Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

North Korea

Christian dogma meets Kimilsungism

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Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult ~ By Jonathan Cheng

How a holy trinity of Kim the father, his son Jong Il Kim, and the spirit of Kimilsungism became the anchor of a personality cult

(Knopf/Doubleday Publishing Group, New York, 2026, ISBN #978-1-5247-3349-0)

In the summer of 1998, I traveled to the northeast region of China to visit a unique educational institution. The Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST), founded six years before, was the first private and the first foreign university to emerge under Chinese communism. Located in a region populated by many Korean-Chinese, YUST trained the children of the elite in computers, engineering, and architecture, among other specialties. It was also the forerunner of an affiliate that opened in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang a few years later.

YUST was also remarkable because it was established by evangelical Christians from the U.S., something the Chinese government tolerated in exchange for high-quality vocational training. The staff I talked with, all Korean Americans, were happy enough to be working in China, where they were careful to conceal their religious sympathies except in one-on-one interactions with the students. But the hope of most of the faculty, I was told confidentially, was to work in North Korea. Although it was exciting to proselytize covertly in China, the teachers had their hopes pinned on doing God’s work among North Koreans.

Those teachers were oriented toward the mecca of North Korea in part because that region of the world had once witnessed one of the most extraordinary upsurges in conversion to Christianity in the modern era. That upsurge had been suppressed during the period of Japanese rule in the first half of the 20th century before being eliminated altogether in 1945 when communist North Korea began to actively suppress all official religions. The teachers were eager to restore Christianity to its former home in Korea.

At the time, I knew that Pyongyang had once been the “Jerusalem of the East,” that the country’s founder Il Sung Kim had a Christian background, and that some elements of Kim’s ideology drew on religious sources. This was common knowledge among North Korea watchers.

But it was only after reading Jonathan Cheng’s voluminous new account, Korean Messiah, that I can now connect all the dots between the rapid spread of Christianity in 19th-century Korea and the rapid consolidation of Il Sung Kim’s rule in the latter half of the 20th-century.

Journalists rarely have the luxury of digging deep into a topic and then developing an argument across multiple articles. As a former Korea bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, Cheng relishes this opportunity to dig very deeply into the Christian history of Korea and then develop the connections between Kim and the religion that birthed him across nearly 550 pages (excluding footnotes). It’s not really until more than 200 pages in that young Il Sung Kim even enters the picture. At times, I would have preferred a more journalistic condensation of the subject. But overall, Cheng’s deep dive is an excellent addition to the literature on North Korea.

In that first pre-Kim part of the book, Cheng explores the way missionaries brought Christianity to Korea, braving inauspicious conditions and even, in some cases, courting martyrdom. It was a tumultuous time for Korea, which found itself caught up in the jockeying for geopolitical power among Russia, Japan, and China. Christianity spread quickly in part because it provided a hopeful vision of the meek inheriting the earth. Koreans weren’t exactly meek, but they were collectively weak in the face of their neighboring empires. Many Koreans also found a fighting spirit in Christianity — that of Jesus angrily sweeping the moneychangers out of the temple — which translated into a revolutionary determination in the early 1900s to expel the Japanese occupiers. Several assassins of Japanese officials, for instance, were Christian converts.

Christianity, as Cheng points out, also flourished because it offered a path to modernity, a way around the strict hierarchies of Korean culture that kept women locked away at home and certain castes locked away in poverty. Christian women began to leave their houses and, contrary to centuries of tradition, to eat dinner with their families. The poor also found advocates among the ministers. “When, during one church service in 1895, the noblemen threatened to leave the church unless the butchers were expelled,” Cheng writes.  “Rev. Moore let them walk, leading the butchers and the other remaining congregants in a singing of ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I know.’”

In the latter part of the 19th century, missionaries transformed the face of northern Korea. Pyongyang had previously been notorious for its saloons and brothels. A door-to-door campaign in 1905 to convert the city’s residents discovered that 40 percent were already Christians. By that point, the houses of ill repute had largely vanished.

When the Japanese occupation authority tried to impose Shintoism on the population, many Christians fled to neighboring Manchuria in northeast China so that they could continue practicing their religion. Many decades later, some of the descendants of those fleeing Christians would send their children to study at YUST.  

The young Il Sung Kim was part of that exodus, and it was in Manchuria where his Christian consciousness and revolutionary mindset developed in tandem. Later, when he returned to North Korea with the victorious Russian army in 1945, Kim would virtually erase his Christian upbringing and wildly exaggerate his revolutionary credentials. As the new Kim-led regime closed churches and expropriated religious properties, Christians fled in droves to the South. Between 1945 and 1950, Cheng reports, a million Christians moved south. In 1950 alone, those religious refugees were responsible for 90 percent of the 2,000 new churches established in South Korea.

Despite Kim’s official anti-Christian doctrine, Cheng points out that revolution and religion continued to intermingle in Kim’s thinking. The particular version of communism that Il Sung Kim would impose on North Korea drew on Christian dogma. A holy trinity of Kim the father, his son Jong Il Kim, and the spirit of Kimilsungism became the anchor of a personality cult. The Ten Commandments became the “Ten Principles of the Monolithic Ideology.” Kim performed miracles, he offered narratives of redemption for the Korean people, and he even displaced Marxism-Leninism with his own Chuch’e (sometimes spelled Juche) ideology of self-reliance. Major edifices devoted to the new state replaced what had been church complexes, with the Kim Il Sung Library rising up where the main Methodist church had been and the huge statue of Kim erected where the Central Presbyterian Church once stood.

Though Cheng doesn’t mention it, Kim’s approach was very similar to the way Christianity took root in Europe, with the cult of Mary replacing earlier sects devoted to female deities, and with churches built on the same sites as pre-Christian sites of worship. The New Testament drew heavily on the Old Testament, and in the Old Testament can be glimpsed remnants of earlier religions (for instance, in all the names of Yahweh).

Perhaps the most interesting part of Cheng’s book, however, comes later in the elder Kim’s life, when he experiences an apparent change of heart about the Christianity that he ruthlessly suppressed on taking power. In the memoirs he wrote in his final decades, Kim was “not merely acknowledging his family’s ties with the Christian faith but describing, in anecdote after anecdote, for hundreds of pages, his deep immersion in the church and his gratitude to the Christians in his life — tales told with an unmistakable sense of wistfulness,” Cheng writes. At the same time, Kim was meeting with various representatives of the Christian community, authorizing the construction of churches to satisfy outside religious institutions, and even mending fences with previous religious adversaries like the deeply anti-communist Rev. Moon of the Unification Church.

Pyongyang engaged with religious figures even further on the fringes. In Guyana, for instance, cult leader Jim Jones established a compound for his followers called Jonestown where he “read aloud from North Korean publications extolling the Great Leader, screened propaganda films from Pyongyang for his followers and even invited North Korean agents to preach the virtues of Kimilsungism.”

Jonestown, of course, self-destructed. The Kim dynasty, meanwhile, lives on in North Korea, in part because the state continues to exercise tyrannical control over the population. Kim also managed, through his skillful and syncretic adaptation of Christianity, to instill in North Koreans that his regime was also a belief system. “More than half of North Koreans in a 2011 survey of more than 100 North Koreans resettled in the South said they still feel pride in Chuch’e ideology and supported Kim family rule,” Cheng points out.

Although anecdotal evidence suggests that substantially fewer North Koreans — inside or outside the country — feel the same way about Kim’s grandson, Jong Un Kim, the endurance of the Kim dynasty across three generations cannot be attributed solely to brute force. Cheng’s book is an indispensable guide to understanding the methods by which the North Korean regime captured at least some of the hearts and minds of the residents of what had once been one of the most rapidly Christianized parts of the world.

North Korea

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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)

Former President Jimmy Carter meets with then DPRK leader Jong Il Kim in North Korea in 1994. First Lady Rosalynn Carter on left.

Editor’s note:  As the 39th 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

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Features

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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.

Over 100,000 civilians suspected of communist sympathies were executed by the South Korean Army in scenes like this even before Il Sung Kim’s Army crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950. (US Army/The Nation)

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.

  1. 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.

Explosives dropped from US B-26 bombers based in Japan rain havoc on the industrial North Korean city of Wonson in 1951. 

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.

  1. 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.

Rock Hudson as a benevolent American bomber pilot tending to the children whose lives were destroyed by the massive U.S. bombing in Battle Hymn.

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 38th 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.

U.S. soldiers walking through the charred remains of Wolmi-Do after U.S. forces attacked it from the air to clear the way for MacArthur’s invasion of Inchon. (National Archives)

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).

The great editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad in the Los Angeles Times on Nogunri.

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. 

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A 75th anniversary and a time of reckoning

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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.

Over 100,000 civilians suspected of communist sympathies were executed by the South Korean Army in scenes like this even before Il Sung Kim’s Army crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950. (US Army/The Nation)

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.

  1. 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.

Explosives dropped from US B-26 bombers based in Japan rain havoc on the industrial North Korean city of Wonson in 1951. 

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.

  1. 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.

Rock Hudson as a benevolent American bomber pilot tending to the children whose lives were destroyed by the massive U.S. bombing in Battle Hymn.

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 38th 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.

U.S. soldiers walking through the charred remains of Wolmi-Do after U.S. forces attacked it from the air to clear the way for MacArthur’s invasion of Inchon. (National Archives)

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).

The great editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad in the Los Angeles Times on Nogunri.

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. 

When Jimmy Carter went to North Korea

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Ever the peacemaker, he met with Il Sung Kim in 1994 and helped freeze Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade | By Christine Ahn (Spring 2023)

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and then-North Korean leader Il Sung Kim examine the West Sea Floodgate in 1994.

As the world reflects on the legacy of President Jimmy Carter, it’s important to remember the place where he may have left one of his greatest post-presidency marks — the Korean Peninsula.

Not only was Carter instrumental in preventing a U.S. attack on North Korea that could have been a second Korean War, he also was an advocate for replacing the 1953 ceasefire with a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War. Now, Carter’s legacy can provide the Biden administration with crucial insight of how to move forward with North Korea, especially as Pyongyang has become a de facto nuclear power.

To Korea watchers, President Carter’s legacy on Korea is mixed. While in office, he made a tragic error in quashing the democratic uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, that claimed hundreds of lives. Tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest martial law following a military coup. On May 22, 1980, Carter’s national security team gave the green light to Lieutenant General Doo-hwan Chun to use force against the student protests in Gwangju, the birthplace of South Korea’s democracy. Much of the South Korean populace who longed for democracy felt betrayed by a U.S. president who championed human rights diplomacy.

But after leaving the White House, Carter played an instrumental role in preventing a new Korean War. In September 1994, as President Clinton weighed a first-strike on North Korea’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, President Carter, flanked by a CNN camera crew, flew to Pyongyang to meet Il Sung Kim and outline the terms of the Agreed Framework, which succeeded in freezing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade.

In his experience speaking with North Korean leaders, from Il Sung Kim to Jong Il Kim, Carter felt that he understood what North Korea wanted, as well as how the U.S. and North Korea could move forward on a path toward peace.

“All that the North Koreans have wanted is a peace agreement instead of a ceasefire and that we should help North Koreans access the outside world by ending our embargo,” he told me in November 2018, when we sat down together at the Carter Center in Atlanta. “They want basic peace with the United States and the ability to become part of a community of nations on an equal basis. I pray and hope that we work out an agreement and treat the North Koreans fairly.”

Carter pointed out the irony of how the U.S. had spent the last 70 years trying “to destroy the economy of North Korea” while working “to boost the economy of South Korea. And still, we condemn the North Koreans for not having a good economy.”

At that time in 2018, the two leaders of North Korea and South Korea, Jong-un Kim and Jae-in Moon , met three times — twice at Panmunjom and once in Pyongyang — where they signed two declarations committing to ending war on the Korean Peninsula and ushering in a new era of peace. But peacemaking between the two Koreas alone was not enough; the success of the inter-Korean peace process also rested on the U.S. establishing peace with the North.

Unfortunately, summit meetings between the two in 2018-2019 ended in failure. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that. This year has already witnessed dangerously high tensions on the peninsula: North Korea recently displayed enough ICBMs to overwhelm the U.S.’s missile defense system and Washington and Seoul are ramping up massive joint military exercises in response. And South Korea under a conservative President Seok-yeol Yoon is flirting with the idea of arming itself with nuclear weapons.

The backdrop to this endless cycle of provocations is the U.S.-China great power conflict, which has put the Korean Peninsula on its front line.

While the Biden administration’s North Korea envoy has said he is willing to meet with his North Korean counterparts “anywhere, anytime,” Pyongyang has largely ignored those offers, and it’s not hard to understand why. Many U.S. policymakers across the political spectrum continue to resist calls for a peace, arguing that signing a peace agreement with North Korea would grant the Kim regime the right to become a nuclear-weapons state. Hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham has argued that a declaration of peace should only come “after [the North Koreans] give up their nukes.”

Even Joseph Yun, a moderate and former U.S. Envoy to North Korea, said, “[I]t would be a real mistake to have a peace treaty come first, then denuclearization, because that is clearly an open admission that you’re dealing with North Korea as an acknowledged nuclear weapons state.”

But a peace agreement would not necessarily recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapons state. As pointed out in the Korea Peace Now! report “Path to Peace,” a peace agreement wouldn’t change the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which only acknowledges a nuclear weapons state as one that manufactured or tested a weapon prior to January 1, 1967. (North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 2006.)

Plus, there are more compelling reasons why a peace agreement would help defuse tensions and halt the arms race. Stanford University professor and nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, who routinely inspected nuclear facilities in North Korea through the 1990s, said, “North Korea will not give up its weapons and weapons program until its security can be assured. Such assurance cannot be achieved simply by a U.S. promise/agreement on paper. It will require a substantial period of co-existence and interdependence.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea James Laney put it best when he said, “[a] peace treaty would provide a baseline for relationships, eliminating the question of the other’s legitimacy and its right to exist. Absent such a peace treaty, every dispute presents afresh the question of the other side’s legitimacy.”

A peace agreement is also supported by members of Congress. On March 1, Representative Brad Sherman will re-introduce the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act, which was first introduced in 2021 and calls for formally ending the Korean War with a peace agreement.

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War Armistice, the Biden administration should take the lessons from his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who made the most progress with North Korea to finally end the Korean War and usher in a new era of peace.

Originally published in Responsible Statecraft

Unofficial envoy Jimmy Carter’s diplomacy in the DPRK

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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)

Former President Jimmy Carter meets with then DPRK leader Jong Il Kim in North Korea in 1994. First Lady Rosalynn Carter on left.

Editor’s note:  As the 39th 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

An ambassador for Korean Americans

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Julie Turner serves a diverse demographic as Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights | By Martha Vickery (Fall 2024)

Julie Turner, Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights.

International human rights might be one of the most difficult specialties of diplomacy, but it is the chosen work of Julie Turner, who was sworn as the U.S. Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues last fall.  A Korean adoptee and career diplomat with the State Department, Turner has been working on issues involving people in the East Asia region, Korean people in both North and South, and with Korean Americans for almost 20 years.

Turner is the second such special envoy.   The position, an ambassador appointment, was vacant for six years, from January 2017 (beginning of the Trump administration) until President Joe Biden nominated Turner in January 2023. She started the job in October 2023 after a Senate confirmation.

The vacancy occurred despite a law (the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004) requiring the President to fill this position. There is a bill before the House of Representatives to reauthorize the 2004 law (the North Korean Human Rights Reauthorization Act of 2023), which has yet to come to a vote.

No diplomatic relationship makes diplomacy difficult

As the special envoy, Turner is charged with engaging in diplomacy with the North Korean government to advance human rights.  However, the North Koreans are not talking to the U.S. government right now and have not been for a number of years.

Starting the job after a long vacancy, Turner has begun to make some small gains. There is, however, is a bitterly long history of how the U.S. has either ignored or tried and failed in its diplomatic overtures to North Korea (see sidebar below) up to and including many current events as this relationship continues to falter.

Despite not being able to engage officially with the North Korean government, Turner meets and works to advance specific policies with a diverse group of North Korean refugees and South Koreans.

A diverse constituency

Coming into the job after a six-year vacancy, there were a lot of priorities to re-order. As special envoy, Turner has been concerned with Korean Americans’ human rights for many years.

One of these is the predicament of Korean Americans who have family members in North Korea. This subgroup of Korean Americans were born before the 1948 division of Korea, fled their homes in (what is now) North Korea immediately before or during wartime, and eventually immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea.  

Many people in this group, all elderly, still have immediate family in North Korea; the majority of these Korean Americans have not seen their family in North Korea since they fled south, after which the border between the two Koreas was closed.  Although there were occasional family reunification events with South Koreans and their North Korean family members, Korean Americans were never included in those events. However, some Korean American U.S. citizens have located and visited family members in North Korea up until the 2017 travel ban.

Because a state of war remains between the U.S. and North Korea, normal diplomatic relationships have never been established, and the U.S. has no embassy in North Korea today.    

Turner frequently engages with North Korean defectors, both in the U.S. and in South Korea.  She works with groups in South Korea who help North Korean defectors. Defectors are conferred automatic South Korean citizenship upon entry to the country.   

Turner is concerned with securing citizenship for and recognition of refugees who came to the U.S. from North Korea. A few came directly, but most entered South Korea and established citizenship there first.  

She is also concerned with the U.S. citizenship issues of Korean Americans, including adult Korean adoptees without citizenship. A bill in process (the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2024) would grant citizenship to international adoptees, no matter their citizenship status, including those who have been deported to their birth countries after being criminally convicted.  An earlier version of this bill was passed by the House in 2022, but was stripped from the bill it was attached to before going before the Senate for a vote.

Growing up to be a diplomat

Turner grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, and like most Korean American kids, was unfamiliar with the issues of Korea and its people as a child.  Beyond knowing she came from there, her experience with Korea was limited to attending a Saturday school to learn Korean language and culture and develop familiarity with the local Korean American community.

Her parents always pushed her to form links with Korea and its people and culture, but she admits that until she grew up, she really did not see the relevance.  “Like many adopted Korean children that went to Korean Saturday morning schools, I was somewhat resentful that I was spending Saturday mornings at school and not watching cartoons,” she recalled.

She remembers that as a seven- or eight-year-old, she submitted an essay to a children’s magazine, the Pennywhistle Press. Along with her essay, she drew a picture of an American flag, and in the essay, she expressed “gratitude to the U.S.” for citizenship. “So, even as a small child, I think I always expected to serve.”

Although she did not realize it then, Korean school would be her first baby step toward a future vocation in international diplomacy. She learned how to speak Korean early, although she says she feels like her Korean language is “still trapped in my 11 or 12-year-old self.”  Some benefits of Korean school were intangibles; how her imagination was expanded to other cultures and people, and growing up knowing other Korean American kids and adults.  She also studied the Korean martial art taekwondo, and eventually achieved a black belt and competed in the sport.

As an adult, she said, “even with all that connectivity to Korean culture, Korea was not something I necessarily wanted to focus on as a career path.”  That thought would change over time in a big way.

As an undergraduate, Turner went to Pepperdine University near Los Angeles, and studied religion, political science and sociology.  In pursuing an interest in social justice, she worked with homeless teens through some non-profits in downtown LA.

After college, Turner was accepted to the University of Maryland’s graduate school of public policy, “then 9-11 happened,” she said.  “And I think for a lot of people, it was a world-view-shifting event.”

By that time, she said, she had already worked for a think tank on Middle East policy, and had studied the intersections of Islam, politics and religious freedom. With her research background, she decided to change her M.A. degree concentration to international security and economic policy.

A move to the State Department

Her first full-time State Department job was with the Information Resources Management bureau (Office of E-Diplomacy).  She thinks her experiences qualified her; she had worked as a website designer/builder to earn money during her graduate studies, with some training from her dad, who was a systems engineer. She took the job because “I thought I could use my artistic leanings as well as a bit of the computer nerdiness I had been raised with.”

At the State Department, a fellowship bought her time to explore its various departments.  She particularly liked the bureau in which she still works, the Department of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.  With that team, she worked on a report on religious freedom concerning some Central Asian countries. “I fell in love with what that bureau was and that I could continue to use my expertise in the religious freedom and tolerance area,” Turner said. She ultimately accepted a full-time position there.

A learning curve on the East Asia team

She was “quite content” she said, and could have continued, loving that job.  But just a few months later, there was an opening in the East Asia team. “Someone in the team had heard that I spoke a little bit of Korean,” she said (with a laugh to emphasize how little Korean language she thinks is still in her brain). The person asked her to consider transitioning to the Asia Pacific group.

“I decided to make the jump, although I did not really know much about Korea from a political or foreign policy perspective. My only interactions with Korea had been through the Korean adoptee community …so it was a pretty steep learning curve,” Turner recalled.  She worked on issues in North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and a “huge chunk of Southeast Asia – all places I had not spent a lot of time thinking about before.”  

At this point, Turner has now spent 20 years working in the East Asia group; part of that time was as the special assistant to the first Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Robert R. King (who served 2009 through 2017).  In early 2023, she was appointed to be the new special envoy by President Biden, and in fall 2023, she was confirmed by the Senate.  Other offices she held include director for the Office of East Asia and the Pacific, and before that, the director for Southeast Asia at the National Security Council.

A chance she never expected

Today, as a recognized expert in human rights and democracy with a focus in East Asia, Turner said she has reflected on the arc of her career and wondered “Huh, how did I end up here?”   

In the State Department, she was in the path of some key career opportunities, she said, although the chance to work for human rights in Korea and for fellow Korean Americans was beyond her expectations. Over time, she has become passionate about the work, especially  “in listening to and being responsive to the Asian American community as a whole, who really feel connected to these issues,” she said.

There have been many policy ups and downs during her 20 years as a specialist on North Korea; through it, her knowledge has been steadily building. “But now, the people, the issues, the connections I’ve made, and the stories I now carry with me of some of the divided families or North Korean refugees I’ve met – they’ve all undoubtedly left such a huge mark on my life, that  guess I can honestly say I love my job and feel very lucky to do what I do. As hard of an issue as it is to work on, on a daily basis.”

Visiting with the Japan Minister of Foreign Affairs to discuss abductee issues (credit: RFA) 

A grasp of the historical context

Part of working with issues in Northeast Asia is understanding the modern history of the region, including the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), World War II, and the Korean War. In general, “understanding historical context is critical to the work we do here as diplomats here at the State Department,” Turner said.

Diplomacy on behalf of human rights requires an attitude of optimism, patience and the skills to creatively solve problems with diplomatic partners, where often few opportunities are available.  Even when an unresolved war legacy exists between countries, diplomats can work on behalf of their governments and keep discussions and partnerships active.

As an example, Turner pointed to how Vietnam and the U.S. improved their diplomacy.  The relationship in the post-Vietnam War era was complex, and still is, “but when you look at where we are now, compared to where we were 30 or 40 years ago, you can see how far we’ve come,” she added.

Similarly, Japan and South Korea have rebuilt their relationship in the years since Japan’s occupation and subjugation of Korea, which began in 1910, ended with the surrender of Japan in 1945 at the end of World War II.

Human rights updates from North Korea

Without a way to personally observe the human rights situation of North Koreans, Turner’s team refers to human rights reporting from the United Nations (generated by the High Commissioner for Human Rights) and other U.S and South Korean sources.  

For example, in early July, Turner went to Seoul ahead of South Korea’s official July 14 “North Korean Defectors’ Day,” and participated in the Seoul Forum on North Korean Human Rights, where she met with government officials, civil society organizations, and industry groups. Approximately 6,400 former North Koreans reside in Seoul, according to Seoul Mayor Se-hoon Oh, in his address to the forum.

Turner participated in an April Korea Society forum entitled Capturing Lost Ground on North Korean Human Rights, in which she related how North Korea has completely cut off official communication with South Korea in recent months, and enforced punishments for anyone possessing foreign media or even for using South Korean slang or pop culture references in conversation. 

These laws heavily target teenagers and young adults, Turner said in the interview. “I have teenagers myself, and thinking about it in that context is alarming, and really underscores a need for the international community to come together to find a way …to make progress for the North Korean people and protect their rights and freedoms.”

At the forum, Turner noted that it has been 10 years since the UN’s first Commission on Inquiry report about North Korean human rights. That report was derived from testimony given in 2013 public hearings of 80 witnesses and survivors of human rights abuses by North Korea against its own people; it has been instrumental in directing U.S. human rights diplomacy with North Korea.  

The crackdown on foreign influences is not recent, although it has intensified.  In 2022, Elizabeth Salmon, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) reported on “disproportionate measures” in sentencing against infractions of laws about use of foreign media. These include the 2020 law against “reactionary ideology,” which contained “punishments including the death penalty for accessing foreign information.” Eyewitness reports in late 2022 indicated the government publicly executed two teenagers for watching and distributing South Korean movies in the city of Hyesan, on the China border.

 A June report in the Korea Times report noted that there are two other repressive laws concerning the effect of foreign popular culture: one is a 2021 law on education of young people; and one enacted in 2023 on the protection of Pyongyang dialect and culture, which bans use of South Korean pronunciation and slang words.

Activists in South Korea have arguably exacerbated the crackdown by North Korean authorities by sending balloons over the border into North Korea bearing USB drives loaded with K-dramas and pop music, as well as leaflets criticizing North Korean leader Jong Un Kim.  North Korea has retaliated by sending balloons carrying trash and human waste to the South.

Defectors describe the tipping point

Turner commented that she has heard a lot about the effects of these laws in conversations with North Korean defectors.  One young woman told her that K-dramas, which are typically 16 episodes long, are often loaded onto USB drives with only 14 episodes, leaving fans hanging without an ending to their story.  She was watching My Love From Another Star , and “got to the end of the 14th episode, and she was just so consumed with wanting to know how it ended that she actually defected,” Turner related. Safely in South Korea, the young woman was able to call her dad through a network of other defectors, tell him she was okay, and, of course, how the story ended.

On its face, the story was bizarrely funny, but also indicated some important ideas about what kinds of influences move people to act. “Every single North Korean refugee I have met can point to some piece of information, some kind of foreign exposure that set off a light bulb” for them, Turner recalled. Depictions of how people live outside the DPRK are especially influential. North Koreans are also drawn to TV shows and Youtube channels depicting former North Koreans living in new countries, and having lives that are “prosperous in comparison to their own,” she explained.  

“For some, it’s just more simple, like a TV show where someone is taking a shower and the bathroom is steaming up with hot water,” she said. One defector saw an movie scene like that, and told her he imagined the prosperity of a home where there was so much hot water, 24 hours a day, she said.

One man told her that he once lived close enough to the border that his own radio picked up South Korean broadcasting. His triggering event was when he heard a news item about a train accident that set the schedule back 30 minutes. He was surprised “that the government would send a message out to the people that the trains were only 30 minutes behind,” Turner explained. “That stuck out, he said, because he had once waited at the train station for three days for a train that was never coming.”

Imagining reconciliation for North Korean refugees

As ambassador, Turner often talks with North Korean refugees about their lives leading to their defection and flight to either South Korea or the U.S.  No North Korean refugees have had closure or reconciliation of their traumatic past. Often their new lives are also very difficult in a brand new culture, adding another layer of traumatic stress.

Turner imagines there will eventually need to be a process of “truth-telling and memorialization” of these times.  ‘It is a journey,” the ambassador reflected. “…Truth and reconciliation, accountability, all those things are very multi-faceted and require a lot of work and are a long-term process. We’re not going to wake up one day and feel like we’ve reached the pinnacle of accountability for the human rights abuses that have been committed by the North Korean government.”

At present, Turner explained, the assignment to her group is to continue to try to engage, despite the difficult U.S.-North Korea relationship. There are some smaller issues, for example, talking with North Korean leadership about how to improve disability rights there; it’s an area where North Koreans have expressed interest in reforming some laws.

In general, she said, they are using every channel, to send messages that they are ready to get back to negotiations and discussions “because we do want to get back to the table and we are willing to come to the table without preconditions.” However, she said, right now “we are not getting a response.”

Turner with ROK Foreign Affairs Minister Tae-yul Cho (credit: ROK MOFA)

Representing Korean American interests

A big part of Turner’s job is representing the interests and voices of Korean Americans, whether they are North Korean refugees, first-generation South Korean immigrants and their second- and third-generation families, and Korean adoptees and their families. There are also thousands of unaccounted-for American prisoners of war (or listed as “missing in action”),  presumably dead, whose families want to repatriate their remains to the U.S. from North Korea. Turner advocates for those families also.  There are also families of South Koreans who were abducted to North Korea for various reasons.  Some of those family members immigrated and are now Korean Americans.

As part of her work with Korean Americans, Turner frequently discusses issues with the Korean American community, gathering comments and opinions, in order to “feed that information back in the policy-making process, and be responsive with that.”

The next year’s priorities

There is a long list of priorities for human rights in North Korea and for Korean Americans affected by policies towards the country. Picking priority issues is always difficult, however a very time-sensitive one for 2025 is the family reunification issue, since those family members are now in their 80s or 90s.

“I also want to be very focused on providing support to the North Korean refugee community” of the U.S., she said. “They go through so much to get to safety. If they are able to make it all the way to the U.S., we want to make sure we set them up for success.”

For the people inside North Korea, Turner continued, “we want to make space for conversations about disability rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, or really any other conversation we are able to have with North Korea.”

Also on her agenda for 2025 are conversations about improving North Koreans’ rights to information “because I do believe that an informed citizenry is the key to peace, stability and security, and so a government that is responsible and focused on meeting the needs of its people is going to be a better contributor to regional security and stability.” Even as technology makes the flow of information-sharing easier, she noted, “we have to make sure the end-users can consume that information.”

The adoptee identity as an asset

Her current position is very different from others she has had in that her status as a Korean adoptee is an asset, in conversation with the many Korean and Korean American people she works with. By the end of 2024, she will have traveled to South Korea five times.  She is still waiting for an invitation to visit North Korea.

“It has been meaningful at a personal level as a Korean adoptee, in having the opportunity to be connected back to Korea,” she said.  “One way is with North Korean defectors as I talk about identity, because they are also trying to find own identities as North Koreans in South Korea, or as Korean Americans in the U.S… I get share a lot about my identity as Korean or American, or Korean American.”

She credits her parents for making the Korean American connections that got her thinking about identity early. “When I talk to them on the phone,” she said, “I thank them for that!”  

A step forward, two steps back: A short history of U.S.-North Korean relations

Government building in Pyongyang. Photo by Stephen Wunrow

The short history of recent U.S.-North Korea relations is a series of attempts at a step forward resulting in two steps back.  The early 1990s were marked by growing concern over the North Korean nuclear missile development program. Then-President Bill Clinton appointed former Secretary of Defense William Perry to get the diplomatic relationship back on track. Perry did so, with help from the South Korean President Dae-Jung Kim.

During the final months of the Clinton Administration, there was a higher level of activity and some warming of North-South relations following the first inter-Korean summit in June 2000.  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright traveled to the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK) and was filmed as she sat with children in their school playground.

Pyongyang citizens gathered to support the Joint Declaration meetings, that began at the June 15, 2000 summit, that negotiated family reunions and other issues between North and South Korea. Photo by Stephen Wunrow

President George W. Bush jettisoned that progress with his hardline tactics and his famous line about North Korea being a part of a global “axis of evil.”  While North Korea signaled willingness to negotiate with the Bush Administration, the Bush policy continued to pressure for a “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, which left very little room for negotiations.

There were also the Six-Party Talks (2003 to 2009) including China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and the U.S., to control North Korea’s nuclear weapons and related research programs. That effort broke down over disagreements on verification issues.

The Obama Administration (2009 to 2016) adopted a policy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea, which resulted in doing nothing to advance diplomatic initiatives. It instead increased sanctions on imports to North Korea, and further isolated the regime.

Finally, the Trump Administration, beginning in 2017, traded the “strategic patience” policy with one dubbed “maximum pressure” which was designed to increase sanctions against and isolation of North Korea. Trump famously said that if North Korea continued its threats against the U.S., it would be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” North Korea continued with its nuclear arsenal development and in 2017, successfully tested the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile.

However, in January 2018, North Korean leader Jong Un Kim accepted South Korea’s invitation to participate in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Trump postponed South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises until after the Olympics. The Olympics were a hopeful time, and led to an inter-Korean dialogue, including a meeting between South Korean President Jae-in Moon and North Korean leader Jong Un Kim. The two discussed eliminating the threat of war between the two nations. 

Kim and Trump met in Singapore June 12, 2018, at which they produced a statement pledging to improve relations and create a lasting peace. North Korea also pledged to “work toward complete denuclearization.” Trump also reportedly agreed to sign a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was only halted in 1953 with an armistice.

There was some movement toward denuclearization after 2018, however the U.S. and North Korea have been stuck since the 2018 Summit on details including the meaning of denuclearization. U.S. sanctions have stayed in place.

Trump and Kim agreed on a second summit, which was held in Hanoi in February, 2019.  It ended abruptly when the Trump team walked out.  According to Trump, the U.S. walked away because Jong Un Kim demanded a total lifting of sanctions in return for his country’s concessions. But North Korean Foreign Minister Yong Ho Ri countered that North Korea only sought partial sanctions relief in exchange for closing its Yongbyon nuclear complex. The two sides vowed to continue discussions.

Recently, Biden administration has worked to counter North Korean threats with a “trilateral” military and strategic alliance of the U.S., South Korea and Japan, but has done nothing to modify the sanctions that are one of the major impediments to forging a better diplomatic relationship. There has been consternation at the recent partnership between Russia and North Korea, and North Korea’s dispatch of its own troops to Russia, presumably to fight in the war against Ukraine.

There is recent broad support, including the Korean American community of a bill (H.R. 1369, the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act),  to direct the Secretary of State to advance a peace treaty with North Korea. The bill would also lift or modify the longstanding travel ban preventing Americans from visiting North Korea, so that Korean Americans would be able to visit their family members in North Korea. That bill was introduced during the 2023-2024 Congress, but has not been passed by either House or Senate.

North Korean troops in Europe: Do they put Pyongyang at risk?

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These soldiers may ultimately challenge regime stability back home | By Jaemin Lee (Fall 2024)

North Korea is sending 12,000 soldiers to Russia to help Moscow in the prolonged Russia-Ukraine war. It is one of the most unexpected developments in and around the Korean peninsula recently. It is as startling for South Korea as when it first encountered the North’s nuclear development program back in 1993.

This is the first-ever overseas dispatch of combat-ready, fully-mobilized armed forces by North Korea. In the past, North Korea has dispatched small contingents of military advisors and pilots here and there to support its authoritarian allies, but nothing like the magnitude of the full brigade that was just deployed.

It is a game changer in many respects. Russia and North Korea have declared a full military alliance, which is something that not even China would consider with its long-term ally Pyongyang. Russia will now have to reciprocate by supplying various items on North Korea’s long wish list. Provision of state-of-the-art missile technology, advanced fighter jets, and modernized air defense systems will likely be the first tranche.

The dispatch is part of the upcoming mutual defense treaty between Moscow and Pyongyang, signed on June 19, 2024 during Vladimir Putin’s visit to the North. The pact is not in force yet, as it is going through domestic ratification procedures on both sides, but ratification is expected soon. Article 3 of the pact obligates each party to “immediately provide military…assistance by all… means available,” if one party “is put in a state of war by an armed invasion.” The pact, combined with the combat troops’ deployment to Russia this time, will complete the emergence of the Russo-North Korean military alliance, which will send a tidal wave across the Korean peninsula.

At the same time, the overseas deployment is a risky gamble for North Korean leader Jong-un Kim. He is now sending young soldiers to the middle of Europe, 7,000 kilometers away from their home country. Although the soldiers are part of an elite group of the North Korean army, defection and desertion on the battlefield are not improbable. Given the ugly condition of the battleground in Ukraine and Russia, and the West’s active propagation of its own political programs at the frontlines, the conditions could easily make young soldiers politically and emotionally vulnerable in their struggle to survive, despite their strict ideological training.

North Korean soldiers could also appear in news outlets or social media clips, after capture by Ukrainian forces. Intended or unintended, they may make damaging statements about the North Korean regime. Heavy casualties, once they become known to domestic constituents, may also strike a political blow to the iron-clad regime.

Seclusion has been North Korea’s polestar, and insulating the population from outside influence has been its guiding light for many decades. Look no further than the regime’s family hostage policy, where its diplomats are required to leave children or close family members back home to preempt any thought of overseas defection. Diplomats and their families in foreign countries also live in groups under tight surveillance from Pyongyang. The North’s laborers in China and Russica also live in their respective bubbles of control and are subject to inspection by government-dispatched overseers.

Recently, North Korea has further intensified its seclusion policy. It closed off its borders with China and installed new fences and walls to prevent its people from crossing the Chinese border. Just three weeks ago, Pyongyang also blew up railroads and roads connecting the North to the South to make it clearer that the country will remain cut off from South Korea.

It is therefore interesting timing that the North Korean leader decided to embark on ambitious experiment that could undermine his iron law of seclusion. Jong-un Kim is now putting tens of thousands of young soldiers — taking into account rotations and reinforcements for the time being — in an environment where his control cannot be water-tight any more. There are reports that North Korean soldiers being deployed with Russian uniforms and Russian equipment and being trained in Russian military barracks. Interaction with foreign elements is already taking place. In the fog of the battlefield on foreign soil, coordinating with Russian forces and Wagner fighters, such interaction will increase and intensify. At some point, it will pop the bubble of seclusion that North Korea has created and maintained for so many years.

By all accounts, the Russian dispatch is Kim’s riskiest gamble. He can bolster the North’s conventional military capability through combat. He can obtain modernized weapons and military systems from Moscow. He can also secure a commitment from Russia if the North Korean regime is in jeopardy. These gains will be critical when it comes to the North’s standoff with outside foes, such as South Korea and the U.S. But they will be either minimally meaningful or even damaging for an internal stability and control dependent on a draconian seclusion policy.

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus.

Codifying a registry for divided families

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Bill passes House; will link Korean Americans with North Korean relatives | By John Kim (Summer 2024)

Younger siblings of Jun-do Cho, 89 (left) traveled from South Korea to meet her in North Korea in 2018.

Approximately 100,000 Americans with relatives in North Korea saw a boost of support from the U.S. House of Representatives when it voted 375 to 8 in favor of the Korean American Divided Families National Registry Act (DFNRA) (H.R. 7152).

The bill, introduced by Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) and Rep. Michelle Steel (R-CA), and passed by the House on June 25, will establish a national registry of Korean Americans and their relatives in North Korea to facilitate future family reunions. The new U.S. registry will be similar to the existing registry of South Korean and North Korean separated families. 

The DFNRA is closely related to a bill titled  The Divided Families Reunification Act (H.R 826) That bill, which was made law as part of the (fiscal year) 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, directs the Secretary of State and the Special Envoy on North Korean Human Rights Issues, to consult with their South Korean counterparts to host family reunions. The bill did not specify a definitive timeline, despite the need for urgency with over 85 percent of divided family members aged 80 and older. Should reunions not occur in the near-term, a family registry would ensure that descendants of Korean American divided families can participate in future reunions.

One such Korean American from a divided family, Ki Shin Lee, born July 5, 1934, was interviewed by Paul Kyumin Lee, president of Divided Families USA. Lee told the interviewer “before I die, my last wish is to see my two youngest siblings again,” and “I’m hoping for an opportunity to visit North Korea through the United States … and say that I’m sorry to them.”

Logistical and implementation challenges

The passage of the Registry Act must be considered in the context of geopolitical developments between the U.S. and North Korea. The 2019 U.S.-North Korea Summit in Hanoi, a meeting between North Korean leader Jong Un Kim, and former U.S. President Donald Trump, led to the halt in bilateral communication after the two sides could not come to an agreement over UN sanctions relief in exchange for a limited retraction of nuclear weapons capability. Since then, Kim has deepened his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and has agreed to help the war against Ukraine by sending more than 7,000 containers stocked with ballistic missiles, artillery shells, and conventional weapons. 

Meanwhile, inter-Korean relations reached an all-time low in January of this year when Kim took the unprecedented step of calling South Korea (the Republic of Korea (ROK) its “principal enemy,” – the U.S. had formerly held the position of  “principal enemy” – and threatened to annihilate it if provoked. Four months later, Pyongyang released hundreds of trash-filled balloons towards South Korea, which landed in streets, on buildings, and on cars. The trash balloons were reportedly released by the North in response to the “frequent scattering of leaflets and other rubbish” in border areas by activists in the South, according to a BBC report.

With the renewed trilateral security cooperation in the U.S.-Japan-South Korea alliance, the current political situation requires the easing of tensions prior to the resumption of family reunions. But since any easing of tension does not seem to be imminent, the Family Registry Act comes at a timely moment amidst increased pressure for the preservation of family history.

There are other complexities in establishing the family registry and getting separated families to sign on to it. Korean American family members with North Korean relatives may not wish to identify themselves as such in a public way, due to perceived shame of association with North Korea and/or fears that doing so could risk the safety of their North Korean family members. 

There are also official and procedural concerns about which nation’s agency (whether the U.S., South Korea or North Korea) will cover the cost of reunions. There are significant costs in administering reunions, including family members’ travel, lodging, the cost of establishing compatible telecommunications links, and other costs.

The ROK’s Ministry of Unification is in charge of that nation’s inter-Korean relations and has played a significant role in the past in administering the reunions. In North Korea, the  Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland (CPRF) is its main agency responsible for managing inter-Korean relations, but it ceased operations this year after Kim declared an end to the policy of reunification.

A reunion of a divided family in 2012.

The history of Korea’s divided families

The saga of divided families began at the end of World War II (in 1948) when the Korean Peninsula was partitioned along the 38th parallel, which placed the northern half under the Soviet Union’s control and the southern half under control of the U.S.  During the Korean War, thousands of refugees fled their hometowns, and some went south to avoid the warfare or to find other family members.  After the Korean War ended (July 27, 1953), the refugees found that they could not get back to their homes and families due to the militarization of the border between South and North. Some of these refugees settled permanently in South Korea, others were able to immigrate to the U.S.

The first formal inter-Korean family exchanges happened in 1985 when a group of 50 South Koreans traveled to Pyongyang and a reciprocal group of 50 North Koreans went to Seoul. Inter-Korean family reunions were again revived under South Korean President Dae-jung Kim (1998- 2003) and again under President Moo-hyun Roh (2003-2008). Reunions occurred less frequently during the more conservative administrations of Presidents Myung-bak Lee and Geun-hye Park. Overall, between 2000 and 2018, 21 ROK-DPRK family reunion gatherings were held, bringing together more than 20,000 family members.

Next steps for the Divided Families Registry Act

The passage of the DFNRA in the House of Representatives is only half of the equation. In March 2024, the Senate version of the National Registry Act (S.3876), was introduced bySen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). The bill thus far has garnered five bipartisan co-sponsors, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Chris Coons (D-DE), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), and Mark Kelly (D-AZ).

Due to scheduling and other logistical challenges, it is unclear whether DFNRA will get a floor vote, which is necessary for the bill to move out of the chamber and onto the President’s desk. The Senate is in recess during August and the first week of September. After recess, there are only a few weeks of legislative time before the end of the 118th Congress in December. The upcoming election in November will also slow down legislative business, since nearly a third of senators will campaign for reelection in their home states. The Senate is facing other competing priorities; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D- NY) listed his priorities: Government appropriations, a child tax credit bill; rail safety regulation; and cannabis banking.

If the Registry Act is not voted on by the end of 2024, it will have to be reintroduced in the 119th Congress (2025-2026). There is a pattern that previously-passed House bills with strong bipartisan support tend to be supported in the following session. However, a major factor in continuing to push the bill is that the original sponsor, Rep. Wexton, will not return to Congress due to a health condition. The bill will have to find a new sponsor.

Author’s note:  The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Korean American Grassroots Conference (KAGC) nor its members. 

Putin and Kim: A new world order?

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Russia and North Korea don’t want a mere alliance, they want an anti-West axis | By John Feffer (Summer 2024)

The recent meeting of Vladimir Putin and Jong Un Kim in North Korea marks a new stage not only in their alliance but in their ideological convergence. This is no mere marriage of convenience. The two leaders have become so much closer in their political and economic sympathies over the last two decades that they now qualify as a compatible couple.

In this most recent meeting, Putin’s first trip to North Korea in 24 years, the two leaders acted very much like two spurned lovers in a rebound relationship. Putin has turned his back on the West and sees his political and economic fortunes in the East. Kim is giving up on reunification with South Korea and views Russia as a more likely partner for economic and military cooperation.

During the Cold War, of course, North Korea and the Soviet Union were close allies. In the 1990s, however, no one could have predicted that the two countries would ever resurrect that Cold War romance.

Rekindling the Love

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was beginning its experiment with democracy and its transition to a market economy. It was opening itself up to the world after decades of relative isolation within the Soviet sphere.

North Korea, meanwhile, was slipping backwards into economic collapse and famine. Although forced to accept humanitarian assistance, the government in Pyongyang remained very skeptical about the intentions of Western governments.

Coming out of those very different experiences, Russia and North Korea arrived at similar conclusions: The West was not to be trusted. The West, after all, provided economic advice that helped to wreck Russia and refused to offer the Kremlin anything but a junior security partnership as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expanded eastward. With North Korea, meanwhile, the West dangled carrots to persuade Pyongyang to forgo nuclear weapons but never delivered on the promises, and promoted a human rights agenda that sounded a lot like regime change to North Korea’s political elite.

Today, having turned their back on the West, the two countries look more and more like mirror images. The both face similarly steep sanctions and have increasingly similar corporatist economies. They both now spend a sizeable percentage of their gross domestic product (GDP) on their military (eight percent for Russia; about double that for North Korea).

Russia, once a shaky democracy, has become an autocracy centered around a single leader who has effectively made himself president for life. North Korea, never a democracy, has managed to keep its dynastic autocracy going for nearly 80 years. Both leaders insist on their absolute sovereign right to do whatever they like within their borders (and sometimes outside their borders).

Apart from the ideological convergence, Russia and North Korea receive concrete benefits from their burgeoning relationship.

North Korea is providing Russia with millions of artillery shells for its war in Ukraine. As much as half of these shells reportedly don’t work, perhaps because of their age, but they at least contribute to Ukraine’s sense of being outgunned. Ukraine has also reported evidence of Russia using North Korean ballistic missiles, which gives Pyongyang an opportunity to test its weapons in battlefield conditions. Jong Un Kim has offered to send troops to fight in Ukraine and even help with the reconstruction of areas of the country occupied by Russian troops.

In return, North Korea is reportedly receiving food and energy as well as Russian technology that it can use for its satellite program and perhaps its nuclear arsenal as well. Russia has also offered to build a hospital in North Korea.

The new bilateral relationship has risen to the level of a military alliance. The two countries have pledged, if either one is attacked, to pursue “all means at its disposal without delay” to provide “military and other assistance.” That comes with a significant asterisk – the aid must conform to the laws of the two countries and to the UN Charter. But still, it’s a return to the relationship the two countries enjoyed up until 2000, when ties weakened considerably.

The New Multipolarism

The two countries also agreed to work toward a “just and multipolar new world order.” The word “multipolar” used to mean an alternative to the bipolarism of the Cold War era and the unipolarism of the U.S.-dominated post-Cold War era. This multipolarism was reflected in the “rise of the rest,” represented by pressure from Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (called the BRICS grouping) to change the composition of the UN Security Council. It also reflects some new trade patterns in the Global South.

But today, multipolarism has acquired a new meaning. Particularly under the influence of Russia, multipolarism now represents a challenge to the rule of law, the rights enshrined in the UN Charter and subsequent treaties, and the very notion that some principles take priority over the national preferences of any given country (or leader).

Russia and North Korea have already been coordinating with other nations on the outs with the international community, such as Iran, Syria, and Nicaragua. So far, the axis doesn’t have anything near a critical mass. Russia would like to recruit China, but Beijing at the moment is too invested in the global status quo to side entirely with these rule-breakers.

Perhaps Russia and North Korea are contemplating not just building up an alternative world order but further disrupting the current state of affairs. North Korea wanted the approval of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin before launching its attack on the South in 1950. With this latest meeting with Putin, could Jong Un Kim again be seeking a green light to invade the South, which some influential Pyongyang watchers believe is in the offing?

Kim has certainly escalated its rhetoric toward the South in recent months and destroyed some obvious symbols of reunification, like the Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification. It would be nearly suicidal for the North to invade the South again. But countries will sometimes do unpredictable things, as Russia proved when it invaded Ukraine in 2022.

More likely, Russia and North Korea will just bide their time and hope to draw in more allies, particularly China. With the rise of far-right politicians elsewhere — Hungary, the Netherlands, perhaps again in the U.S. — the West may well be too divided and too isolationist to mount a challenge to the new axis anchored by Russia and North Korea. At least that seems to be the plan being hatched by Kim and Putin, with the expectation that China will soon decide to decouple from a West that is already in the midst of cutting ties with China.

So, this new alliance is not just a pact of outsiders. From the point of view of Russia and North Korea, it truly is the beginning of a whole new world order.

Originally published in Hankyoreh.

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