South Korea And The United States: A Conference Report; Alliance Under Tension: The Evolution Of South Korean-U.S. Relations
The Asia Society conference report provides a solid overview of U.S.-R.O.K. relations with stress on political and security issues. The conference in 1988 at Wingspread (in Racine, Wisconsin) brought together a number of prominent academics and officials from the United States and South Korea. The report has incisive sections on contemporary R.O.K. politics and economics, North-South Korean relations and the evolving role of the great powers in Korea. The volume published by Kyungnam University is another substantial addition to the literature. There are good chapters on anti-Americanism in South Korea by Manwoo Lee, on U.S.-R.O.K. security relations by Ronald D. McLaurin, and on the South Korean defense industry by Chung-in Moon. There is also an informative chapter by Moon on the South Korean lobby in Washington.
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In the tangled international tapestry certain relationships dominate the pattern. The U.S.-Soviet struggle has colored almost all world politics for a generation. Franco-German entente has ended centuries of European warfare. One relationship which holds much potential for improving world conditions is that between Japan and the United States. This bilateral relationship, conducted within a dense multilateral web in which each nation has many other ties based on interest and sentiment, is now, and will be increasingly, central to any proper functioning of the world economy and polity.
Since the end of World War II, there have been three watersheds in Sino-Soviet relations. In February 1950, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China formed an alliance against the West. In the late 1950s, there was the beginning of the historic split between them that transformed international politics. Then, in the early 1970s, there began the Sino-American rapprochement that, by the end of the decade, completely altered the strategic landscape and led to an incipient Chinese-American alliance against the Soviet Union.
The major events of 1983 in East Asian politics and economics can be looked at from three broad vantage points or planes of abstraction. At the most general level one sees, rather like the movements of tectonic plates on the earth's surface, a slight shift in the center of gravity of U.S. foreign policy from Europe toward Asia. In large part this shift is prompted by a growing realization among the leaders of the United States and Japan that their nations will, for the indefinite future, be paramount in the fundamental sciences and their practical offshoots in microelectronics, biotechnology, fine ceramics, and other new areas of technical development, and that Western Europe will trail in most of these fields and the Soviet Union simply be left behind. The fact that the American President met with the prime minister of Japan three times during 1983 underscores this trend, as did the President's statement in Tokyo in November that "No relationship between any two countries is more important to world peace and prosperity than the relationship between the United States and Japan."

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