SINO-AMERIGAN DETENTE AND ITS IMPACT ON KOREA

(i) The strategy of geopolitics

The war in Vietnam conclusively demonstrated that America could neither dictate nor impose its own prescription and terms for an international order in Asia. The Vietnam experience brought about a fundamental adjustment in the existing pattern of power relations with America's erstwhile arch enemy in Asia, the People's Republic of China.

The persistence of hostile mutual deterrence between the US and China permitted neither settlement nor compromise over such intractable issues as Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam. Yet as early as 1967, Richard Nixon had declared in his celebrated article in Foreign Affairs that ‘America cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, to nurture its own fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus, the US aim should be to induce that change.’ President Nixon hinted from the very day of assuming office at the need for cautious exploration of communication with the PRC through some ‘unilateral doctrinal measures’ by the United States.

In his inaugural address, Nixon defined America's new approach towards the Communist bloc at large as follows: ‘After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation. Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open … We cannot expect to make everyone our friend, but can try to make no one our enemy.’

For twenty years after the end of the Second World War, the United States was the only truly global power with the capacity to deploy its armed forces anywhere in the world. The Cold War rhetoric expressing the need to defend ‘the free world’ against the threat from an allegedly monolithic Communist bloc may be seen as an attempt to establish a new pattern of international order. Many of the terms and concepts of that era reflected the concern to consolidate that ‘free world’ and to limit an alleged Communist expansionism. The latter aim involved primarily strategic and military priorities, and the former included the attempt to bolster both the national security and the domestic stability of frequently fragile allied governments. The predominance of American military and economic power meant that America's commitments to its allies were credible because US capabilities largely matched those commitments.

In Northeast Asia, the United States has held the key position in the balance-of-power system since the Korean War of 1950. That war profoundly influenced the pattern of American involvement in Asian affairs in general and in the future of Korea in particular. By intervening militarily to save South Korea from North Korean aggression, the United States established a balance of power against the Communists and set a precedent for future American participation in Asian conflicts. Since then, America's role as the ‘determinant’ of the regional balance has been institutionalized by the presence of sizable US forces in South Korea.

For thirty-five years since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the Korean peninsula has been a focus of East–West confrontation in Northeast Asia. Its root cause, the division of the peninsula into North and South Korea, was a direct consequence of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The ensuing bitter doctrinal enmity and military confrontation between the two Koreas reflected conflicting interests between the US and the USSR (and the People's Republic of China – PRC). Since the armistice of 1953, a state of neither peace nor war has obtained on the Korean scene among the contending parties. The forward basing of US forces in South Korea is one symbol of the entangling conflict.

Amongst the variables that affect the peace and security of the peninsula, this study chose to emphasize the role of the American security commitment to South Korea as a key determinant. This is because the presence of sizable US forces in South Korea ever since the end of the Korean War has been the single most important factor in preventing recurrence of war between the contending Koreas. Accordingly, this study examines in particular the role of US forces in South Korea and those interests (both US domestic and international) which have pressed for and against a US military presence.

THE EVOLVING ROLE OF US FORGES IN KOREA

(i) US forces as a deterrent

The American experience in Vietnam demonstrated that the use of extensive military power could not guarantee desired outcomes, and that America should exercise its military commitment abroad with restraint. Americans now thought that imperial interventionism had after all led the US ‘mistakenly’ into Indochina. With the erosion of the impulse to maintain an imperial domain, there was a much lessened fear of a loss of American influence in the Asian periphery. It even appeared that the maintenance of existing US commitments to allies in East Asia would no longer in itself entail an automatic US military involvement in local conflicts. Indeed, there was an almost emotional response among the American public at large against any foreign military intervention (e.g. the War Powers Act of 1973). This feeling eventually led to the collapse, if temporarily, of American interest in Southeast Asia during the period 1975–8. In addition, the Watergate scandals brought about the end of clear-cut presidential direction of foreign policy in the face of a more assertive Congress. Consequently, the decision-making process became even more diffuse and fragmented.

It was under these overall circumstances that the US government began to give serious consideration to shifting its global posture from a strategy of ‘two and a half wars’ to that of ‘one and a half wars’.

THE UNITED STATES AS A LIBERATOR

(i) At liberation

The central object of this chapter is twofold: first, to examine the origins of America's involvement in Korean affairs in the post-war era; and secondly, to assess in turn the place of South Korea's security in US global as well as regional strategy in the early Cold War years.

The 1940s were the decade that witnessed the transformation in America's policy from continental isolationism to one of globalism based on vast economic and military capability. America's ability to wage and win a two-front war with Germany to the east and Japan to the west demonstrated the superiority of American power.

It was in the Pacific that the United States had first trod the path to world power. The United States had become a Pacific power in 1898 when it annexed the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii as the result of the Spanish–American War. The following year, the United States warned the European powers and Russia to keep their hands off China. John Hay's ‘Open Door’ note of September 1899 was the first time that the US has promulgated a general foreign-policy principle outside the Western Hemisphere. American commercial interests in China made the Far East a centre of international rivalry and conflict with other big powers.

FROM THE LESSONS OF KOREA TO THE LEGACY OF VIETNAM

During the thirty-five years since the enunciation of the containment doctrine in 1947, perhaps nowhere has the American effort to promote peace and stability been more costly and painful than in Southeast and Northeast Asia. The two divided countries on the periphery of China – Korea and Vietnam, along with Taiwan – became the focus of America's containment policy in Asia as well as the roots of America's tragic entanglement in Asian affairs.

The unexpected Korean War had led, in turn, to an unexpected extension of an American security commitment to South Korea – a new alliance which would have been unthinkable when Truman had initially called upon the American public to undertake the responsibilities of containment in Europe. The extension of an American commitment to South Korea was, as Raymond Aron has put it, ‘an extreme interpretation of containment that implied the refusal by the United States to accept any loss whatsoever, territorial or ideological, in its Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union.’ Such an extension led later to an even more frustrating local war in Vietnam.

In retrospect, it may be said that Korea had a revolutionary effect on post-war American foreign policy. In turn, America transformed Korea's position in contemporary history by drawing it into the mainstream of world politics. South Korea became a major operational theatre in the East Asian–Western Pacific basin.

It was stated at the outset that the purpose of this study was not to provide a solution to the problem of maintaining America's commitment to the security of South Korea. It is evident, however, that the direction of the analysis and argument has indicated an implicit defence of the US–ROK alliance which has constituted a major security pillar in East Asia. The US–ROK alliance was justified with reference to North Korea's alliance with the Soviet Union and China. But to derive from this alone an endorsement of America's commitment to South Korea would be to overlook certain other points that have been stressed throughout the argument.

In the first place, considered in the strategic context, it has been contended that since the US commitment to the ROK per se did not define its own scope and relevance as an instrument of defence, its credibility must be assessed more by US military forces deployed in the region and less by the deterrent promise contained in the security treaty. In other words, if credibility has been the principal issue at stake in the American commitment, its substance would depend on the scope and magnitude of the military effort to which the US committed itself. The importance of peacetime defence efforts or security cooperation has remained a prominent feature of the US–ROK alliance. This is because the adequacy or inadequacy of the American commitment can be known for certain only should deterrence fail.

THE STATE OF CARTERS MIND

(i) The inheritance

Jimmy Carter's victory in the presidential election of November 4, 1976 marked a turning point in the foreign policy and domestic orientations of successive US Administrations. His victory came as a direct consequence of the lingering Vietnam agony and in the wake of the Watergate nightmare. It represented, in a sense, a revulsion by the American public at large against the secretiveness and the realpolitik pretensions of the previous two Republican Administrations.

To be sure, the foreign policy of the short-lived Ford–Kissinger team was essentially an extension of the geopolitical diplomacy of Nixon–Kissinger. Its image of American power in the post-Vietnam era and its perspectives of building a ‘lasting peace’ in a militarily bipolar and politically multipolar world were basically in tune with Kissinger's geopolitical conception of the balance of power that governed US global diplomacy during the Nixon era. Jimmy Carter's aims as he entered office must, therefore, be viewed in the light of policies which he inherited from his predecessors.

The essence of the Republicans' geopolitical diplomacy lay in the simultaneous pursuit of detente with the Communist great powers and a process of contraction from peripheral areas. These two objectives were mutually reinforcing, and the efficacy of one depended in large measure on that of the other.