Center for International Policy

The United States and Korean Unification

Bruce Cumings

Department of History
University of Chicago

A Working Paper Prepared for the Task Force on U.S. Korea Policy sponsored by the Center for International Policy and the Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, Illinois, December 5, 2002
For more than a decade the serious and seemingly never-ending problem of American relations with North Korea, as presented in soundbites and newspaper paragraphs, has read like a cartoon: the United States, in its original innocence, thinking only of the best interests of the Korean people, confronts a renegade state run by a mad totalitarian dictator, starving his people to death in the interests of just one thing: nuclear weapons and the missiles to carry them. Once this lunatic has those means at his disposal, he will not hesitate to take out one, two, many American cities.
In our paper of record, The New York Times, we can witness the alpha and the omega of this long-running cartoon: in the immediate aftermath of the four-day ground war that defeated the Iraqi Army, the Times' foreign affairs op-ed columnist, Leslie Gelb, located "the next renegade state:" a country "run by a vicious dictator" with SCUD missiles, "a million men under arms," and likely to possess nuclear weapons "in a few years." North Korea was the culprit, of course--another Iraq, this coming a decade before the "axis of evil." Last month another New York Times op-ed columnist quoted a Korean in Japan, Kim Myong Chul, to the effect that North Korea would wipe out Washington and New York if the U.S. tried anything. I first met this person 25 years ago, and within 30 minutes had determined that nothing he said could be trusted.
Yet the Times is the paper of record, with far more accurate and considered coverage of foreign affairs than any other American newspaper. And just when you think the cartoons are only that, along comes the real North Korea, virtually parodying the worst case scenarios of Beltway hardliners (enriched uranium technology being merely the most recent example). How is it possible to unpack a measure of truth from this vexed confrontation, now in its seventh decade?
History makes a difference, and I want to argue that the history of U.S.-Korean relations is really the most important thing we need to know in figuring out American relations with North Korea in the past decade, and in thinking through how the U.S. might contribute to Korean reunification. The North Korean leadership is a close student of this history, because it has to be; its behavior since the end of the Cold War is a textbook case of how an enemy who knows a particular history in its bones, would act and react. A corollary is that the North Koreans know next to nothing about American policy and American politics, seeing what they see only on the distant receiving end. Likewise most American leaders have next to no knowledge of North Korea, but much more damaging, they usually have had little understanding of the American role in Korea going back to the end of World War II, and the profound responsibility that the U.S. bears for Korea's division, the coming of the Korean War, the failure since 1953 ever to end that war, and the kind of country that we witness across the demilitarized zone.
So let me attempt to list what I would take to be some of the more important historical lessons of the past 57 years (with most of these lessons coming from the declassified record of American diplomacy):

· The U.S. bears the major responsibility for the division of Korea at the 38th parallel in 1945, because it took this decision unilaterally in mid-August 1945, without consulting any of our wartime allies, and of course no Koreans, and then proceeded to set up a full military occupation;
· The ROK government that emerged in 1948 after this three-year occupation was more an American creation than any postwar government in East Asia;
· The U.S. created its stake in the security of South Korea as a pro-American state in the famous "fifteen weeks" in 1947, when the containment doctrine and the Marshall Plan came to fruition; the rationale for doing so was the "reverse course" in Japan, to establish Japan once again as a regional industrial power, shorn of its military and political clout, and reinvolve it with former colonial economies (the ROK, Taiwan, Southeast Asia);
· Because Congress refused to fund the $600 million bill that would put the ROK on a par with Greece and Turkey, however, this commitment had to remain secret: but Dean Acheson told a Senate committee in 1947 that we had drawn the line in Korea. This commitment governed the Truman/Acheson decision to come to the defense of the ROK in 1950.
· Because of the revolutionary challenge presented by the new North Korean government, and the volatility of the Syngman Rhee government with its frequent threats to march north, Acheson fashioned a civil war deterrent: we would contain the North and constrain the South. This is the essence of what he meant to say in his famous "Press Club" speech in January 1950.
· We have not departed from that civil war deterrent to this day, and it is the primary reason for the continued presence of US troops in Korea-we do not trust the Koreas to be alone together.
· The Truman/Acheson war for containment in the summer of 1950 was a success, but the Truman/Acheson/MacArthur war for "roll-back" (in the terms of the operative document, NSC 81 in September 1950) got us into a war with China, and that debacle took any serious effort at "liberation" of communist regimes off the table down to the end of the Cold War.
· A bipartisan consensus on containment, laid down primarily by Acheson and John Foster Dulles in the winter of 1950, later structured the Vietnam War, making Lyndon Johnson fear the military and (domestic) political repercussions of invading North Vietnam.
· The Korean War "demolished the Truman administration," in the words of Dean Acheson, making it impossible for Harry Truman to stand for election in 1952; the inability to gain a containment victory in South Vietnam led to LBJ's decision not to run in 1968. From 1948 to 1996u there was no two-term Democrat, a partial consequence of the Korean and Vietnam wars.
· To stabilize the Korean civil war, amid frequently voiced fears that the North or the South would start the war up again, Dulles reluctantly decided in 1957 to introduce nuclear weapons into the Korean peninsula (he was reluctant because the decision broke article 13D of the armistice agreement).
· Nuclear weapons remained in Korea until the end of 1991, when George H.W. Bush removed them-because it would be impossible to pressure Pyongyang over its Yongbyon reactor while maintaining such weapons in the South, and because the Army wanted out of nuclear weapons, given the availability of precision-targeted, high-yield conventional weapons.
· Nonetheless, the standard operating procedures of American war plans since 1958 have called for the early use of battlefield and tactical nuclear weapons in a new Korean War; this is a critical reason for the forward stationing of so many North Korean divisions (so they can get into the South and "mingle" before nukes are used).
· P'yôngyang's desire to eliminate or counter that nuclear threat has been palpable since the 1950s, and the U.S. threat gave it rights of self-defense under the NPT and international law more generally. North Korea argues that it is merely engaged in deterrence, that is, the classic argument that once both sides have nuclear weapons, the resulting Mexican standoff negates the possibility of use. Thus a DPRK nuclear capability would return the peninsula to the status quo ante 1991, before the USSR collapsed.
· The U.S. began aerial and electronic surveillance of North Korea before the Korean War began, and since has maintained an ever more intensive surveillance by all means necessary; therefore, one can assume anything that can be seen above ground (like the famous Yongbyon "waste site") is meant to be seen.
· The Japanese began vast underground military installations in Korea in the latter stages of World War II; the North Koreans put nearly everything underground (schools, factories, airplane hangars) from 1950-53 because of American control of the air in the war. They have built underground ever since, with an estimated 850 underground installations of security interest. This is a rational response to a condition that William Perry once referred to at the beginning of the era of "smart" weapons: "anything that can be seen is lost."
· North Korea privileges one value against all others, the Western doctrine of the sovereign equality of all nations. When they say "sovereignty is life" and its absence is death, they express the decision rules of the only communist country ever to be occupied by an American army-but survived. This regime may go down, but in its present configuration and at any point since 1948, it will go down fighting.
· The U.S. has committed itself to Korean unification only once, in July and August 1950 in preparation for the march to the Yalu; otherwise it has shown little interest in ending the Korean division, before or after the war.
· No South Korean government until 1998 had any serious interest in unification, if that meant a prior reconciliation with North Korea and some sort of prolonged autonomy for the northern leadership within a Korean nation. Unification by "overcoming Communism" was the preferred strategy of the Rhee, Park and Chun governments.
· The unification policies of the Roh Tae Woo and Kim Young Sam governments were predicated on the analogy of German unification, where the North would give up or collapse, and the southern system would be extended to the North in toto.
· The North Korean government made unification the cornerstone of its policy toward the South from 1948 to the present, but until the 1990s never contemplated a unification in which the southern leadership would still hold power and the capitalist economy would remain-much lip service to the contrary notwithstanding.
With these clipped outline points as background, maybe we can return to the more pleasant style of a narrative. I would like to treat four questions: what has made the DPRK's and the ROK's unification policies different since 1998; what changes did this help induce in American policy; what are the lingering constraints of history; and what should the U.S. do finally to realize a unified Korean peninsula?

Diplomacy Works

Long before the June 2000 summit, when the two Korean heads of state shook hands for the first time since 1945, hopes of reconciliation in Korea had been raised by the two sides before, only to be dashed. I remember vividly the atmosphere of joy and high expectations in Seoul on July 4, 1972, when the ROK and the DPRK jointly published several principles for reunification that grew out of secret talks between Kim Il Sung and the South's CIA director, Yi Hu-rak. Park and Kim Il Sung were going to have a "summit." Within a few months, however, not only had a full Cold War confrontation reappeared, but President Park had declared martial law and promulgated his Yusin constitution, inaugurating a black period of formal authoritarian rule that did not end until 1987. More joint principles on reconciliation and reunification issued forth in late 1991, and in June 1994 Kim Il Sung proposed a first-ever summit with his southern counterpart-and then died two weeks later. The South Korean president at the time, Kim Young Sam, had three choices: stay silent, offer condolences, or slander the dead northern leader. By choosing the third option, he completely poisoned relations with the DPRK. The presumably "epochal" principles from the 1972 and 1991 meetings were as fleeting as the proposed summits. So, what made the difference since 1998?
The main reason lies in several years of diplomacy that had prepared the ground for success, through dramatic changes in South Korean and American policy, through a steady Chinese policy of equidistance and trying to bring North Korea into diplomatic interaction with its enemies, and through compromises in recent years by the North that belie its obstinate, nasty image. A three-year crisis over the North's nuclear program nearly led to war in June 1994, but energetic diplomacy got the North's nuclear reactor frozen with the October Framework Agreement in 1994-and it is still frozen. In 1997 the North agreed to "four-power talks" (the U.S., China, both Koreas) to replace the continuing technical state of war, while quietly dropping its previous refusal to deal with a South that never signed the armistice. Those talks, now lapsed, were very important because their stated goal is to bring a final end to the Korean conflict through a peace settlement. A hullabaloo in 1998-99 over a huge underground installation said to harbor nuclear facilities ended with the North yielding to unprecedented American inspections of this site and other security facilities.
At the end of August in 1998 the North launched a rocket that entered the stratosphere over the northern tip of Japan's Honshu Island, in a failed attempt to put a satellite in orbit-thus to herald the 50th anniversary of the DPRK on September 9, 1998. This event was widely (and easily) construed as a massive new threat of long-range missiles from the North, a threat perceived as uncomfortably genuine by wide sectors of the Japanese population, but a heaven-sent gift to American advocates of National Missile Defense. South Koreans had a different reaction; long under the threat of northern missiles of shorter range, neither the government nor the people seemed to make too much of this new rocket test (and some secretly applauded how much this Korean missile had discomfited Japan). In the U.S. another "North Korean crisis" occupied the media for many months, generating much more heat than it did light about the realities of North Korean missiles.
From its inception the North has always enjoyed fostering a fearsome image, but its missiles, like its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, were mainly useful as bargaining chips with the U.S. over the past decade. The provocative missile launch was followed by a major agreement with Washington in September 1999 to halt missile tests in return for a slow and partial lifting of the 50-year-old American economic embargo on the North, and an American turn toward an engagement policy. When the Clinton administration finally got around to lifting parts of the embargo in mid-June of 2000, just ahead of the summit, the North reaffirmed its commitment to a moratorium on missile tests. Bill Clinton nearly reached a deal to buy out all of the North's medium- and long-range missiles, but the 2000 election negated the deal. Since it was once on the table, however, history will not be kind to those who pushed it aside in the interests of renewed confrontation.
The turn of the new millennium heralded a major turning point in North Korean foreign policy. In January 2000 P'yôngyang began a diplomatic offensive, opening relations with Italy, Germany, England, the Philippines, and Canada, and it has held discussions about doing the same with France, Japan, and of course Washington. A first-ever high-level North Korean delegation arrived at the ASEAN meetings in July 2000, where Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met the North Korean foreign minister for the first time, which was a prelude to the subsequent exchange of visits between Gen. Cho Myong-nok and Ms. Albright in October. It seems clear that Kim Jong Il intended to greet the new century with a diplomatic posture much different than his father's in the 20th century. It is Kim Dae Jung, however, who has been leading the process of reconciliation.
Kim Dae Jung's "Sunshine" Diplomacy
Since he came into office, President Kim has done more to change policy toward the North than any previous South Korean or American president, in spite of Seoul facing a far greater immediate threat than anyone else. His patient and persistent "sunshine policy" grew out of his long-term study of the North-South problem, and his experience as a leader whose adult lifetime spans the entire existence of the national division and both Korean states. When Kim Dae Jung finally won election in December 1997, the significance of his victory is that he could never have been elected during the Cold War; security agencies in Korea would have prevented it. But in a different era, he and his supporters organized the first genuine democratic transition to the opposition since the ROK was founded. This elemental fact and the new orientation toward the North speaks volumes to the benefits that democracy has brought to the South, and will someday bring to the North.
At his inauguration in February 1998 Kim pledged to "actively pursue reconciliation and cooperation" with North Korea, and declared his support for P'yôngyang's attempts at better relations with Washington and Tokyo-in total contrast with his predecessors, who hated any hint of such rapprochement. Kim Dae Jung was also the first head of state publicly to call for an end to the fifty-year-old U.S. embargo against the North, which he did during a visit to Washington in June 1998. The Clinton administration received that suggestion with a noticeable coldness at the time, but in September 1999 it finally began to do what Kim had asked, by committing itself to engagement and to a slow lifting of the embargo restrictions. Kim has also shipped huge amounts of food and other forms of aid to the North without demanding concessions, and refused to allow himself to be provoked by North Korean hardliners-thus ending the tit-for-tat practice of each side never moving an inch farther than the other side, which for decades assured that there could be no progress in North-South relations.
Kim encouraged many South Korean businesses to invest in the North, and supported especially massive investment by the late Hyundai founder and native of northern Korea Chong Chu-yong, who was at the forefront of North-South economic relations for years. In August 2000 he went to P'yôngyang again for talks with Kim Jong Il, and returned with a signed agreement to open hundreds of factories employing up to 200,000 North Korean workers in and around the ancient Koryo capital of Kaesong, a city bisected by the 38th parallel but firmly in the DPRK since the war ended; in the fall of 2002 the two sides reaffirmed their commitment to begin building these facilities.
But it was of course the June 2000 summit that dramatized this many-sided diplomacy, while also marking the emergence of Kim Jong Il as something of a statesman: when he welcomed Kim Dae Jung at the airport he showed him a Confucian's courtesy, walking slowly behind his elder counterpart with a body language so culturally appropriate that even South Korea's right-wingers decided Kim Jong Il couldn't be a complete barbarian. He proceeded to discourse with Kim Dae Jung (and everyone else) with apparent aplomb and ease of command.
From the mid-1990s onward, of course, North Korea faced extraordinary disasters and near extinction as its economy basically collapsed-resulting in a continuing famine and an apparently bottomless requirement for external aid. By 1998 when Kim Dae Jung was inaugurated, however, nearly a decade had passed since the Berlin Wall fell, and so one had to assume that North Korea was not going to collapse and would be around for some time to come. Thus Kim Dae Jung pledged his government to peaceful coexistence, and to refrain from trying to provoke a North Korean collapse or to "absorb" the North, on the German model of unification. These are the critically-important points in all of Kim Dae Jung's strategy, in my view, and explain why North Korea had the confidence finally to decide upon its own new diplomacy. It had not collapsed, had not disappeared, and as the South pledged itself to live amicably with the North for at least another generation (without expecting a quick unification), the U.S. came to understand that it would have to deal with North Korea as it exists, rather than hoping that it would somehow go away.
There was another deeply serious element in the non-collapse of North Korea, because P'yôngyang's leaders warned many times that for the world to hope for its collapse was to hope for the next Korean War. Perhaps the most dramatic statement came in March 1996, on the heels of CIA Director John Deutch's testimony in Congress that it was not a question of whether North Korea would collapse, but only a question of when. Within forty-eight hours Vice-Marshal Kim Kwang Jin retorted, "the point now is not whether a war will break out in the Korean peninsula … but when it will be unleashed."
A New American Policy

In spite of a hotbed of noisy opposition in the U.S. Congress and a seemingly endless American media commotion about the North Korean threat, middle-level State Department officials patiently negotiated one agreement after another with P'yôngyang, in a long series of talks on various problems beginning in January 1991. This culminated in the Department's six month-long review of Korea policy begun in the fall of 1998, which markedly changed the direction of U.S. policy and culminated in the June 1999 Perry mission to P'yôngyang. Ambassador Perry issued a public version of this review in October 1999, the essence of which was a policy of engagement predicated on the co-existence of two Koreas for another considerable period of time, a progressive lifting of the American embargo against the North, pledges not to threaten the North, and a deepening of diplomatic relations.
The American civil-war-deterrent structure provided the unspoken realpolitik basis for the changes of policy in Seoul and Washington. The U.S. wants to keep its troops in Korea for the long term (and after unification according to Defense Secretary William Cohen's statement in June 1998), which is mildly surprising given the end of the Cold War so many years before, but much less surprising than North Korea's acquiescence and even support for that same strategy. U.S. troops thus continue being a general stabilizer for Northeast Asia, but both Korean leaders want them to stay because they are the guarantor of peaceful coexistence-that the South will not be attacked and the North will not be swallowed or "absorbed" by the South, a kind of "Hong Kong" solution to the border (or DMZ) problem in Korea.
Several years ago North Koreans began telling Americans privately that U.S. troops should stay in the South to help Koreans deal with a strong Japan and a rising China, but also to protect the DPRK against absorption by the South. In 1997 Selig Harrison interviewed a North Korean general who told him that whereas the North may call publicly for the withdrawal of American troops, in reality American troops should stay in Korea. During the June 2000 summit, Kim Jong Il said essentially the same thing directly to Kim Dae Jung.
In this sense the changes in the Korean situation initiated by Kim Dae Jung at his inauguration in 1998 and later sustained by major changes in American and North Korean policy, represent the first genuine attempt to achieve peace, reconciliation, and a final end to the Korean War within the existing post-World War II security structures. U.S. troops would remain in the South for the foreseeable future, two Korean states would remain and coexist, American might would still keep one side from trying to overcome the other, and North Korea would accede to this strategy because of its survival needs, its morbid fears about its own security, and because of the proximity of Japan and China, which are both strong nations at the same time--for the first time in modern history.
These facts can help us appreciate the extent of change that Kim Jong Il has wrought in North Korean strategy, which is to find a way to keep those troops on the Korean peninsula in spite of 57 years in which the DPRK has shouted itself hoarse to get them out. North Korea quietly reconsidered its strategic orientation after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and China recognized Seoul in 1992, and sought somehow to involve the only remaining superpower in saving its skin. The superpower, however, wanted the opposite, and North Koreans were hard pressed to communicate this new reality to anyone, including their own people. Eight years of dangerous cat-and-mouse diplomacy ensued, with P'yongyang playing, often dangerously, the hole card of its nuclear program and its missiles, and external observers assuming that North Korea was an unregenerate terrorist monster suddenly let loose as a post-Cold War "rogue state."
This dramatic shift is the key toward understanding how the on-going reconciliation and diplomacy might finally dissolve the extraordinary tensions that have inhabited Korea for half a century. It explains why Kim Dae Jung said he wanted to end the Korean War before leaving office, but that Korean reunification is still 20 or 30 years in the future. Above all, it explains why P'yôngyang does not fear the consequences of the ongoing reconciliation. Success simply requires that the U.S. transform its role, from being the coach, cheerleader, and often the quarterback of the southern side, to being an honest broker in bringing the two Koreas together (or keeping them apart, as the case may be). Until the Bush administration came in, that strategy did not seem difficult because the Pentagon wants to stay in Korea-forever, it would seem.
The continuing American commitment to Korea is, moreover, still just one aspect of the American strategic position in East Asia and the Pacific: Japan also remains within the postwar settlement hammered out in 1947-53, and shows no signs of getting out of it, Okinawan protests and nationalist stirrings to the contrary. The "Nye Doctrine" of 1995 projected two more decades of stationing around 100,000 troops in Japan and Korea, and U.S. strategy now places no end point on how long the troops will stay in the region. In recent years the Pentagon has raised its guard against a new challenger for control of Pacific security; Pentagon annual reports do not name that "challenger," but recent events-like the warming of relations with Vietnam, India, and North Korea (until 2001), rumors that the U.S. might defend Taiwan against a mainland attack, and a string of new U.S. bases in central Asia post-9/11-have led many Chinese to see a growing American encirclement of China. Other nations in East and Southeast Asia, however, do not voice much dissatisfaction with this outcome. In this light, a pacified Korean peninsula in which the two states coexist, if not a unified Korea, fits the logic of American strategy in Asia for the first time since-well, since Dean Rusk first drew a line at the 38th parallel 57 years ago.
What Is To Be Done?

The denouement to the Korean confrontation described above should not be an outcome that this workshop is satisfied with. As the past two years have shown, the rapprochement can easily be reversed, pushing us back almost overnight to the peculiar, antique cold war that has occupied Korea for decades. Furthermore any prolonged division of Korea ineluctably calls forth people who either want to keep the peninsula divided (through the well-rooted "division systems" on both sides, and the interests of foreign powers), or who want to solve the division by force. I would therefore like to close this paper with a few more points for debate and discussion:
· A neutralized Korea could also solve the problems of security and unity, predicated on the withdrawal of U.S. troops and solemn and verifiable agreements with the other powers to respect Korean neutrality. One of the wisest American experts on East Asia, Mike Mansfield, was the first to table the idea of neutrality in 1961, on the model of Austria's unification and Cold War neutrality in 1955.
· I think that the diplomatic record going back to the first discussions over Korea between the U.S. and the Soviet Union at Potsdam in July 1945, illustrates the maxim that no great power found an interest in dominating all of Korea, and all eventually settled for half a loaf; why can they not now settle for a full loaf, run by Koreans and for Koreans?
· After all, a kind of neutrality and autonomy was fundamentally Korea's position in the Northeast Asian world order for hundreds of years before the imperial scramble of the 19th century.
· Neutrality also would enable the U.S. to make a graceful exit from a troop commitment that seems to grow more unpopular and anachronistic by the day.
· Neutrality amid radical disarmament by both sides would be the essential enabling condition that would move the current track of reconciliation onto a realistic future track of reunification.
I will stop here and refer the reader to Selig Harrison's learned discussion of Korean neutrality in his new book, Korean Endgame. But I would say this is the "first- best" solution for American diplomacy. The second-best solution is the one Kim Dae Jung and Bill Clinton were driving toward when the Democratic train derailed, in November 2000; it has the virtue of being founded on the realities of the peninsula over the past half-century and protects the security interests of all parties, but it puts off reunification until the next generation (and can easily be reversed). The worst solution, however, is the one we seem to be moving toward today: a nuclear-armed North Korea, which may well provoke Japan and/or the ROK to go nuclear, and thus break the very structure of American security in Northeast Asia fashioned so long ago, in the time of Dean Rusk and Dean Acheson.