The official biography of Kim Il-sung, paramount leader of the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea from its founding in 1948 until 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 Kim family moved to northeastern China, where Kim Il-sung attended
school in Jilin province. The Korean Communist Party had been founded in
Shanghai in 1921, but soon disbanded because of 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 northeastern region of China was occupied by Japan, which turned
it into the puppet state of Manchukuo. Changchun, capital of Jilin province,
was made the capital of Manchukuo. After the World War II 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 materiel, the
northeast became the staging ground from which the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) 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 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 northeastern
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 Sovit Union and was sent to a camp near Khabarovsk, where the
Korean communist guerrillas were regrouped with Soviet 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. 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 (WPNK) was formed while in the south, the clandestine Workers'
Party of South Korea (WPSK), despite being banned by the US occupation, ran an
extensive network of underground units with considerable popular support.
South Korea under US puppet Syngman Rhee
On October 12, 1945, General Douglas 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 US Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), the wartime forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency
(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 demagogues bent on autocratic
rule."
In postwar 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 whom came only from
the Christian right in the United States.
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, North and South Korea formally established themselves
as separate independent states, the former as the Democratic People's Republic
of Korea (DPRK) 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 receiving recognition from their 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
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.
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 United
Nations 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 peninsular 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 who, regardless of political
persuasion, 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 had liberated the entire mainland of China,
with the Nationalists, or Kuomintang (KMT, or Guomindang, as it is
alternatively transliterated), fleeing to the island of Taiwan, some 145
kilometers 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 United States had not fought 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
Cold War links Korea, Taiwan, January 7,
2004).
Roosevelt and anti-colonialism
The following is recorded in "Franklin Roosevelt Conversation with Charles
Taussig on French Rule in Indochina, March 15, 1945", from Major Problems in
American Foreign Policy, Volume II: Since 1914 (Taussig was a Cornell
University football star, New York lawyer and New Deal adviser):
The
president [Franklin Roosevelt] said he was concerned about the brown people in
the East. He said that there are 1.1 billion 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 - 1.1 billion potential enemies are
dangerous. He said he included the 450 million Chinese in that. He then added
[British prime minister Winston] 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 Indochina 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
Indochina 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
Roosevelt, who was openly unsympathetic to colonialism. With instructions from
the president, 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 Gaulle 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 French fleet in July 1940, turning
French sentiment against Britain.
In Asia, the Japanese occupied French Indochina in September 1940. At the time,
northern Vietnam was known as Tonkin and southern 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 that country's actions in
Indochina, and on December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii.
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 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 communists led by Mao Zedong. The United States was officially
neutral in the civil conflict, with US conservatives supportive of Chiang and
many China experts showing sympathy for the communists. Stilwell was made
commander of the China-Burma-India theater after the Japanese overran most of
British Burma. Stilwell was simultaneously 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 Stilwell was relieved of his command as a political expedient to appease
Chiang for fear that the KMT leader, already reluctant to risk a costly
offensive against Japanese forces, might sign a separate peace with Japan,
thereby freeing it 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 of 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 the British colony, but he
was released because of a personal intervention by Chiang 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, 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 ("Nguyen the Patriot"; born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890), who was
arrested and imprisoned by Tai Li's agents in August 1942, under pressure from
the Free French and the British, which 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
China-Vietnam border. After his release, Nguyen Ai Qoc changed his name to Ho
Chi Minh ("He Who Enlightens") 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 World War II, 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 American Flying Tiger pilots. Ho Chi Minh and his guerrillas had full
OSS support.
As part of its support for Ho Chi Minh the OSS sent a Deer Team, including an
officer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, who parachuted into his camp with a supply
of cash, and a medic named Paul Hoagland who treated Ho Chi Minh with quinine
and new sulfa drugs, preventing his death from a combination of malaria,
dysentery and other tropical diseases. The OSS also trained 200 elite officers
for Ho Chi Minh's army. The commander, a man named Vo Nguyen Giap, who would
later lead the Vietnamese forces to defeat the French in the 1950s and the US
in the 1970s.
The Free French did not love freedom enough to tolerate Ho Chi Minh for being
an anti-imperialist nationalist. They reasoned that if Ho should succeed in
liberating Vietnam from the Japanese and establish a free democratic
nationalist government, the French would lose their empire in Asia after the
war. Despite Roosevelt's anti-colonial policy, the US under his successor Harry
Truman, Britain under Churchill and the Free French led by Charles de Gaulle
negotiated with the USSR that, like Korea and Germany, Vietnam was to be
divided, 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 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 [Viet Minh League] 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 General Vo Nguyen Giap
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."
Thus 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. Similarly 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 was through communism.
For several months after the end of World War II, Donovan, as a New Deal
progressive who saw the war as a struggle against tyranny that included Western
colonialism in the Third World, worked in Vietnam trying to rebuild the
destroyed infrastructure, channel postwar US economic aid into the country and
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 by Truman as the
hawkishly anti-communist Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 at the beginning
of the Cold War. The insecure accidental occupant of the White House switched
the late Franklin Roosevelt's mandate of helping nationalist freedom-fighters
against imperialism to a Cold War order of helping to restore postwar
colonialism as a 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 US presidential 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 the Soviet
threat to Western Europe, where postwar 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 United States 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, Dwight 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 World War II and underestimating the
tenacity of nationalist resistance, a lesson 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, but it 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, making him 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
as good for global business as World War II had been for US business, a
development warned about by Eisenhower regarding the emerging
military-industrial complex. As it turned out, the Korean 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
to go off the gold standard and forced the United States to resort to dollar
hegemony to exploit the rest of the world financially and thereby 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-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 (about $11 billion in today's dollars) for the H-bomb
program, an amount roughly equal to the desperate US aid to the KMT in its
final phase of collapse as the government of China.
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
evils incarnate 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
had given each Vietnamese what it spent in the Vietnam War, Vietnam would have
been a rich country where communism would not have had much appeal. Instead,
the money was spent on the barbaric destruction of the Asian country, with huge
loss of lives and 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, forcing
the resignation of 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, and preventing a
full normalization of US-China relations.
Starting with Truman and institutionalized by John F Kennedy, liberalism in US
domestic politics has to be balanced by belligerent anti-communist foreign
policy, with the 1930s Munich agreement 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 placed 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 name of battling Islamic 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 prophecy 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 wing
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 their discontent. States enjoy the
venue of diplomacy to address their grievances. The main source of terrorism is
groups deprived of what they claim as legitimate statehood or legitimate
control of their own state.
Six decades after the end of World War II, 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, thus
preventing two major Asian nations from normalizing their wartime anomalies.
All the talk about defending democracy and preserving stability is merely "to
put ourselves [the US] into a defensible position", as Dean Acheson so aptly
put it half a century ago. And the Korea non-proliferation/missile crisis is
merely a pretext to escalate this ongoing conflict.
US strategy puts the cart before the horse. The solution is not selectively to
prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons by 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 anomalies continue
The first five years of the Workers' Party of Korea's rule over North Korea
were dominated by the Korean War. Similarly, the Korean 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 Taiwanese maneuvers toward
independence are also linked to a mounting crisis over the North Korean
nuclear-weapons program.
The 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice arising 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 each 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
Henry C K Liu is chairman of a New York-based private investment
group. His website is HenryCKLiu.com.
