Small peninsula shapes global
history By Makar Melikyan
Friday is the anniversary of the July 27,
1953, ceasefire of the Korean War. The
consequences of the conflict were so great that to
this day no final peace agreement has been
concluded. Moreover, the Korean War had
significant international consequences as the
first spark of the Cold War.
On June 25,
1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th
parallel and launched the most tragic war in
Korean history. Born of an ideological divide, the
Korean War exploded into a major international
conflict and set forth a number of rules and
lessons of the Cold War.
First, the war
demonstrated that in an age of superpower rivalry,
an area left politically and/or militarily
unprotected by one
superpower is likely an
invitation to aggression by the other.
The
US had in effect abandoned South Korea by early
1950. In March 1949, General Douglas MacArthur
drew the Anglo-American "line of defense ...
through the chain of islands fringing the coast of
Asia", leaving South Korea on the unprotected
side. Secretary of state Dean Acheson did the same
in public in January 1950. It wouldn't take much
effort for North Korean leader Kim Il-sung to
persuade Moscow and Beijing to support his
invasion of the formerly US-occupied South.
However, despite its withdrawal from South
Korea, the US returned in the wake of the North's
invasion and fought a brutal war for the next
three years. In Korea the superpowers found
themselves in a zero-sum game. The whole world saw
in Korea the contours of the coming global
confrontation between liberalism and socialism.
Second, the diplomatic lessons for the
superpowers were learned in New York. At the time
of the outbreak of the war, the Soviets had been
boycotting United Nations Security Council
sessions, demanding the adoption of the People's
Republic of China (PRC) as a permanent member.
They initially underestimated the importance of
the UN in the post-World War II era, and the West
took advantage of the Soviet representative's
absence.
The Security Council authorized
its first-ever peace-enforcing operation in Korea,
with Resolution 83. Although the Soviets later
challenged the legitimacy of the resolution, 15
states joined the US and South Korea under the UN
flag and pushed the front line of the war back to
the 38th parallel and even further north in
October 1950. The Soviets learned well its lesson
not to underestimate the veneer of international
law and never boycotted UN Security Council
sessions again.
Third, the Korean War
served as a spectacular stage for the PRC to make
its debut as a rising power. The Chinese call the
period of their de facto colonization by the great
powers from 1842 until 1949 a "century of
humiliation". Now China was on the rise once again
as the leader of the red march over East Asia.
Chinese troops surprised the UN coalition with an
attack and managed to push them back to 8
kilometers south of Seoul by January 1951. Even
though the front line was later moved back to the
38th parallel, the PRC's triumphal entry to the
war ensured the tremendous growth of its prestige
around the communist world and beyond.
Leaders in Kremlin had failed to realize
that China was not just another satellite state:
It was a regional power that should be treated
properly as such. Beijing was already dissatisfied
with the insufficient level of support by Moscow
of North Korea, because of concerns about a direct
conflict with the United States. China bore the
brunt of the "anti-Imperialist" war, and came out
of it with greatly enhanced international
prestige. Moscow's misjudgment of China's rising
power in the Korean War sowed the seeds of the
Sino-Soviet split a decade later, and the Sino-US
rapprochement two decades later.
Fourth,
Korea became the second piece in a long row of
dominoes through East Asia that needed to be
protected by the West. Americans could perhaps
have avoided the war in Vietnam and later the fall
of pro-US regimes in the region if they had been
able to stop communism in Korea. After pushing
North Korean and Chinese forces back to the 38th
parallel in April 1951, General MacArthur was sure
that his forces could march on and end the war in
total victory. However, on April 11, 1951, US
president Harry Truman fired MacArthur.
After two years of talks and brutal
fighting, the US concluded a truce on July 27,
1953. Truman's successor, Dwight Eisenhower, hoped
to come to a compromise with the communists and
resolve the war in Korea. But the Korean armistice
bore an unintended effect: The "victory" of
communism in Korea encouraged its further spread
in Southeast Asia, and the US had to pay a much
higher price to counterbalance communism in
Indochina, and experienced a series of new
failures.
In the end, no final peace
agreement on the Korean War was concluded, and a
de facto peace in the peninsula has been
maintained by costly military deterrence on both
sides. And not only did the Koreas balance each
other on the regional level, the US and the USSR
did so on the global level. A potentially
combustible military balance of power became a
common solution for most Cold War conflicts, since
mutual assured destruction because of the
existence of nuclear weapons made it impossible
for either side to prevail completely over the
other. Most ideological and ethnic conflicts
stayed unresolved during the Cold War period.
The Korean War in retrospect was a turning
point; no conflict that came after Korea could
easily be resolved with the use of force. Armed
attacks and calls for war have only begotten
cycles of peace talks, no matter where the
conflict emanates from - Korea, the Middle East,
the Caucasus or the Balkans.
The last
lesson of peace is something that can only be won
by the Koreans themselves. Many hope that the
recent change of leadership in Pyongyang will lead
to progress in the relations between the Koreas
and finally bring about a reliable peace
agreement. Sooner or later, the last piece of the
Iron Curtain will also fall, and Korea shall
become whole.
That will ultimately signal
the end of the most devastating war in Korean
history.
Makar Melikyan is a PhD
student at Yerevan State University, Armenia.
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