Compromised in Korea: Redeemed by the Clinton Administration?

Korea may not have found its place in the sun just yet, but it has reached the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. As I write, Hwang Jang Yop, one of the principal architects of the North Korean political system, sits in the South Korean embassy in Beijing, an apparent defector. A man who had slipped out of the North 15 years before, said to be the nephew of a wife or paramour of Northern leader Kim Jong Il, has been gunned down in Seoul, allegedly the victim of a hit man sending a message to would-be defectors. Scandal laps at the feet of South Korean President Kim Young Sam as his friends and aides are arrested in a case involving the collapse of the giant Hanbo Steel Company and the loans and bribes that had kept it afloat. Labor unrest seethes in the South as President Kim and his party attempt to keep down wages to maintain their country's competitiveness in world markets. For Americans, questions about the possibility of famine and collapse in North Korea, Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program, and the possibility of war on the peninsula loom over the immediate drama.

But most Americans are as ignorant about Korea as their leaders were in 1945 when they first ordered U.S. troops there. American policy toward Korea between 1945 and 1950 was disastrous, contributing to the division of a people and the precipitation of full-scale war between the Northern and Southern regimes in 1950. During the war, the Truman administration, having intervened to save the South from communism, suffered a catastrophic dose of "mission creep," seeing battlefield success as an opportunity to destroy Kim Il Sung's regime and reunify Korea under a noncommunist, perhaps even democratic, government. The ensuing conflict with the Chinese "volunteers" who came to Kim's rescue probably cost several million lives.

For the next 35 years or so, American presidents, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, were occupied with containing communism in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies. Although some fretted, most abetted, or at the very least tolerated, a series of brutal but aggressively anticommunist dictatorships in Seoul. They maintained American troops at the 38th parallel who were both a tripwire to deter Pyongyang and hostages to America's Korean ally. No American president, before the collapse of the Soviet Union or afterwards, was able to devise a policy that achieved more than an uneasy truce on the Korean peninsula. The Cold War has been over for nearly a decade, the U.S.S.R. disintegrated six years ago, but Korea remains divided into antagonistic halves -- and American troops are still there.

Now, astonishingly, the Clinton administration, noted for underachievement in foreign policy generally and Asian affairs in particular, seems to be performing brilliantly in Korea. Threading its way through territory mined with Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean anxieties, it has helped defuse crisis after crisis since 1994 and appears to be on the verge of getting North and South Koreans to sit down with Chinese and American representatives to discuss the possibility of formally ending the Korean War. Perhaps Bill Clinton can achieve what none of his predecessors came close to: the peaceful reunification of Korea.

MAVERICK TO MAINSTREAM

No one has done more to call attention to the deficiencies of American policy toward Korea than Bruce Cumings, one of a handful of American scholars proficient in the difficult Korean language. His two-volume, 1500-page Origins of the Korean War quickly became the standard work on the subject, although it told readers more than anyone wanted to know. In recent years Cumings has participated in documentary films on Korean affairs, advised American leaders, and attempted to awaken the public to Korean issues, as in his February 1997 article in The Atlantic Monthly, which concluded with a call to bring American troops home from Korea. Unstinting in his criticism of the Seoul regime, American ignorance of Korea, and U.S. policies toward the peninsula, Cumings has proudly alienated the South Korean political elite and more than a few American academics, diplomats, and journalists. His new book, disappointingly, is relatively unprovocative -- perhaps an indication of how much of his argument has already been accepted.

No one disputes the need for an English-language survey of Korean history. The translation of Ki-baik Lee's useful A New History of Korea contains only 13 pages on the years since 1945 and ends in 1960. Korea Old and New: A History, published in 1990 and distributed by Harvard University Press, is based on Ki-baik Lee's work but provides extensive coverage of the twentieth century by other scholars, including a superb account of the years 1945-90 by Carter Eckert. As Korean studies grow in the United States, stimulated by the Korea Foundation's generous, though controversial, funding, the necessary monographic foundation for broad interpretive work is slowly being constructed. Cumings' book, much of which reads like a chat with his seminar students, should generate interest in the field and make Korea's past and present more accessible to nonspecialists.

Cumings offers a quick survey of Korea from prehistoric times to 1860. He looks a little more closely at events from 1860 to 1945, but almost two-thirds of the book is focused on the years since 1945. Discussions of liberation, division, the Korean War, and industrial development in the South, a fascinating sketch of the North since 1953, and an idiosyncratic chapter on Koreans in America signal Cumings' principal interests. His affection for the Korean people and their culture is apparent throughout, as is his contempt for their leaders.