[Park Sang-seek] Two different views of armistice 60 years on

This year the two Koreas have celebrated the 60th anniversary of the armistice of the Korean War for different reasons and different purposes.

The countries that made military and nonmilitary contributions to the U.N. Command, particularly South Korea and the U.S., wanted to remind the international community that their participation in the Korean War was the first international effort to make the U.N. a true collective security body and to affirm that the use of force by any individual state or political entity for any purpose is illegal. 

Of course, immediately after World War II, the world was beginning to split into two camps ― the Western democratic and the communist camps, and those countries which fought for South Korea mostly belonged to the Western camp. 

In this sense, the Korean War was the first manifestation of military confrontation between the two camps. More important for South Korea and the U.S. was that the Korean War made South Korea the torch bearer for the anti-communist movement and the U.S. the sole leader of the Western camp and a true hegemonic power of the world.

For North Korea, the Korean War was a “legitimate” military act by the North Korean regime in response to the armed invasion by the “illegitimate South Korean rebel government.” The North Korean troops almost succeeded in the reunification of the Korean Peninsula but were stopped by the combined forces of South Korea and the U.N. Command.

Then, the tide of the war turned in favor of the latter forces and the North Korean regime itself faced annihilation, only to be saved by Chinese military intervention. It was a heroic victory for Kim Il-sung, the supreme leader of the North Korean regime, and the North Korean people who saved the Korean nation from the South Korean “traitors” and the American “imperialists.” For the North Korean regime, in this sense, it was a double victory: a victory for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and for communism.

The historical implications of the Korean War for the international order are also very important. The Korean division was the first and most serious military conflict between international communism and Western democracy. Later, similar ideological conflicts took place in other parts of the world, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba and Yemen. But North Korea is the only surviving communist regime in a divided nation, and the ideological war still persists on the Korean Peninsula while the whole world is globalizing.

The two Koreas have become two contrasting showcases for developing nations: South Korea as a model of successful modernization by capitalist democracy and North Korea as a model of the failure of modernization by communism. This is the reason why the U.S. often urges developing nations to follow the South Korean development model.

On the part of the U.S., its military intervention is the most important foreign policy decision in the post-Cold War era. In my view, it is more significant than Nixon’s rapprochement with China in 1972. The first one was to contain the aggressive movement of international communism, while the latter was to split the international communist movement. By intervening in the Korean conflict directly, the U.S. openly declared its determination to become the leader of the anti-communist movement.

When I was a graduate student at an American university in 1964, I was invited to a debate on the Vietnam War on the university radio. The moderator asked me why I opposed the American intervention in the Vietnam War, while supporting the U.S. intervention in the Korean War. My answer was that an absolute majority of the Vietnamese people supported the Viet Cong, and in contrast an absolute majority of the South Koreans fought for democracy to the end and requested U.S. intervention.

A few weeks ago I was quite surprised to see Thomas Hudner, a Korean War hero, on CNN. According to the CNN report, he visited Pyongyang on July 20 to discuss the recovery of the remains of his fellow navy pilot, Jessie Brown. These two soldiers participated in the famous Jangjin-ho (Chosin) battle on Dec. 4, 1950. Brown’s plane was shot down by enemy ground fire, and Hudner tried to save him but failed. When I served as Korean Consul General in Boston between 1988 and 1992, I used to meet him often. At that time, he was serving as the head of the Veterans Administration of Massachusetts.

During this period, the Korean War Veterans Committee of Massachusetts was busy holding dedication ceremonies for the interchanges of federal highways in memory of Korean War heroes from Massachusetts and erecting the Korean War Memorial at the Navy Shipyard in Charlestown. Most of the time, Hudner was present. In one of my speeches I said off the cuff that Hudner failed to save his fellow soldier but he indirectly saved my life.

The Korean War teaches us at least three lessons. First, the U.N. revealed a great potential as well as an inherent shortcoming. The U.N. Charter incorporated two contradictory mechanisms for the maintenance of peace and security: the collective security system and the balance of power system. The balance of power system is embodied in the collective self-defense and the concert of power systems.

Even after the greatest world war, realpolitik has remained unchanged. Under such a world order, the U.N. collective security system is too idealistic to be respected and practiced by great powers. Under the circumstances, the collective security system led by the U.S. was destined to fail in the Korean War.

The second lesson is that South Korea has learned vividly that there is no permanent ally as there is no permanent enemy. Geopolitics and ideology are two important determinants for its foreign policy. A geopolitically remote but ideologically close big power can be more reliable than a geopolitically close and ideologically remote big power.

The third lesson is relevant to North Korea. North Korea has learned the hard way that its two communist allies acted according to their own national interests, not for the sake of ideological solidarity. The former Soviet Union gave mainly verbal support for fear of a potential conflict with the U.S., while China intervened militarily for fear of the fall of a firewall against American expansionism. 

By Park Sang-seek

Park Sang-seek is a professor of the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University. ― Ed.