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A 2011 KQ essay reiterates the sticky issues plaguing the U.S. relationship with North Korea, then and now | By Jimmy Carter (Winter 2011 issue)

Editor’s note:  As the 39^th U.S. President Jimmy Carter is honored after his recent passing at age 100, we are reminded of his many distinguished accomplishments of his post-presidential era, one of which was as an unofficial U.S. envoy from the U.S. to both North Korea and South Korea.  This essay, under the headline “The winding road to permanent peace: A short history of North Korea’s consistent message to the U.S.”  from KQ’s  Winter 2011 issue (available in original form in the KQ Archive), was written by Jimmy Carter after the former president was asked to consult with the North Korean leaders on its development of enriched uranium. The enriched uranium process was viewed as an infraction of the non-aggression agreements that came out of the Six Party Talks.

This very factual essay, which reads like an update from a diplomat, shows Carter’s skill at reading between the lines of the North Koreans’ acts of aggression, and noting that that nation’s behavior may be a thinly-veiled signal that “they deserve respect in negotiations that will shape their future.”   At the end of the essay, Carter reiterates his belief that avoiding war will certainly require “a permanent peace treaty to replace the ‘temporary’ cease-fire of 1953,”  a step that activists are still working to bring about in 2025, 14 years after Carter’s essay was first published.

No one can completely understand the motivations of the North Koreans, but it is entirely possible that their recent revelation of their uranium enrichment centrifuges and Pyongyang’s shelling of a South Korean island last November are designed to remind the world that they deserve respect in negotiations that will shape their future. Ultimately, the choice for the U.S. may be between diplomatic niceties and avoiding a catastrophic confrontation.

Dealing effectively with North Korea has long challenged the U.S. We know that the state “religion” of this secretive society is juche, which means self-reliance and avoidance of domination by others. The North’s technological capabilities under conditions of severe sanctions and national poverty are surprising. Efforts to display its military capability through the shelling of Yeongpyong Island and through weapons testing has provoked anger and a desire for retaliation.  Meanwhile, our close diplomatic and military ties with South Korea impels us to comply with its leaders leaders’ policies.  

The North has threatened armed conflict before.  Nearly eight years ago, I wrote about how, in June 1994, President II Sung Kim expelled The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors and proclaimed that spent fuel rods could be reprocessed into plutonium. Kim threatened to destroy Seoul if increasingly severe sanctions were imposed on his nation.

Desiring to resolve the crisis through direct talks with the U.S., Kim invited me to Pyongyang to discuss the outstanding issues. With approval from President Bill Clinton, I went and reported the positive results of these one-on-one discussions to the White House. Direct negotiations ensued in Geneva between a U.S. special envoy and a North Korean delegation, resulting in an “Agreed Framework” that stopped North Korea’s fuel-cell reprocessing and restored IAEA inspection for eight years.

With evidence that Pyongyang was acquiring enriched uranium in violation of the Agreed Framework, President George W. Bush — who had already declared North Korea part of an “axis of evil” and a potential target — made discussions with North Korea contingent on its complete rejection of a nuclear explosives program and terminated monthly shipments of fuel oil. Subsequently, North Korea expelled nuclear inspectors and resumed reprocessing its fuel rods. It has now acquired enough plutonium for perhaps seven nuclear weapons.

Sporadic negotiations over next few years among North Korea, the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China and Russia (the so-called Six Parties) produced, in September 2005, an agreement that reaffirmed the basic premises of the 1994 accord. Its text included denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a pledge of nonaggression by the U.S., and steps to evolve a permanent peace agreement to replace the U.S.-North Korean-Chinese cease-fire that has been in effect since July 1953. Unfortunately, no substantive progress has been made since 2005, and the overall situation has been clouded by North Korea’s development and testing of nuclear devices and medium-and long-range missiles, and military encounters with South Korea.

North Korea insists on direct talks with the U.S., while leaders in Pyongyang consider South Korea’s armed forces to be controlled from Washington and maintain that South Korea was not party to the 1953 cease-fire. Since the Clinton administration, our country has negotiated through the six-party approach, largely avoiding substantive bilateral discussions, which would have excluded South Korea.

This past July I was invited to return to Pyongyang to secure the release of an American, Aijalon Gomes, with the proviso that my visit would last long enough for substantive talks with top North Korean officials. They spelled out in detail their desire to develop a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and a permanent ceasefire, based on the 1994 agreements and the terms adopted by the Six Parties in September 2005. With no authority to mediate any disputes, I relayed this message to the State Department and White House. Chinese leaders indicated support of this bilateral discussion. North Korean officials have given the same message to other recent American visitors and have permitted access by nuclear experts to an advanced facility for purifying uranium. The same officials had made it clear to me that this array of centrifuges would be “on the table” for discussions with the U.S., although uranium purification -a very slow process, was not covered in the 1994 agreements.

Pyongyang has sent a consistent message that during direct talks with the U.S., it is ready to conclude an agreement to end its nuclear programs, put them all under IAEA inspection and conclude a permanent peace treaty to replace the “temporary” cease-fire of 1953. We should consider responding to this offer. The unfortunate alternative is for North Koreans to take whatever actions they consider necessary to defend themselves from what they claim to fear most: A military attack supported by the U.S. along with efforts to change the political regime.

The writer was the 39th president of the U.S. This op-ed was published Nov. 24, 2010 by The Washington Post. For more information, visit: Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope. www.cartercenter.org

One Left: A novel ~ By Soom Kim (translated by Ju-chan and Bruce Fulton)

(University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2020, ISBN #978-0-29574766-8)

Review by Bill Drucker (Spring 2023)

As the old woman folds her blanket, she hears on the television that the last one has passed.  An onni – sister, a comfort woman.  “No,” the old woman mutters.  “There is still me.”  She cleans her room and walks out to the veranda.  She sees a dead magpie next to her shoes, a gift from her cat, Nabi. 

So begins a fictional story that describes a very real group of war survivors.  One Left is a beautifully-written novel, dedicated to the Korean women who were forcibly drafted into and survived military sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army in the World War II era. The story has emotional honesty and gravitas, and can be a hard read at time.  After just a few chapters, the reader may have to pause.  The narrative tugs at our hearts. 

The quiet, low-key story begins with the description of an old woman who lives in squalor in a depressed neighborhood.  The woman had lived in a tiny apartment for the last five years where her nephew had placed her. Her nephew’s motive is to have an address in an area he believes will get renovated and be more valuable in the near future.

Her self-isolation is due, in part, to the fact that she is afraid of her own past as a so-called “comfort woman,” or military sex slave.  Kidnapped at age 13 by the Japanese military, she survived and went back to Korea after seven years to an unwelcoming family and country. The TV news of the death of the woman assumed to be the last onni makes her want to speak the words “I was a victim too.”

The scenario is realistic, as only a few hundred women in South Korea came forward starting in 1991 to publicly tell their stories of the war crimes committed against them. Many became activists for the cause. The total number of Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery is estimated at 170,000 to 200,000; only a fraction of that number survived.  Due to the shame of publicly admitting even forced prostitution, it was always understood by the comfort women’s activist movement that there must be hundreds of survivors who remained anonymous.  

Magpies figure into the story.  In the West, the magpie is a harbinger of bad news.  In Korean culture, it is a national bird, the bearer of good news and luck.  In Korea, magpie songs can mean that guests or good news will arrive soon.  

In the story, the woman’s cat drags a dead magpie to her door, leaving her anxious about what it could mean.  The stray cat’s name is Nabi, Korean for “butterfly.” The butterfly is the symbol for the global human rights and justice movement of the former comfort women and their supporters.

In actuality, there are less than a dozen declared former comfort women alive today in South Korea.  These elderly women have been dying at a faster pace as the years pass. However, the awareness of the global human rights campaign of the former comfort women is alive and growing today, due to the reach of the internet and the many women’s rights and human rights activists who have taken up the cause.   

Their campaign, which began in 1991 and extends to the present day, is to demand justice and reparations from the Japanese for their war crimes against them, including educating the next generation in Japan about the true war history, which is sanitized in Japanese culture. The movement also supports other movements to support women in war.

One Left is Soom Kim’s first novel that has been translated into English. She is a prize-winning writer of nine novels and six collections of short stories.  The book is well-researched, with interviews of the actual comfort women, and reviews of the records compilations.  Award-winning translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are familiar names, with their fluid translations of literary works from Korean to English.

In this a telling of a tragic history from the perspective of one elderly former sex slave who sees herself as “the last one,” Kim revitalizes energy for this irreconcilable injustice in a new generation of readers.  

Some thoughts on the new dark reality for immigrant communities | By Chen Zhou (Winter 2026)

Two Fridays ago, my wife and I made a decision we never imagined making in America: Wherever we go, we would carry our U.S. passports.

Not because it’s normal.

Not because it’s required.

But because it feels safer.

Around the same time, many lawyers began offering unsettling advice to U.S. citizens, such as “Say less,” “Follow instructions,” “Don’t argue”.  Not because the law demands it, but because a new reality does.

That was the moment it became clear to me: Something fundamental is shifting.

Why Minnesota?

People across the state are asking the same question. Why Minnesota? Why such a heavy presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal immigration enforcement here? Are we afraid of undocumented immigrants crossing from Canada?

The answer does not lie in the immigration numbers. Minnesota does not have the highest number of undocumented immigrants. There are lots of estimates on percentages of immigrant population per state. The top five are usually named as California, followed by New Jersey, New York, Florida and Nevada. California is at about 27 percent immigrant population; Nevada at about 20 percent. Minnesota is way down the list, at about eight percent.

But it does have one of the highest per-capita concentrations of ICE agents in the nation right now, and the Twin Cities is the main target. No wonder the key question in all our minds is “So why us?”

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Minnesota was perhaps thought to be a “soft target” — geographically isolated, culturally polite, with enough first-generation immigrants who tend to keep their heads down. Big cities hold assets. Red states have loyal bases. Places like ours are easier for the federal government to target its military power.

Or so they thought. During January 2026, however, Minnesotans showed how this theory was wrong. Instead of caving under the onslaught of armed thugs, they have put up a  persistent and resilient target, repelling ICE troops with righteous anger, unity, self-control and even humor, despite unlawful and often brutal ICE behavior.

Fear in immigrant communities

In my community, many people are first-generation immigrants. Their English is accented or limited. They are unfamiliar with American legal culture. They hesitate. They respond slowly. They are not confident, and that makes them vulnerable.

Many are U.S. citizens or legal residents, yet, like people in all non-white immigrant groups, they fear being mistaken for undocumented immigrants. They are not afraid because they have broken the law — but because they believe enforcement will act illegally.

This fear is not abstract. It is real.  The proof is on the ground, and it shapes how people speak, move and live.

The cost of standing up

I’ll be honest, I’m not brave. I’m not like Alex Pretti.

Knowing the risks, he still stood up when he believed the government was acting unjustly. We soon learned that dedication to the public good, and his belief in the ideals of this country played out in his life. He was a U.S. veteran, and became a registered nurse in order to work on behalf of other veterans at the Veterans’ Administration hospital.  

In his final moments, he wasn’t thinking about himself — he was trying to protect others. His last words were to ask the woman he was trying to shield from ICE attack “Are you OK?”

“Give me liberty, or give me death” is an American ideal attributed to founding father Patrick Henry in exhorting Virginians to rise up against British rule in 1775. Although all of us, even Alex Pretti, would prefer to show our support for our democracy without being shot dead for it, we can all agree with Patrick Henry that a life spent hiding out of fear of an oppressive and reckless military force is no way to live.

Alex Pretti didn’t get up that morning thinking “Give me liberty or give me death,” but because he was out there, standing up for liberty and helping his neighbors, he was forced to carry it to its brutal conclusion.

He was exercising the most basic constitutional rights: freedom of speech, assembly, petition, and the right to observe authority. For that, he was shot

The American system on trial

On January 7, Minnesota lost Renee Good. The Bad and the Ugly then showed up.
Then on January 24, Minnesota lost Alex Pretti. This time, more Minnesotans stood up. Vast marching crowds, videoed by drones, appeared on social media immediately.  The images encouraged Minnesotans and all Americans that we stand together in defiance, resilience, courage, and most of all, unity. These images were proof that there would be no backing down in the face of tyranny.  

The U.S. was first called the “Great Experiment” by George Washington. At the time of its founding, the U.S. governance structure was unique.  Its original genius was not to confer power only to perfect leaders, but to allow a system designed to restrain power. The three branches of government are designed as co-equal so they can tug one another toward a dynamic middle. Separation of powers, due process, and public accountability were meant to prevent exactly the kind of abuse we are all witnessing in this moment.

America’s strength is not that it never errs. It is that it can correct itself. Recently, that self-correction design has been corrupted and skewed. It is a time where the experiment is being tested. Will it hit a breaking point?

What patriotism really means

Recent events have caused me to reflect about what American patriotism is. For me, it is an act: Patriotism means upholding the democratic ideals the country was built upon.  It is also a feeling of loyalty to democratic principles and norms: Liberty, justice, and the rule of law. 

Citizens in a democracy are not subject of a greater power; they are overseers of a system derived from their own power. 

Conflict is not a failure of democracy — it is evidence that democracy still functions. There are accepted principles around government-sanctioned conflict. The media can question the government. Citizens can question law enforcement, including ICE.

I am stating these principles advisedly, since many citizens have been violently dragged from their cars and detained for taking photos or filming on their cell phones. Recently, two Black journalists were arrested (then released) for reporting on a protest held at a St. Paul church.

And, of course, Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed by federal immigration authorities for showing up and questioning ICE. As history reflects on this moment, I believe they will be remembered for speaking up,  protecting others, and in holding power accountable. To many, those actions reflect the very spirit of patriotism — ordinary citizens standing for what they believe is right.

Now, across the country, Americans of many political views are asking the same question: Are we abandoning the Constitution itself?

A brief reminder on the Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights is a set of 10 amendments to the Constitution. They were intended to guarantee the rights of individuals, check and restrain the power of the government. A few of these amendments are particularly important in this moment:

• First Amendment: The right to speak, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, and petition the government for grievances against it without fear of death.

• Second Amendment: The right to keep and bear arms (as a safeguard against tyranny, not a pastime).

• Fourth Amendment: No searches or seizures of a person’s home or private property without probable cause and a warrant.

• Fifth Amendment: Every person accused of a crime has the right to due process, that is, there is no imprisonment without fair procedures and trials.

• Sixth Amendment: The right to a speedy and public trial by jury in criminal cases, for specific criminal charges.  The accused must be able to formally face the accuser, present their own witnesses, and be represented by a lawyer.

How many of these rights are now being violated by ICE?  ICE’s oppressions are challenging our First Amendment rights to speak and assemble, and the recent arrests of journalists (for showing up and doing their jobs) are obvious attempts to chill the freedom of the press.

Alex Pretti’s Second Amendment right to bear arms was certainly questioned in the aftermath of his death by the federal authorities.

ICE is also battering down the doors of private homes to arrest and take away the occupants, and dragging people out of their cars, violating their Fourth Amendment rights to unreasonable search and seizure of one’s home and personal property.

Detainees are being flown to holding facilities out of state and often denied representation either because their attorney is denied access or because the attorney cannot even find out where they are, thus violating their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights.

Demonstrators have also been arrested and taken away under no particular charge, for being too annoying or challenging to ICE authorities, for refusing to follow ICE orders they consider illegal, and/or for looking like an immigrant (i.e., a person of color).

Immigrant detainees and arrested demonstrators are both being denied their Sixth Amendment right, when arrested, to have specific charges against them, with the opportunity to refute the charges in court. This puts them in the untenable position of not knowing how to defend themselves because they don’t know what they are accused of.

How many of our individual rights have to be taken away before we say ”No more”?

A question of decency

Most Americans are decent people. Which makes an old question echo loudly again: “Have you no sense decency, sir?” This was asked of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 during proceedings of his House Un-American Activities Committee to upon McCarthy’s harsh accusations that one of attorney Joseph Welch’s staff had ties to a communist organization.

McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign was a personal vendetta to root out suspected “communists” in the U.S. government, along with any LGBTQ-plus government workers or officials, who were labeled as security threats. Its few Democratic members resigned in disgust early on, but hearings rambled on, televised, for months in 1954. 

The question about decency reverberated with viewers, ordinary Americans were tired and revolted by his campaign. After that pointed question, McCarthy’s power disintegrated almost overnight. There are many current parallels to this moment of history today.

It was a watershed moment. Have we also just experienced another such reverberating moment?

Blaming the victim

Upon hearing of Pretti’s death, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was quick to describe his actions as “domestic terrorism,” saying Pretti was “attacking” officers and “brandishing” a weapon before he was killed. Other loyal Trump administration staff joined in on the blame. 

Right after that announcement, of course, they were walking those comments back, because the video recording, taken by a brave (and law-abiding) bystander, clearly showed what happened. We all saw the video, we know the facts, and we will NOT agree to conclusion that the murders’ higher-ups decided to force-feed to the public. ( “Have you no sense of decency?”) The eyewitness testimony and many videos especially contradict Noem’s accusation about the legally-carried gun, which he never drew.   

What we can do

In the Chinese American community, many are choosing caution. Safety comes first — protecting family, avoiding unnecessary risk. As immigrants, many of us try to avoid trouble. We focus our energy on protecting and providing for our families — staying safe, staying quiet, and keeping away from conflict.

But there is more we can do even if we cannot or should not be marching in the streets right now. Personally, I have decided to:

• Thank neighbors who protest when others are afraid.
• Record events peacefully and lawfully — documentation matters.
• Support community business, particularly minority-owned and immigrant businesses, some of which have to close intermittently for fear of ICE raids.
• Participate in community event such as a Lunar New Year celebration or any other event where the space is safe. 

Most importantly, Asian Americans must not live in fear. This is a time to believe in the ongoing experiment of America, and remind ourselves that patriotism is an ongoing act. Our great experiment needs our support to succeed.

In the words of Alex Pretti, at a remembrance of a patient who had just died at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital,  “Today, we remember that freedom is not free. We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.” 

And for my fellow Minnesotans coping with a disrupted life in their home cities, we need to persevere. Our community needs its liberty back, and we can all help achieve it.

If Yoon’s impeachment opened extraordinary spaces of participation, now they must become integrated into the ordinary workings of democracy | By Dae-Han Song (Spring 2025)

On April 4, 122 days after martial law was declared in South Korea, the constitutional court upheld the National Assembly’s impeachment motion and dismissed the former president Suk Yeol Yoon.

While toppling the president involved a Herculean effort, the greater challenge will be changing social conditions to prevent the rise of another Yoon. After all, eight years ago, then-President Geun-hye Park was also impeached. The failure of President Jae-in Moon and the Democratic Party to fulfill the mandate for social change and reform demanded by the candlelight uprising led to widespread disappointment and discontent, ultimately paving the path for Yoon’s election.

With the clear frontrunner Jae-myung Lee of the Democratic Party declaring himself a “center conservative,” the election has become a contest between conservatives. And while a Lee victory might be necessary to root out those that directly supported and defended Yoon’s self-coup (when he tried to overcome his political impasse with the National Assembly by declaring martial law), it also requires laying the foundations to break the vice grip on power held by the liberal and conservative parties that brought Korean society to this point. To do so, the people need the power to recall elected officials and directly propose their own laws.

Déjà vu

Eight years ago, riding high on the exuberance of the candlelight uprising (which led to the ouster of President Geun-hye Park),  the Democratic Party’s Jae-in Moon was given a mandate for reform. With two years left in his term, his party was even handed a supermajority (180 out of 300 seats) in the following National Assembly. Yet, despite his campaign promises, Moon failed to make Korean society more equal (i.e., he did not substantially increase the minimum wage, control housing prices), safer (i.e., he did not mount a full investigation of the Sewol Ferry Tragedy to prevent its recurrence, or follow through with criminal accountability for industrial accidents), and free from discrimination (i.e., he did not advance the comprehensive anti-discrimination bill).

Now, with the Democratic Party’s Jae-myung Lee the clear frontrunner in opinion polls, the Democratic Party is likely to win the presidency again. If the conservative People Power Party proudly carries the legacy of dictatorship, the liberal Democratic Party, whose ranks swelled with democratization activists from the 1980s, has long been captured by the economic elite. If Lee wins, he would be in a strong position to implement reforms because the Democratic Party will maintain its supermajority in the National Assembly (achieved in 2020 and 2024) for at least the first three years of the next presidency.

Yet, looking at Lee’s track record as the Democratic Party leader since 2022 and his campaign rhetoric, it’s unclear whether his administration would offer policy solutions to ordinary people’s most pressing problems: Inflation, growing inequality, housing prices, and discrimination. After all, during Lee’s leadership, the Democratic Party used its supermajority mostly to play the blame game with the Yoon administration. And, rather than addressing inequality by redistributing wealth through taxation, it abolished the financial investment tax and is now talking about increasing the portion of inheritance exempt from taxation.

Unsurprisingly, before Yoon’s self-coup, the Democratic Party was nearly as unpopular as the People Power Party. Even now, a vote for Lee has simply become a vote for the lesser evil. And while choosing the lesser evil is necessary to root out the elements of Yoon’s self-coup, breaking out of this impeachment-elections-impeachment cycle requires structural changes.

Break the cycle

Today, all parties agree on amending the 1987 constitution, which established the current formal democracy. Even the disgraced conservative People Power Party is calling for constitutional amendments to shorten the next presidential term, given their likely defeat. The Democratic Party is proposing to amend the constitution to redistribute power from the executive to the legislative branch. Yet, neither is addressing the limitations of the 1987 constitution: a formal democracy that limits democratic participation to voting during elections.

Impeaching President Yoon created an extraordinary opening for ordinary people (among them, young women and members of the LGBTQ+ community) to rise up as democratic actors. Without expanding participation, formal democracy’s response to their efforts, growth, and exuberance amounts to: “Thank you for defending democracy. Please make sure to vote.” Korea’s democracy must accommodate the democratic space for these emerging actors to shape their lives and future beyond choosing between two parties.

That’s why a progressive current is forming around the need to expand participatory democracy. More specifically, the People Power Direct Action (established to organize ordinary people to impeach Yoon and expand direct democracy) is proposing to root out the self-coup elements. It wants to do this by empowering people with the right to recall elected officials and propose their own laws. With such expanded powers, voters could remove leaders who have lost their democratic mandate.

Before declaring martial law, Yoon’s actions and policies had already turned him into a lame duck president with approval rating at around 20 percent.  Yet, without the recall referendum, voters could do nothing but wait for him to complete the second half of his term. Furthermore, even after Yoon carried out martial law and was impeached by the National Assembly, the public had to anxiously wait for the Constitutional Court to uphold the impeachment.

Secondly, the power to propose laws would break the vice grip held by elite interests. If the conservative party proudly carries the legacy of dictatorship, the liberal party, whose ranks swelled with democratization activists from the 1980s, has long been captured by the elite. After all, in one of the issues most important to young people – housing – (conservative and liberal) National Assembly members are aligned with the elite.

The average real estate assets for National Assembly members stand at KRW 1.9 billion (about $1.3 million), nearly five times the national average. Among the top ten wealthiest, four are from the Democratic Party; the other six, from the People Power Party. In fact, the largest real estate assets – KRW 41 billion (roughly $30 million) – are held by a Democratic Party assembly member. Most importantly, 54.7 percent of the members of the three permanent committees connected to real estate have significant land holdings themselves. If the National Assembly fails to propose bills that control housing prices, it’s because it hurts their interests.

The same argument applies to controlling financial speculation and stock ownership. And if this is neither shocking nor unique to South Korea, then democracy requires that common people be given the power to propose laws that represent their interests.

Lessons across time and place have shown us that the way to the greatest evils are the accumulated disappointments and anger from settling for the lesser evil. To break free, people need to be able to rise as democratic actors. If Yoon’s impeachment opened extraordinary spaces of participation, now they must become integrated into the ordinary workings of democracy. The ability to recall elected officials and propose laws would be a start.

This article is reprinted from Globetrotter with permission.

Whitewashed U.S. accounts and popular films versus the real origins of the Korean War and its consequences on a generation of Koreans | By Tim Shorrock (Summer 2025)

To mark the official start of the Korean War, I go deep with the historian Bob Buzzanco on the war’s origins in the enormous divide inside Korea after it was colonized by Japan from 1910 to 1945.

To most Americans, the official date of the Korean War’s beginning is June 25, 1950, when North Korean military forces crossed the 38th parallel and “invaded” the South. To commemorate the date, I was invited to appear on the Green and Red Podcast by host Bob Buzzanco and his producer, Scott Parkin (if you just prefer to listen, click here).

Here’s how Bob introduces the show:

It’s the 75th anniversary of the Korean War. Looking at the politics and history of the “Forgotten War,” we talk with journalist Tim Shorrock. We discuss the Open Door in Asia [during the late 1800s and early 20th century], the Japanese occupation of Korea, communist resistance to it, the rise of right wing South Korean forces, North Korea crossing the 38th parallel, the Cold War and more.

It was an excellent show, in part because of the probing questions from my hosts, and we go back all the way to the late 1800s, during the era of the Joseon Kingdom in Korea and its desperate attempt to keep the U.S., Japan, Russia, and the other imperialist powers out of the peninsula.

You will notice that I put the term “invaded” above in quotes. I do that because the so-called “Forgotten War” was in reality a civil war that began almost from the moment that the U.S. unilaterally divided the Korean Peninsula in two after dropping its second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The Soviet Union quickly agreed to the proposal, and by early September, the U.S. Army had occupied the southern half with its troops.

Stalin’s Red Army, which was already in Korea by then, occupied the northern half, which shares a short border with Russia. By the summer of 1950, the U.S. and Soviet troops had withdrawn, leaving the two separate states in the once-unified country to fight it out. South Korean leader Syngman Rhee had threatened for months to “march north” and “liberate” the DPRK. But to the shock of his divided government and the U.S., which still had 500 military advisers in country, the DPRK crossed the line first in an attempt to overthrow Rhee and kick U.S. forces off the Korean Peninsula.

It was a desperate gamble on the part of Il Sung Kim, the DPRK leader who fought the Japanese throughout World War II in Manchuria. Noting that the U.S. had not intervened to prevent China’s communist revolution in 1949, he believed the Truman administration would stay out of Korea too. But he was dead wrong, as he quickly learned when President Truman, with Republican taunts of “who lost China?” ringing in his ears, ordered hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to the Korean front.

I’ve always wondered: how can we call Kim’s action an “invasion” when his army was one faction of Koreans fighting another across a temporary border that had been imposed on them by two powerful foreign nations? The truth is, we can’t. That so-called border was completely arbitrary and had nothing to do with the reality of Korea.

As I write in my story The Nagasaki Bomb and the Division of Korea about the U.S. decision to draw the line, “Not a single Korean was consulted, leaving this proud country with a 5,000-year history as a single nation out in the cold for this momentous decision.”  Eighty years later, Korea remains bitterly divided and is still in a technical state of war.

In the book I’m writing about U.S. intervention in Japan and Korea after World War II, I make three key points about the war that I also discussed in the show.

1. The all-out war between the U.S.-controlled UN forces and the North Korean Army that began in June 1950 was preceded by a vicious U.S.-led counterinsurgency war in the South against leftist anticolonial forces that killed thousands of people long before the “invasion” from the North.

By 1946, the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea and Syngman Rhee, a U.S.-educated independence activist, had created a South Korean state led by landlords, businessmen, right-wing nationalists and anti-communists. Many of them had collaborated with the Japanese during its 35 years of colonial rule. Their policies, dictated by the U.S. military, triggered a massive political struggle with the anticolonial and powerful South Korean left, which was demanding full independence and a single, unified Korean government.

The counterinsurgency campaign culminated on the island of Jeju, where the U.S.-led South Korean army crushed an uprising in the only province to vote against Rhee’s plan to create a separate state in South Korea (that atrocity is the subject of Nobel laureate Han Kang‘s latest novel, We Do Not Part). The internal struggle inside Korea caused over 100,000 deaths before the North Koreans crossed the demarcation line in June 1950, according to a senior U.S. diplomat who was stationed in Seoul during that time.

I conclude in my book that the people of southern Korea were the first to be subjected to the anti-communist death-squad repression chillingly described as the “Jakarta Method” by the journalist Vincent Bevins in his great book, Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped our World.

2. The war took place just as the “reverse course” in the U.S. occupation of Japan was coming to fruition.  The shift from democratization to remilitarization greatly profited Japan, which saw its economy grow by leaps and bounds when the U.S. flooded Japanese industry with procurement orders to help it fight the unfolding war in Korea.

The change in U.S. policy towards Japan began in the late 1940s, when the U.S. government, backed by a powerful coalition of American conservatives and businessmen with close ties to the Japanese elite, shifted its focus from democratizing and demilitarizing Japan to making the country the linchpin for the U.S. Cold War strategy in the Far East.

Almost overnight, U.S. policy shifted from punishing Japanese officials and industrialists responsible for World War II to enlisting them in a global war against the Soviet Union and China. Meanwhile, in a massive “red purge,” Japanese communists and radicals who had been freed from Japanese prisons in the initial days of the occupation were forced out of public life and thrown back in jail. Then, with Japan in deep recession, the Korean War began, and the country’s economy was saved.

Not only did Japan provide the bases the U.S. Air Force used to pummel Korea, but its industries supplied most of the jeeps, radios, and weapons used by the U.S. military in its fight to eradicate the communist threat. This is how the State Department described the economic transition in an official history that has remained on the web until 2009:

In 1950, “the most serious problem [in Japan] was the shortage of raw materials required to feed Japanese industries and markets for finished goods. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 provided [U.S. Occupation forces] with just the opportunity it needed to address this problem, prompting some occupation officials to suggest that, “Korea came along and saved us.”  After the UN (sic) entered the Korean War, Japan became the principal supply depot for [the U.S.-commanded] UN forces.

That’s quite a claim: A terrible war next door “saved” Japan and the U.S. occupation. In fact, the amount of procurements purchased by the Pentagon in Japan from 1950 to 1953 so rejuvenated its economy that historians there still call it the “Korean War boom.” As Chalmers Johnson, the late, great historian of postwar Japan often noted, the U.S. military spending during this period replicated in Japan what the Marshall Plan did in Europe.

The Korean War also laid the seeds for Japan’s remilitarization. At the outset of the fighting, with U.S. forces in Japan suddenly deployed to Korea, Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered the Japanese government to establish a national police force. Despite the public support for the constitutional prohibition against a standing army, this force became the nucleus of Japan’s new “Self Defense Forces” that is today one of the largest militaries in the world.

The “reverse course” continued through the Korean War, which the U.S. used in 1951 as leverage to force Japan to sign a peace agreement that guaranteed the permanent stationing of U.S. bases on Japanese soil. Since 1955, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, created with the financial backing of the CIA, has been America’s closest and most subservient ally in Asia.

3. Truman’s intervention in Korea transformed the civil war into a global struggle that almost triggered World War III. That happened when his administration (not Gen. MacArthur, as most U.S. historians claim) ordered the U.S.-led UN and South Korean forces to cross the 38th parallel and try to overthrow the North Korean State.

If the U.S.-run UN forces had stopped at the original border, Truman might have deserved credit for “saving” South Korea. But Cold War hubris got in the way. After MacArthur led the counterattack in his Inchon invasion, the administration sent U.S. and South Korean forces deep into North Korea in a brazen attempt to “roll back” communism and establish a permanent strategic beachhead on Korea’s borders with China and the USSR.

This sparked the Chinese intervention that sent the U.S. Marines, and the UN army back into South Korea. Millions died in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century. Most of those deaths came at the hands of the U.S., which – as President Trump boasted about the U.S. Air Force over Iran last week – seized control of Korea’s skies in the first days of the war.

As Korean American writer Grace Cho wrote in an excellent article in The Nation, “When we say ‘war,’ maybe what we really mean is ‘genocide.’” That’s exactly what it was.

Why the Korean War is not forgotten in Korea

During the Korean War, over three million Koreans were killed, the majority of them civilians. Nearly 40,000 Americans, about 4,000 foreign troops in the U.S.-run UN Command, and over 100,000 Chinese also died. Millions of Koreans were left homeless, their lives forever scarred by the fratricidal violence. Afterward, the entire country was left in cinders; in the North, every single city was destroyed.

Much of that destruction was caused by the U.S. Air Force, which wrested control of the skies early on and spent the war bombing, strafing, and splashing napalm everywhere it could find the communist enemy. In November, 1950, after China’s intervention in the battle shortened MacArthur’s vision on a short war in which the boys “would be home by Christmas,” the arrogant commander pronounced a death sentence on huge numbers of Koreans with a scorched-earth policy.

“Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target,” he ordered. That inhumane directive was gleefully carried out by Gen.Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff who masterminded the firebombing of Japan just five years before. “Over a period of three years or so,” he said in an oral history for Princeton University, “we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too,” adding that “a lot of people can’t stomach it.”

The genocidal nature of the war was carefully hidden from the American people by Hollywood, which produced dozens of movies that were sheer propaganda and served to cover up U.S. war crimes. “When the war erupted in June 1950, Hollywood was still busy cranking out World War II epics,” the reporter Ki-Hoon Moon wrote in a brilliant article in The Korea Herald on June 24.

That conflict had a clear narrative arc: good versus evil, and a victory that made all the sacrifice feel earned. Korea, by contrast, offered no such closure — no victory to justify suffering, no heroes to welcome home. What eventually took shape was a cinematic trend scholar Daniel Kim terms ‘humanitarian Orientalism’: A wave of films that presented white Americans as benevolent saviors while reducing Koreans to infantile objects in need of rescue and moral guidance from the West.

One Minute to Zero (1952) channeled this notion through its central moral dilemma. Robert Mitchum’s Col. Janowski orders artillery strikes on refugee columns suspected of harboring North Korean infiltrators. While the scenes unfold with unflinching brutality, with set pieces intercut with real footage of fleeing civilians, the film’s ultimate drama rests squarely on Mitchum’s inner turmoil and his girlfriend’s gradual acceptance of the war’s harsh imperatives. As such, Korean civilian deaths are framed as unfortunate but justifiable collateral damage in the white protagonists’ deeply personal humanitarian quest.

Battle Hymn (1957) followed a similar formula. Here, Rock Hudson’s Col. Dean Hess takes in Korean orphans even as he carries out deadly bombing missions. The film blurs the line between humanitarian rescue and military strategy, portraying the act of saving orphans as a way to keep them away from communism. In so doing, it reveals the biopolitical logic of American intervention: Some Korean lives deserve protection, while others constitute acceptable losses.

Still, word about the war got out. In May 1951, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a private organization created during World War I, sent an international delegation of 21 women from 17 countries to North Korea to investigate atrocities committed by U.S. and South Korean troops during and after their occupation of the DPRK. MacArthur’s directive, they said in a report for the United Nations, “meant the revival of the fearful military tactic that had reduced considerable parts of civilian areas in Germany and Japan to ashes during World War II.”

The report, which was completely ignored by the American press, described in gruesome detail the impact of U.S. firepower. “The people of Korea,” it began, are subjected to “a merciless and methodical campaign of extermination which is in contradiction not only with the principles of humanity but also with the rules of warfare as laid down, for instance, in the Hague and Geneva conventions.”

The U.S. Air Force bombing, it said, was marked by “the systematic destruction of food, food-stores and food-factories” and “the systematic destruction of town after town, of village after village, many of which by no stretch of imagination could be considered to be military objectives.”

The Truman administration denounced the report and launched a vitriolic campaign of red-baiting to discredit the women, leading “to the labelling of the WIDF as a communist organization and its subsequent removal from the UN as a consultative organization,” wrote Suzy Kim, a professor of Korean studies at Rutgers University.

Yet despite the denunciations, some American generals involved in the bombing campaign were genuinely were shocked at what they had done, inadvertently confirming what was in the report.  “I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is a terrible mess,” Air Force four-star Gen. Emmett E. “Rosie” O’Donnell, Jr. a decorated World War II veteran, said afterwards. “Everything is destroyed. There is nothing left standing worthy of the name.”

Even MacArthur was shocked. “I shrink — I shrink with a horror that I cannot express in words — at this continuous slaughter of men in Korea,” he lamented during his famous Senate hearings in May 1951. “The war in Korea has almost destroyed that nation.” If the war continues, he warned, “you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind.”

Incredibly, nobody in Korea was spared the wrath of the American armada, so the damage was terrible in the South as well.

MacArthur’s forces began bombing runs south of the 38^th parallel immediately after the North Korean invasion. In July 1950, a phalanx of B-29s attacked the Yongsan area of Seoul in a raid designed to kill North Korean forces billeted there; over 1,300 civilians died and were buried in mass graves. U.S. bombing and shelling elsewhere in the south killed many more.

“We even burned down Pusan,” LeMay boasted in an interview. “That was an accident, but we burned it down anyway.” Even MacArthur’s daring invasion at Inchon, considered to be one of the proudest moments in U.S. military history, was equally violent and preceded by a vicious attack that killed many Korean civilians. On September 10, 1950, according to a 2008 report by the South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, U.S. Marine aircraft attacked the nearby island of Wolmi-do to “eliminate all possible threats” to the Inchon landing.

The result was an atrocity. The U.S. forces “saturated the populated east side of Wolmi-do with napalm bombing, rocketing and strafing of houses and inhabitants” and hit “children, women and the elderly,” the commission found. “There is a strong likelihood that U.S. forces were aware of the numerous civilians living in Wolmi-do, but there was no evidence” that they gave any prior warnings of their attack.

The South Korean commission (which did its work from 2004 to 2008 and was heavily criticized by the U.S. government) concluded that the devastation wrought by the Marines “cannot be justified under the principle of discrimination or the principle of proportionality.” At least 10 victims were verified killed, but casualties were likely much higher.

The commission also determined that U.S. forces were directly responsible for at least 300 dead at the infamous massacre at the No Gun Ri Bridge in the early days of the Korean War that was first uncovered by the Associated Press. The AP won a Pulitzer prize for its investigation (the U.S. expressed “regret” but never formally apologized).

In its final report, the Korean commission concluded that 86 percent of 14,373 executions in the south in 1950 were committed by security forces operating under U.S. control, Dong Choon Kim, a member of the commission, wrote that of the 1,222 incidents classified as massacres, “215 were found to have been committed by the United States military,” Kim added.

Sadly, the survivors of those massacres and the bereaved families had to hide their grief for decades because South Korea’s U.S.-backed authoritarian leaders, Syngman Rhee and Chung Hee Park, forbid any public acknowledgement of the deaths of anyone considered a communist or a subversive. It was only after South Korea established its democracy in 1987 that Koreans could learn their true history.

By supporting these authoritarian governments and denying its own role in the Korean War genocide, the U.S. participated in one of the largest cover-ups in history. The time is long due for a full reevaluation of the war and a national dialogue about its costs and consequences. 

Can this and other middle-power diplomacy coalitions stay relevant in these times? | By Jeffrey Robertson (Fall 2025)

When the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) coalition was born in 1989, it was more than another acronym. It was a moment of triumph for middle powers — Australia, Canada, South Korea, and others — asserting that the post–Cold War world could be shaped not just by the great powers, but by those who knew how to manage cooperation. It was pragmatic, elegant, and deeply functional. It promised a region connected by openness rather than divided by ideology.

This longstanding diplomatic organization, consisting of 21 nations including the U.S. and South Korea, is still running, and South Korea will host its upcoming summit in Gyeongju, in November, with meetings in three other South Korea cities. The theme is “Building a Sustainable Tomorrow: Connect, Innovate, Prosper” and its general purpose is to lower trade barriers and strengthen trade and commerce among its member countries.

For a fleeting decade, APEC was the exemplar of middle-power diplomacy: Agile, inventive, and confident enough to believe that globalization could be guided rather than merely endured. More than that, it was colorful! It was the fruit yogurt of multilateralism. An unnatural panoply of fruits from across the region — summits, declarations, handshakes and hesitatingly hilarious national costume photo shoots. 

Yet, like any unnatural mix of exotic fruit and milky proteins, its time in the sun left the color but soured the taste. Its shelf life expired, and its ingredients — dialogue, openness, flexibility—have turned rotten. The post–Cold War order, in which APEC thrived, has passed. Without reform, so too will APEC. 

APEC’s achievements

To appreciate what will be lost, it’s worth recalling how extraordinary APEC once was. In an era defined by great-power institutions — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the UN Security Council, the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized countries — APEC emerged as something else entirely. It is a network of economies, not states, united less by shared ideology than by shared geography and commercial logic. It embodied what it termed “open regionalism,” a concept as subtle as it was radical. Instead of excluding outsiders, it encouraged members to liberalize trade among themselves in ways that would ultimately benefit all.

APEC was the height of post-Cold war middle power diplomacy and ticked off all of its criteria: Active diplomacy, niche diplomacy, good international citizenship, and coalition building. Indeed, so successful was the coalition building that when you ask around for long enough, you discover as many “inventors” of APEC as there were representatives at the first meeting! 

Academics will tell you that academics created APEC — the result of new levels of academic-diplomatic cooperation, inspired by Track-2 and Track 1.5 initiatives (a diplomatic term for initiatives crafted informally by non-state actors, such as academics). These were created by and built upon the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC).

Diplomats will tell you that it was diplomatic innovation —  the result of the largest foreign affairs budgets in a generation. Australians will suredly tell you it was an Australian invention, South Koreans will tell you it was a Korean invention, Indonesians will tell you it was an Indonesian invention. All that can be said; APEC was the result of some pretty smooth diplomatic and political coalition building.

And for a while, it worked.

It established a framework for engagement that softened hierarchies. For business, it meant fewer barriers. For bureaucrats, it meant dialogue towards reform. For scholars, it was a living experiment in functional multilateralism.

With time, the results highlighted the success: Tariffs fell, investment grew, and Asia-Pacific integration became the story of the 1990s. Leaders met annually, economies coordinated, and the APEC spirit — technocratic, incremental, and resolutely cooperative — seemed to capture the essence of the post–Cold War order.

What went wrong?

APEC was the institutional reflection of its time: It was built in an era that was optimistic about liberal order, confident in American leadership, and trusting in the idea that prosperity would bind nations more tightly than politics could divide them. Its success depended on three conditions: A relatively stable unipolar system, shared faith in globalization, and the willingness of middle powers to mediate rather than challenge.

These conditions no longer exist. The unipolar world is gone. Globalization has fractured into rival standards and contested supply chains. Middle powers — once the balancers — are increasingly caught between strategic dependence and domestic fragmentation.

The result is that APEC’s format now feels almost quaint. Its communiqués read like relics, its agendas recycled like the most awkward Asian national costumes worn by the sweatiest overweight western leaders after APEC conferences. It still convenes, still publishes, still talks about “facilitation.” But the energy is performative. The language of cooperation remains, but the logic that sustained it, has evaporated.

Is change possible?

Institutional transformation between eras is possible — but only for those institutions that serve clear, durable functions. For example, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), founded in 1865, persists because it manages something concrete: Technical coordination. The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), born in the 1880s, still convenes legislators because its purpose — dialogue between parliaments — transcends geopolitics. The Universal Postal Union (UPU) is another: It endures because mail must move, regardless of the century.

These organizations outlived their origins because they do things. They deliver, regulate, or arbitrate something tangible. What, by contrast, does APEC do?

That question reveals the problem. Was APEC about open regionalism — a strategic move by Australia to dilute exclusive Asian blocs? Was it about trade facilitation — a way for governments to streamline business cooperation? Or was it simply about middle power diplomacy — an attempt to contain major powers within a framework of dialogue and consensus?

Whichever purpose one chooses, it was bound to expire. Open regionalism faded once the World Trade Organization (WTO) stalled and bilateral deals took over. Trade facilitation moved to more formal, enforceable agreements like the free trade agreements known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Likewise, middle-power diplomacy found its footing in other frameworks, such as the Group of 20 (G20) which represents 19 countries plus the European Union and African Union, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ agreements with other countries (known as the “ASEAN-plus agreements”). APEC, lacking both the hard edge of trade law and the emotional pull of regional identity, simply drifted.

Can APEC be reformed?

APEC’s inertia is not unique. The difficult process of transforming of institutions during times of significant geopolitical change is one of the great recurring themes of international relations. Once created, bureaucracies resist reinvention. They are designed for stability, not for imagination. There are exceptions — but whether APEC, South Korea and reform are a neat bundle, is a difficult question.

South Korea prides itself on being a model middle power — dynamic, globally-connected, and committed to multilateralism. But that reputation masks a deeper weakness: its diplomatic institutions are trained for adaptation, not for innovation. South Korea was a post post-Cold War middle power. 

Seoul never demonstrated the sustained diplomatic creativity required to establish an institution like APEC. There are other smaller coalitions of nations that have also had relevance issues, including the group of five countries — Mexico, Indonesia, Republic of Korea, Türkiye and Australia (known as MIKTA), and the group of developing countries, the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) , a treaty-based intergovernmental economic coalition. Both of these organizations have had challenges to roles. It is obvious their original roles have been eroded, and today, their relevance is precarious.

MIKTA started with fanfare, holding leaders meetings and gala dinners. It is now an affair for local junior diplomats with boxed lunches on the side of more important meetings. The GGGI appears to be a multilaterally-funded retirement village for former South Korean ministers and diplomats, staffed by a bevy of outsiders shuffling paper to show legitimacy.

If any country in the Asia-Pacific were to attempt a reinvention of APEC’s purpose, Korea should be well placed. It straddles North and South, East and West, and has many interactions with both developed and developing countries. It understands both the vulnerabilities of middle powers and the ambitions of great ones. 

Yet, its foreign ministry culture — hierarchical, legalistic, and risk-averse — remains ill-suited to the kind of creative diplomacy that institutional transformation requires. The ministry excels at implementing the agendas of others, not at inventing new sustainable frameworks on their own. We cannot expect APEC to be ready for a new era after its Gyeongju conference.

APEC may have been the fruit yogurt of post–Cold War multilateralism — colorful, sweet, and healthy. It was an inspired concoction of diplomacy and optimism, blending incompatible ingredients into something surprisingly palatable. But for institutions, just as for yogurt, preservation should never be the goal. Renewal should be the goal. The question is whether those who try to build on the Gyeongju conference will have the courage to start mixing again.