Reflections on the Korean War/박상식

happened to watch a television advertisement by the Korean War Veterans Committee of Massachusetts in a hotel on the day I arrived in Boston as Korean consul general in December 1988. It was to solicit donations for the construction of a Korean War Memorial at Charlestown Navy Yard. I called the Korean War Veterans Committee and asked how the Korean Consulate General could help the project. The committee simply asked us to donate a stone for the pedestal on which the bronze statue of an unknown soldier would stand. Four years later, the memorial was completed. As far as I know, it is the first Korean War Memorial at the state level in the United States.

In my speech at the groundbreaking ceremony on June 25, 1991, I said that the Korean War can’t be a “forgotten” war. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the first U.N. commander in the Korean War, said that “To win here or lose everywhere: that is the question.” In fact, the Korean War was a turning point in the post-World War II era because the war turned the East-West conflict into a cold war, not a hot war, and the international political order into a bipolar system.

The Kim Il-sung regime tried to reunify Korea by force and Stalin tried to test how the U.S. would react to North Korea’s invasion. Until 1947, the U.S. had no definite strategy toward Soviet expansionism and international communism; it was wavering among three strategies: confrontation, containment and conciliation. In that year, then President Harry Truman declared the Truman Doctrine based on a containment strategy and applied an economic containment policy to Europe. Convinced that the Soviet Union was attempting to expand its power through a proxy in Asia, Truman expanded the containment doctrine to Asia and adopted a military containment policy, sending U.S. troops to Korea.

What would have happened if the U.S. had not intervened in the Korean War? It is obvious that the Korean Peninsula would have been communized. Stalin, encouraged by the success in Korea, would have tried to communize Japan too. The Sino-Soviet conflict might not have happened for a long time. The U.S. might have mobilized its military forces to defend the Western bloc, while Japan might have rearmed itself. In reaction to these moves, the Soviet Union would have strengthened its military alliances with China and the communized Korea and organized or propagated a communist revolution in the Third World. This would have created a vicious circle: The U.S. would have abandoned the containment policy and pursued a roll-back policy to liberate the Eastern bloc. This, in turn, would have accelerated the arms races, particularly the nuclear arms race, between East and West, and brought the two armed camps to the brink of a third world war. Only the “mutually assured destruction” strategy of the two superpowers could have prevented such a catastrophe.

It is not difficult to foresee what kind of life the Koreans in the communized Korea would have lived. As long as the Korean leadership pursued orthodox communism, the Korean political system would have remained similar to the present North Korean system. There could have been a possibility for communist Korea to adopt a policy of reform and opening for rapid economic development, as the Soviet Union and China did. In the process, it might have developed into a democracy like the former Soviet Union or a collective leadership with a human face like China. In either way, it must have made the Korean people wonder why they had to suffer so many miseries to experiment with communism. A Russian once sarcastically said that communism is the longest and the most torturous process from capitalism to capitalism.

The Korean War was the official beginning of the Cold War and the decay of communism. In Northeast Asia, liberal democracy has not yet prevailed. Moreover, the Korean War has not officially ended. After the cold war, on the other hand, the Soviet Union has become democratic and China an economic superpower under a collective communist leadership, with Japan remaining a strong ally of the U.S. Under the circumstances, how to maintain the ROK-U.S. alliance has become a great challenge for South Korea. The epitaph of the Korean War Memorial reads: “The American soldiers who sacrificed their lives on Korean soil for freedom have laid a foundation stone for the eternal bond between the two nations. This stone from Korea symbolizes the foundation.” Here freedom means liberal democracy for both Korea and the U.S. I had the honor of writing this epitaph.

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

코리아해럴드/2010년 6월 23일