middle East
(240,000).
No other empire in history has
maintained such a large permanent force in peacetime
beyond its home for such a long time. These troop
arrangements are largely the result of post-World War II
arrangements and Cold War exigencies. The US had feared
a massive land invasion of Western Europe from the
former Soviet Union and placed large numbers of ground
forces there to defend it. US forces in Korea and Japan
have been in place for a rapid response to a North
Korean or Chinese threat for the past 50 years. The
current Iraq occupation takes about 110,000 troops, plus
another 130,000 in the Persian Gulf.
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, have 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.
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 - 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 Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) had secured 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, taking
with them US$300 million 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.
Up to this point, many China
specialists in the US government, such as Owen
Lattimore, O Edmond Club, John Service, John Davies and
Vincent Carter, were objectively sympathetic to the
cause of Chinese communism, based on their field
knowledge of the successful social reforms in communist
areas during China's long war against Japanese
militarism.
A declassified 182-page report by
the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on alleged
espionage by Lattimore, who had been political adviser
to GMD leader Chiang Kai-shek in 1941-42, reads as
follows:
Informant X reports that November 1948, at
this lecture [at Harvard University] Lattimore
condemned Chiang Kai-shek unmercifully as a
reactionary. Lattimore is alleged to have declared
that there would be no hope or promise in China, or
peace in Asia or of cooperation between the USA and
China as long as Chiang Kai-shek held power. On the
other hand, Lattimore expressed the opinion that
communist control of China would bring unity to the
nation, industrialization to its economic system, and
launch a modernization program which would enable the
Chinese to take their rightful position in the world.
He urged that the foreign policy of the United States
ought to be that of doing business with the Chinese
Communists ... He indicated that he had left the
service of the Government of the United States because
the foregoing ideas, which he expressed, were contrary
to the ones held by the policy-determining officials
in the US Department of State. For his
prescient views, Lattimore was persecuted, along with
other China specialists in government.
General
Joseph Stilwell, General George C Marshall and president
Harry S Truman were all openly critical of the corrupt
Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, who
appeared more interested in fighting the Chinese
communists than the Japanese militarists. After the
failure of Marshall's attempt to broker a coalition
government in China, the US maintained an official
position of neutrality in the Chinese civil war,
although the US remained ideologically and operationally
partial to the GMD.
China was in the midst of
preparing for the liberation of Taiwan in a final
campaign of its protracted civil war when the US
intervened in the Korean civil war on June 27, 1950.
Only six months earlier, to clarify limits of the Truman
Doctrine of March 12, 1947, in which the US declared its
moralistic duty to combat communism worldwide to fill
the vacuum created by Britain relinquishing its prewar
imperialist role in Greece and Turkey, US secretary of
state Dean Acheson, in January 1950, had delivered a
speech at the National Press Club saying that South
Korea and Taiwan were not part of the US "defensive
perimeter", which seemed to indicate that the United
States would keep out of a local Korean civil conflict
or the liberation of Taiwan by force in a final campaign
of the Chinese civil war.
"American assistance
can be effective when it is the missing component in a
situation which might otherwise be solved. The US cannot
furnish determination, the will, the loyalty of a people
to its government," Acheson said. The speech said
nothing about restraining either South Korea from
eliminating the North militarily, or the Chinese
Nationalists on Taiwan from recapturing the mainland. In
1949 both anti-communist governments repeatedly claimed
these to be their goals.
Then in February 1950,
Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin began to
accuse the US State Department of being run by
communists and the Democrats of having "lost" China to
communism, going so far as to accuse retired army
general and former secretary of state Marshall of having
been a communist agent since the beginning of World War
II. McCarthyism eliminated a whole generation of
insightful China specialists from US governmental and
academic establishments. Republicans finally found an
issue with which to overcome their stigma as the Party
of the Great Depression - accusing the Democrats of
being soft on communism.
The November 1946
mid-term congressional elections were a disaster for the
Democrats, with the Republicans taking control of both
houses. Truman, facing his first election as a
presidential candidate in 1948, while viewed by most
merely as a caretaker president after Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's death in office, desperately needed a
neutral figure of high public stature and good rapport
with Congress and the press to take charge of foreign
affairs. Truman was no liberal. In fact, Roosevelt
selected Truman to replace the liberal Henry Wallace as
his running mate in 1944 to appease the conservatives.
On January 7, 1947, Marshall, ending his failed China
mission, was nominated as secretary of state, and he
went on to propose the Marshall Plan as a concrete
program to implement the Truman Doctrine of the global
containment of communism.
George Kennan as a
junior diplomat in the US Embassy in Moscow had authored
in February 1946 the famous Long Telegram, a historic
8,000-word document that offered a coherent explication
of the "Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs". He
advocated the use of the "logic of force" in response to
anticipated Soviet aggression. Sixteen months later,
Kennan published a seminal article in Foreign Affairs
magazine, "The sources of Soviet conduct", which set
forth the policy of containment: "Soviet aggression
should be opposed whenever encountered." The article was
signed by "X", although everyone in the know knew Kennan
was the author. For Kennan, the Cold War gave the United
States its historic opportunity to assume leadership of
what would eventually be described as the "free world".
After his surprise victory in the 1948 election,
Truman was faced with developments unfavorable to US
global interests. On January 14, 1950, Ho Chi Minh
declared the founding of the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam. On January 27, Truman declared the formation of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). On
February 3, the US recognized Bao Dai of South Vietnam,
beginning the commitment that eventually led to the
Vietnam War. On February 6, the Republican National
Committee set its campaign slogan, "Liberty Against
Socialism", for the 1952 election.
National
Security Council (NSC) Report 68, dated April 14, 1950,
written at the request of president Truman, under the
direction of Paul Nitze, who three months earlier had
replaced 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 percent of the gross domestic
product (GDP), in response to global communist
expansion. On February 8, Nitze 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 part of the free
world. NSC Report 68 embodied much of Kennan's Cold War
perspective of exploiting anti-communism as a pretext
for global US hegemony, although it tilted heavily
toward military expansion, over the protests of Kennan,
who advocated a balance of economic aid. Nitze went on
to build a highly successful career in government as a
strategic nuclear hawk.
Thus, notwithstanding
subsequent manipulation of public opinion, declassified
official documents show that the post-World War II US
military buildup preceded events in Korea in June 1951 -
and was 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 for the H-bomb program.
Domestic
politics had hijacked US foreign policy and tragically
misconstrued legitimate national liberation struggles
against Western imperialism around the world as Soviet
expansion and as evil incarnates against freedom that
must be stopped at all cost. 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. 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, but the malignant policy also transformed the
US itself into an oppressive regime in betrayal of its
own founding ideals.
Simultaneously, a
garrison-state mentality was systematically forced on
the 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 terrorism. The tragedy of
September 11, 2001, will 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 families who are no
more involved with international terrorism than the
average family in Middle America.
Secretary of
state Acheson in a "Princeton Seminar" comment, February
13, 1954 (Papers of Dean Acheson), recalled policy
recommendations on Korea in the early days of the
conflict:
The recommendations that we made [at Blair
House during the renovation of the White House] were,
first of all, to get the Americans out of Korea, as
soon as possible - that is, the dependents of the
Military Mission and people of that sort. The second
recommendation was that General [Douglas] MacArthur
should be instructed by airdrop to get all the
ammunition and military supplies which he possibly
could to the South Korean forces. The third
recommendation was that the fleet should be ordered
from Cavite [in the Philippines] north at once, and we
added that we should make a statement that the fleet
would repel any attack [from China] on Formosa
[Taiwan] and that Formosa should not make any attack
on the mainland.
The President said he would
not do the latter that night; that he would order the
fleet immediately from Cavite [but] ... not make any
decision one way or the other [on "neutralizing"
Formosa] ... It was an interesting discussion [on June
25] because as I recall it the assumption by everybody
- I don't think there was a question in anyone's mind
or that it entered into the discussion that took place
- as to whether we would or would not stand up ... to
this issue that had been presented to us. I think it
was just sort of clear to us almost without discussion
that we were going to [become involved in Korea].
These recommendations, of course, looked very strongly
in that direction. I think there was some talk about
what this meant, about what would happen if we let it
go, and all that sort of thing. But certainly there
was nobody there who took the view that we should not
regard this as a crisis to which we had to respond ...
By Monday night it was clear that this was a
rout. Or pretty much of rout. The second decision made
on Monday night was that the 7th Fleet was to prevent
any attack on Formosa, and any attack from Formosa
against the mainland. The latter was to put ourselves
into a defensible position. We obviously would be in a
very bad box if we said that we would interfere with
any attack of the [mainland "Red"] Chinese on
["Nationalist"] Formosa, but leaving these people
[Chiang Kai-shek's forces] free to provoke the very
attack which we would then be called upon to repulse.
So in the interests of the security of the whole
operation - nobody shall attack against it or from
it. Fifty years later, US posture on Taiwan
remains basically the same, to prevent the ending of the
Chinese civil war with a no-war, no-peace status quo to
prevent a united China from challenging US hegemony in
Asia. All the talk about defending democracy and
preserving stability is merely "to put ourselves [the
US] into a defensible position".
In Oral History
Interview with Dean Acheson June 30, 1971, by Theodore A
Wilson and Richard D McKinzie, Acheson said: "You see,
you all start with the premise that democracy is some
[thing] good. I don't think it's worth a damn ... People
say, 'If the Congress were more representative of the
people it would be better.' I say the Congress is too
damn representative. It's just as stupid as the people
are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish
... In the old days when liberalism didn't persist and
senators were elected by the legislatures, you got some
pretty good senators, because they were not
representative."
This from the man who launched
the Cold War in defense of democracy - and tragically
his view is quite representative of the attitude of the
US elite even today.
Next: Wrong war in the wrong place
Henry C K Liu is chairman of
the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright
2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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