History - International Relations
More than half a century after the Korean War ended, the two Koreas still face each other across the bleak Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), engaged most of the time in unremitting hostility, punctuated by occasional brief thaws and increasing North–South exchanges. Huge armies are still poised to fight at a moment’s notice. This has been true since the Korean War, which really solved nothing, except to solidify armed bulwarks of containment, to which the United States, South Korea, and North Korea remain committed, even in the post–Cold War world. Both Koreas continue to be deeply deformed by the necessity to maintain this unrelenting struggle. Yet, around the peninsula much has changed.
Watershed changes in world politics in the 1970s altered the Cold War logic that had governed East Asia. With US president Richard M. Nixon’s opening to China in 1971–72, both North Korea and South Korea watched helplessly as their great-power benefactors cozied up to each other. With the conclusion of the Second Indochina War (1954–75), obstacles to ending the Cold War throughout Asia were even fewer. The new strategic logic of the 1970s had an immediate and beneficial impact on the Korean Peninsula. The Nixon administration withdrew a division of US troops without heightening tension. The North Koreans responded by virtually halting attempts at infiltration (compared to 1968, when more than 100 soldiers died along the DMZ and the spy ship USS Pueblo was seized) and by significantly reducing their defense budget.
Henry Kissinger revealed in his memoirs that Kim Il Sung was in Beijing during Kissinger’s famous “secret visit” in July 1971; although it was not known whether they talked, it was likely that Nixon and Kissinger encouraged South Korea to talk with the North and indicated to the North various benefits that might come their way if North Korea took a moderate path.
In what seemed to be a miraculous development, in early 1972 both Koreas held talks at a high level (between the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and Kim Il Sung’s younger brother), culminating in a stunning July 4, 1972, announcement that both would seek reunification peacefully, independently of outside forces, and with common efforts toward creating a “great national unity” that would transcend the many differences between the two systems. Within a year, this initiative had effectively failed, but it was a reminder of what can be accomplished through enlightened diplomacy and of the continuing importance of the unification issue.
Later on, the policies of the United States and China shifted again, if less dramatically. When the Carter administration announced plans for a gradual but complete withdrawal of US ground forces from Korea (air and naval units would remain deployed in or near Korea), a prolonged period of North Korean courting of Americans began. In 1977 Kim referred to President Jimmy Carter as “a man of justice,” and the North Korean press momentarily dropped its calumnies against the United States, including use of the term “US imperialism.” Kim gave interviews saying he was knocking on the American door, wanted diplomatic relations and trade, and would not interfere with American business interests in the South once Korea was reunified.
The North Koreans also began using a term of opprobrium for Soviet imperialism, chibaejuui (“dominationism”), a term akin to the Chinese usage, “hegemonism.” By and large, P’yongyang stayed close to China’s foreign policy line during the Carter years, while taking care not to antagonize the Soviets needlessly. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, the North Koreans forcefully and publicly condemned the act, while maintaining a studied silence when China responded by invading Vietnam.
Civil disorders in South Korea in 1979–80 and the emergence of a new Cold War atmosphere on a world scale froze the Korean situation for much of the 1980s. The Carter administration dropped its program of troop withdrawal in 1979. The Reagan administration invited President Chun Doo Hwan to visit Washington as its first foreign policy act, a move designed to bolster South Korean stability. The United States committed itself to a modest but significant buildup of force and equipment levels in the South. In the early 1980s, the United States added some 4,000 personnel to the 40,000 already in South Korea, sold Seoul advanced F–16 fighters, and with the South mounted huge “Team Spirit” military exercises involving upwards of 200,000 troops of the two nations toward the beginning of each year.
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