[On July 27th, 1953 an armistice signed by President Eisenhower ended the Korean War. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that endpoint and other Korean conflict contexts!]
On what
took so long, what changed, and what lingers.
There are
a lot of things that are distinct about the Korean War from most other 20th
century military conflicts (at least those that involved the United States),
including the fact that it wasn’t officially a war at all: after North Korea
invaded South Korea in
June 1950 the United Nations (led by the U.S.) launched
a “police action” in response, and that’s what it remained throughout. The
respective sides also spent significantly longer trying to negotiate an end to
the conflict than they did simply fighting it: negotiations toward a possible peace
treaty began as early as
June 1951, just over a year into the conflict, but were not concluded until
two years later (as this week’s 70th anniversary series reflects).
Although that two-year period has come to be known as the stalemate,
brutal fighting certainly continued throughout, and indeed exacerbated the central
problem with the negotiations: the question of whether and how POWs from
both sides would be repatriated (many captured North Korean soldiers apparently
did not want to return, for example).
Evolutions
of and eventual solutions in those negotiations undoubtedly played a role in
how and when the armistice was eventually signed. But so too did regime change,
in two distinct but somewhat parallel ways. In March 1953, Joseph
Stalin died of a stroke, and in the aftermath of that world-changing event
the Soviet Union’s power players were far more interested in internal politics
and entirely uninterested in continuing
to support China and North Korea in a distant conflict. In the United
States, Dwight D. Eisenhower won the 1952
presidential election, meaning not only that a Republican would be in office
for the first time since 1933 but also that one of the chief supporters of the
Korean conflict (President
Harry Truman, on whom more tomorrow) was replaced by someone much
more skeptical of whether and how it should continue. I don’t mean to
suggest in any way that a democratic election and a peaceful transfer of power
are at all comparable to the death of a dictatorial leader and the ensuing
power struggle. But both of these changes do reflect how much individual
leaders can contribute to both a nation’s path and the course of international
conflicts.
In any
case, after those years of negotiations the respective sides finally agreed
upon and signed the Korean
Armistice Agreement in July 1953. Even then, however, this conflict was
distinct from others—one of the key players, South Korean President Syngman
Rhee, refused
to sign the armistice; another, the North Korean
government, claimed at the time and has continued to claim ever since that it
won the war; and there was never an actual peace treaty, meaning that the
conflict remains officially suspended rather than definitively concluded. While
the first two details might be seen as semantics or political posturing, the
third is embodied in a very real way by the most overt result of the armistice:
the fraught, contested, laden
with landmines Korean
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which separates the two nations. To my mind, the
DMZ is very much like the Berlin Wall, not simply in its separation of two
halves of a potentially unified nation and people, but also in its existence as
an uneasy state of constant potential violence and conflict. The fact that it
isn’t emphasized in the U.S. anywhere near as much as the Berlin Wall was
throughout its existence reflects, I would argue, anti-Asian prejudice far more
than any particular distinction.
Next post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Any other Korean War contexts you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment