Origins of the Korean War
As the onset of the Cold War struck the Western world into two divided factions, the Far East, Korea in particular, became the first major arena for international contention and geopolitical jockeying of the two post-war superpowers. However, this international history was at the same time laid over a preexistent regional strife and, following the defeat of the Empire of Japan, an uncertain future for the Korean people. It was this uncertainty that was enhanced, complicated, and eventually warred over by the United States and Soviet bloc.
Some may contend that the Korean War’s origins are entirely civil or international in origin. Focusing on the disagreement between the United States’ actions on the international scale and the mishandling of the American military government and Rhee’s regime in South Korea, I argue that the volatility of international politics at that time made it impossible for outside forces to successfully stabilize the precarious situation in Korea and regulate the formation of a united, independent nation. However, it was the irreconcilability of all parties’ interests, including the Soviet Union, the United States, the UN, leaders on both sides of the 38th parallel, and the Korean people themselves, that doomed South Korea to years of instability and an inevitable armed conflict. The political stalemate that eventuated from the international down to the community level in South Korea should come as no surprise, and indeed the harbinger of the Korean War.
In this survey I will first address the pursuit of self-serving policies and subsequent frustrations of international players in Korea, which is principally highlighted by the dealings between the United States and Soviet Union. These negotiations took on the character of Cold War strategies while failing to realistically address the circumstances of a newly liberated, yet divided Korea. Secondly I will examine the United States presence in Korea, from the first missteps of the military government to dealing with an intractable South Korean administration, as well as Syngman Rhee’s role in aggravating the hostilities within his own regime.
Perhaps the initial act paving the way towards the Korean War was the establishment of the 38th parallel as the demarcation line between politically oppositional American and Soviet occupation forces. Locked in an international confrontation, to these superpowers Korea represented less a struggle to unify a country than the opening of a new front on which to contend, and possibly humiliate or best the other. Consequently the Soviets backed Kim Il Sung, a Communist who purportedly fought with the Russians in the Second World War, and the United States supported Syngman Rhee, a long-time exile whose vehemently anti-Communist stance won him favor with the Americans but whose ambition would soon eclipse anything but supreme leader of Korea. The implication here is that with the inception of two inherently antagonistic factions in the North and South, both marked by fervent nationalism and political single-mindedness, the prospect of a timely or peaceful unification had already been closed.
With this in mind, in late 1945 the Americans and Soviets agreed to a four-power trusteeship of Korea and the formation of a U.S.—Soviet Joint Commission to reconcile their administrations toward an interim government. In the absence of prospective unification, trusteeship was an acceptable alternative from an international perspective; but vastly overlooked was the point that a new foreign-delegated administration was anathema to Koreans who had spent their last 35 years under Japanese colonization. (Allan 75) The forcible acceptance of trusteeship on the part of a Communists directive lent popular support and solidarity to the rightists in South Korea, but the Soviets also meant to give themselves political leverage: In further meetings of the Joint Commission they obstinately stipulated that all Koreans who opposed the Moscow agreement should be excluded from consultations pertaining to the formation of a provisional government i.e. everyone except for their North Korean adherents. (Allan 80) This among other issues plagued the Joint Commission, and as the negotiations finally ground to a halt in 1947 the United States turned to the newly formed United Nations for support in supervising national elections and advising the establishment of a unified, independent Korea. However, the presence of the UN guaranteed neither immediate independence nor unification for Koreans, as the position of the UN was generally in accord with United States foreign policy and the Soviets made their noncooperation clear. Barring the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea entry into the North while at the same time advancing their own Soviet-inspired regime, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the UN could only monitor and verify elections in the South, and when the UN formally recognized the Republic of Korea in 1948 it was wittingly ambiguous as to whether the ROK represented South Korea or Korea as a whole, though the ROK goes on to claim this prerogative in its constitution. (Lowe 48)
For many Koreans, and indeed members of the UN superintending body, the idea of separate elections was a contentious issue, representing the official disunion of the peninsula, even though the formalization of two discrete states had been ideologically preordained by a joint U.S.-Soviet occupation. After determining the governing capacity of the ROK the UN commission advocated the prompt withdrawal of American and Soviet occupying troops and the restructuring of the commission itself as a permanent body. However, their qualification of military extraction was the opening of negotiations between North Korea and the nascent ROK prior to withdrawal; the UN’s disregard for this prerequisite was likely the enabler of further deterioration of relations between the divided Koreas. (Lowe 49) While the transfer of management to UN control also aided United States plans for expedient withdrawal from South Korea, the actual timeliness of a U.S. withdrawal of troops was hampered by the relative unreadiness of South Korea’s forces compared to the North’s, and Soviet geopolitical advantage with regards to their subordinate administration in North Korea—in other words continual fears of a Communist sweep of the peninsula.
It is this dilemma, the dissonance between the diminishing viability of continued economic and military support of South Korea and the unacceptability of Communist ascendancy on the Korean peninsula, which characterizes America’s equivocal policies in Korea before June 1950. As head of the Western bloc, by the mid-40s the United States had major economic and military commitments all over the world; the designation of Korea as not a vital strategic asset coupled with Kennan’s then-prevailing policy of asymmetrical response made the American divisions stationed in Korea and the vast sums aid seem likely to have better uses elsewhere. It wasn’t all just a matter of foreign policy, though, as Congress would not always approve the large expenditures the administration requested. (Lowe 59) The United States’ seemingly noncommittal intentions influenced many a defeatist attitude of inevitable Soviet conquest on the peninsula, both at home and abroad. Nevertheless, while it may have been strategically expendable, a Communist-controlled Korea would threaten the security of the entire Far East, especially if the Soviet Union considered Korea as a jumping-off point, a region where the United States clearly did have an essential interest in Japan. Abandoning Korea would disconcert America’s allies in the region and any other nonessential but U.S.-friendly areas, as well as significantly damage the prestige of the United States and the authority of the UN once they became involved. Losing Korea was still a worst-case scenario even after the American’s withdrawal, as evidenced by the approval of Economic Cooperation Administration aid to Korea and the sustained presence of the Korean Military Advisory Group, both after the official end of the occupation. Perhaps the greatest foreign policy blunder of the administration was its lack of clarity in expressing a realistic position on the Korean situation. While it is obvious now that the United States would go to war to protect its interests there, Korea was frequently left out of the Asiatic defensive perimeter, most famously by Acheson in early 1950. (Lowe 63) Willing to go to great lengths to avoid an overt war with the United States, without this unintentional encouragement from the U.S. the Soviet Union was far less likely to have authorized North Korea’s invasion plans and it is likely that international conflict could have been averted—I argue that international conflict was preventable and not civil conflict because the events leading up to the creation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north and the Republic of Korea in the south irrevocably precipitated an armed struggle between the emergent states as a desperate means of unification, which the international community had failed to achieve through diplomatic means. In addition, while the onset of the Korean War is often attributed to the date of the North’s invasion on June 25 of 1950, North and South Korea had been in a de facto state of civil war since the early joint occupation in 1945, with the 38th parallel the primary setting for intermittent clashes between their forces.
By examining the relationship of the United States with Korea not in the respect of directly causing the Korean conflict but as a destabilizing influence on South Korea, we find that the military government had an unintentional hand in shaping how and when the war erupted. As enumerated above, the ambivalence of American foreign policy was a major originating factor in the outbreak of the Korean War, but here I would like to review the role the United States played within South Korea, both in the maladroit governance in the early stages of the occupation and the consequent ascendancy of the loose cannon that was Syngman Rhee. Perhaps the most central individual to the preliminary shaping of South Korea was General John Reed Hodge, head of the military government for the first three turbulent years. Upon Hodge’s arrival, politicos in South Korea had already begun to factionalize and vie for legitimacy. His qualifications and preparedness aside, in the rapid pursuit of stability and a control framework, Hodge’s vigorous and hardline anti-Communism approach led him to govern without first considering the full extent of Korean circumstances.
After liberation from Japanese rule, Koreans were ready for radical reforms in the causes of democracy, expeditious independence, and unification. A glimpse of this revolutionary spirit was found in Lyuh Wun-hyung and the People’s Republic of Korea, the interim government active between Japanese surrender and the arrival of the occupational forces, who were successful in maintaining order and found popular support through the inception of People’s Committees in local communities. (Allan 74) However, the moderate liberal socialism of the PRK was fundamentally tinged with Communism in Hodge’s eyes, as all leftist organizations were, and therefore it was rebuffed without hesitation. (Allan 75) The rightists on the other hand, still forming coalitions and preliminary committees, were seen as the most likely advocates of the occupation. The main appeal of ultranationalist Syngman Rhee was that he was firstly a staunch rightist, but whose recent homecoming after decades of a political career in exile signified a lack of any pro-Japanese blemish and also sizeable political capital and public appeal. However, it wouldn’t take long for Rhee’s considerable ambitions to make the military government lament their choice of advocate. Perhaps due to his Illinois-farm boy naiveté or possibly a latent prejudice towards Asian peoples, Hodge detected nothing of Rhee’s treacherous aspirations until it was far too late to change course. (Lowe 27) Known to be at once hypocritical and obstinate, irrational and demanding, emotional and calculating, all of Rhee’s strategies were similarly geared toward the concentration of his own power, in his mind for the good of Korea but more likely the self-delusion of a megalomaniac. (Allan 105) The allies Rhee made during his extensive period abroad would allow him to undercut the occupation’s jurisdiction, and his bevy of aggressive political tactics combined with his seemingly unassailable public support loosed Rhee from American diplomatic controls. Even so, for lack of a replacement nearly half as popular, Hodge and his advisors were committed their support of Rhee and his coalitions even while he railed against the military government and called for immediate independence without trusteeship, and even campaigned for separate elections in the South before the formal division of Korea. The strength of the M.G.’s commitment is most evident in the breakdown of negotiations of the Joint Commission in 1947 due to the rightist camp’s opposition to trusteeship and the American delegation’s obligation to concur. Political unrest heightens all over Korea as Rhee broadens his crusade against trusteeship to encompass the Joint Commission and both the American and Soviet occupations, forcing the United States, attacked by both left and right, to begin considering withdrawal from Korea and the transfer of advisement to the United Nations. (Lowe 34-5)
But why would the American administration tether itself to the nearly autonomous and unpredictable Rhee? The repudiation of moderate leftism and the military government’s conservatism in a time when comprehensive reforms were feverishly anticipated had catalyzed the radicalization of politics in South Korea. Hodge’s attempt at reconciliation by establishing the Left-Right Coalition Committee would ultimately prove ineffective, and the tenacious People’s Committees left over from the interim People’s Republic became bastions of the radical (and not so radical) leftism that would blight the country’s stability for years. Indeed British consul-general D. W. Kermode attributed the final impasse of Korea to Hodge’s extension of antagonism to the moderate left in the early occupational period. (Lowe 30) The answer also stems from one of the more glaring missteps of the military government in Korea—while it was not uncanny that the United States retained some of the Japanese officials in the bureaucracy, the lack of initiative in transitioning to suitable replacements in due course constituted a major oversight and an affront to recently liberated Koreans. (Lowe 21) The administration’s concurrent support of organizations with notorious Japanese-collaboration backgrounds cost them dearly in reputation and the widespread support of moderates and leftists. This left the right, the camp most associated with pro-Japanese inclinations, as the most viable option through which to effect their authority, and Rhee a populist vehicle with which to rehabilitate their public position. That is not to say Rhee’s regime was without the taint of pro-Japanese collaborators, which it undoubtedly was. Rhee’s constituency was made up significantly by the landowning elite left over from Japanese rule, who supported Rhee in return for the preservation of their power, which effectively disenfranchised the provincial poor. (Allan 105) Also, the main action arm of Rhee’s regime was the Korean National Police, approximately 80 percent of which were former Japanese police employees. (Tucker 797) The legacy of cruelty from the years of Japanese colonization left the police vulnerable to public wrath, and continued to be “ruthlessly brutal in suppressing disorder.” (Cumings 186, Allan 84) While for the most part autonomous from the military government, Rhee’s police state was much preferred to a revolutionary regime and in that way tacitly commissioned by the occupation. (Cumings 188-9) In effect Rhee’s KNP, together with rightist paramilitary youth groups, mainly formed after the savage uprisings in autumn 1946, and the Student National Defense Corps that extended government control to all student organizations, maintained a brutal and terroristic stranglehold on the peninsula that was both the originator and best method of stamping out disorder and resistance from radical elements. (Cumings 201) However, the high levels of class struggle still present in Korea and low levels of organized revolt suggest a continual peasant war against an oppressive system and not a coordinated guerrilla campaign, at least not till after the extremely bloody Cheju-do and subsequent Yosu-Sunch’on Rebellions. (Cumings 269, 282)
These two 1948 insurgencies, while eventually put down with unyielding force, attest to the perpetual cycle of violence and discord in pre-war South Korea, if not continuing into the post-war. On the largely ignored island of Cheju-do they harbored sentiments of separatism from the mainland as well as the continued presence of People’s Committees. (Cumings 252) Over the course of a few weeks protests against separate elections in South Korea escalated to island-wide riots and then into a full-scale guerrilla action that took over a year to fully eradicate, by the end of which time one in five islanders had been killed and over half the villages destroyed. (Cumings 253, 258) In the midst of the Cheju-do uprising, elements in the Republic of Korea’s Army stationed in Yosu rejected their imminent counterinsurgency mission on Cheju-do and rebelled against their regiment. (Cumings 260) Capturing the city of Yosu they gained momentum and spread westward into the city of Sunch’on as more people joined the apparently spontaneous mutiny. While the rebellion was crushed in about ten days, the order they imposed on captured territory during that time curiously resembled Lyuh Wun-hyung’s interim government that predated the Republic of Korea. (Cumings 262) Following these incidents, and in response to continued guerrilla activity, major terror campaigns were enacted and civil liberties suppressed. (Cumings 267) While Bruce Cumings calls Rhee’s one unqualified success the apparent defeat of Southern partisanship by the spring of 1950, the doggedness of the peasants and the guerrillas in their protracted efforts, as well as the barbaric extent of the maneuvers required to contain those efforts speaks volumes about the tension and instability within and outside of South Korea. (Cumings 285) It is also important to note that although the militant aspect of the rebellions was invariably put down, that does not as a consequence strike the contention from the mind of the people. The ultimate defeat of struggling partisans in the South also dashes North Korea’s hopes for unification by revolution, further cementing their invasion plans.
Considering the aforementioned patterns and examples I am hard-pressed to find a truly causal relationship between the actions of any one player resulting in the outbreak of the Korean War, with two exceptions. The first was the politically unavoidable yet completely ill-founded and supposedly arbitrary decision to divide Korea along the 38th parallel, and the inevitable failure to abate or contain the ensuing conflict. Due to South Korea’s chronic instability in the five-year span preceding the Korean War, the questions I am left with echo the concern of American intelligence agencies at the time: North Korea’s gross underestimate of the significance of partisan support in the unification with the South, the abandonment of the idea of unification by revolution in South Korea, and their provision to the southern partisans of little more than their blessing. (Cumings 283)
Bibliography:
Allen, Richard C. Korea’s Syngman Rhee: An Unauthorized Portrait. Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1960.
Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Lowe, Peter. The Origins of the Korean War. New York: Longman, 1986.
Rhee, Syngman. The Spirit of Independence. Trans. Kim Han-kyo. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.
Encyclopedia of the Korean War: a political, social, and military history. Ed. Spencer C. Tucker. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, c2000.
