Peace Regime Building on the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asian Security Cooperation by Joo Seung-Ho;Kwak Tae-Hwan;

Author:Joo, Seung-Ho;Kwak, Tae-Hwan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

U.S. Coping With “Peace” Prospects for Korea

As the previous section noted, the uncertainties about post-World War II “peace” for Korea created a paradigm which has overshadowed for decades various efforts to achieve genuine and lasting peace for Korea. This section shall examine several aspects of that paradigm, followed by a section assessing how the contemporary U.S. government may in the near and long term deal with peace policies regarding Korea.

After Japan’s defeat and prior to the eruption of inter-Korean border tensions which occurred in the context of an increasingly colder Cold War, U.S. policy toward postwar Korea was overwhelmingly shaped by the legacy of a mid-World War II agreement by the United States, Great Britain, and China at the 1943 Cairo conference that those three countries “mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.” Although the Soviet Union was not a part of that agreement because it did not formally enter the war against Japan until relatively late in the Second World War, the allies’ assumption was that the “in due course” outline for Korea’s postwar freedom and independence in a peaceful era would logically be shared by all the allies against the Axis powers. Clearly the postwar era’s Cold War atmosphere was not on the allies’ horizon. That “in due course” metaphor dominated American policy makers’ expectations regarding Korea’s postwar peace and how Koreans would deal with their near-term and long-term future. 19 The basic theme embodied by the “in due course” notion was an assumption that Korea’s desires for escaping Imperial Japan’s harsh policies as a free and independent nation would be realized over time as a result of Japan’s defeat and the creation of post-World War II peace for East Asia. Part of the reason the “in due course” phrasing made sense at the time clearly was due to the uncertainty about how long it might take for the allies to defeat Japan. Less clear, but implicit in using that description of how long it might take Korea to achieve such goals was the shared ambiguity among those allies about Korea’s readiness to attain the goals. Still less clear, and avoided for diplomatic purposes, was uncertainty on the part of the United States and Great Britain about how ready China would be to play an effective leading role in Asia in the wake of Japan’s defeat and how long it might take for Korea to attain “freedom” and “independence” in the shadows of a China coping with postwar recovery. In effect, the “in due course” phrasing was a diplomatic way of expressing hopes for what could and should happen for Korea in an uncertain postwar environment.

19 For full coverage of the Cairo declaration, see: Gaddis Smith, American Diplomacy during the Second World War: 1941-1945 (New York: Knopf, 1985). For a more extensive assessment of the overall consequences of the “in due course” paradigm for U.S. policy, see the author’s Toward Normalizing U.S.-Korea Relations, In Due Course? (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishing, 2002).

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