Korean War

A priority of peace

August 6, 2024 by Martha Vickery

Korean American Public Action Committee pushes forward a new peace resolution in Washington | By Martha Vickery (Summer 2024)

*Casey Choi, executive director of KAPAC and (right) KAPAC conference participants on the Capitol steps.*

How to get to peace in Korea was the topic of a Washington DC event in May that gathered activists from all over the country. The organizer, the Korean American Public Action Committee (KAPAC), a non-profit peace action organization, and the event included meetings among regional representatives from across the county, a press conference, a gala dinner, visits to Congressional representatives, and a demonstration at the Capitol.

Supporters came together for a (politically) star-studded event in support of a bill that seems at first glance to be an appeal for some very modest goals. But there is one big goal among them that will be a heavy lift – peace.

The conference showcased a bill that has seen little action for two sessions in a row except for an introduction and referral to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It has garnered an impressive 41 cosponsors, indicating broad House support. However, since its formal introduction in the current (118^th Congress) session in March, it has gotten minimal attention from legislators. Korean American House member co-sponsors include Andy Kim (D-MA) and Marilyn Strickland (D-WA).

The conference took on the heavy topic of how to achieve a North Korea-U.S. peace process, complicated by the urgency of hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. The bill states, and the conference topics emphasized, that a Korea peace agreement is of crucial global importance.

For Korean Americans, there is an added urgency because of the elder Korean Americans who want to be reunited with their North Korean families, either in conjunction with a formal peace agreement or sooner.

*Rep. Brad Sherman of California speaks about the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act at a press conference that took place during the event.*

Provisions of the bill

Reasons why the U.S. should formally end the war on the Korean peninsula are enumerated in the first few paragraphs of a resolution, called the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act, now a House of Representatives bill (H.R. 1369).

Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA), principal author of the bill, spoke about the its importance among the many priority issues before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on which he serves. He has worked on this bill for four years. “It will take time, and no one said it is easy,” he said at a Capitol press conference.

Sherman added that the bill specifies a review of the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to North Korea. The review would be specific to determining whether if the Trump-era executive order could at least be modified to include exceptions for Korean Americans. An estimate in the bill puts the number of Korean Americans with North Korean family members at 100,000. Most are elderly people who were children or teens when they were separated from their families in 1948 when Korea was divided into north and south; they later immigrated from South Korea to the U.S.

Under the bill’s provisions, a peace treaty would replace the armistice that has been in place between the U.S. and North Korea since the shooting war in Korea was halted 71 years ago. The treaty would establish formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and North Korea. KAPAC and other political action groups have called for a peace treaty for many years, and there have been many attempts at diplomatic initiatives to achieve a formal state of peace. The bill cites many of these attempts, reading like a backlog of long-neglected U.S.-Korea diplomatic issues.

It specifically calls out for follow-through on the agreements of the North Korea-U.S. summit meetings in 2018 (between the U.S. and North Korea, held in Singapore); and in 2019 (between North Korea and the U.S., held in Hanoi, Vietnam) through which a diplomatic process was intended, but never established, for a path to peace.

The resolution also specifies that a treaty would open a door to negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile development. An agreement on that issue, it is argued, would bring more stability to the region.

To keep communications open, the bill specifies that diplomatic liaison offices be established in North Korea and the U.S. This step was also specified in the joint statement, signed by the U.S. and North Korea at the Singapore Summit in 2018, but no action has been taken on it.

*Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) met with delegates from KAPAC during the May conference in Washington.*

Building support

More recently, on June 14, Sherman spoke on the floor of the House, reminding his colleagues of his four-year history of working on the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act. He noted that some House members have said that negotiating peace is an “unwarranted concession to North Korea and Kim Jong Un. That is hardly the case,” he said. “The armistice of 1953 was done by both sides. If an armistice is not an unwarranted concession, neither is a formal peace treaty.” He added that Britain and Canada have both indicated support for the bill.

South Korea’s support was apparent in the large delegation of South Korean legislators who attended the KAPAC conference, and other South Korean legislators and other political leaders who wrote letters of support. Conservative South Korean President Suk Yeol Yoon’s administration has not supported the bill, however, one of the South Korean delegation was from the conservative party. The rest were from the South Korean progressive parties, which are the dominant group in the South Korean (unicameral) legislature.

The conference, held May 22-24 began with a dinner and speakers, included a day of congressional visits, and ended with a morning demonstration at the Capitol. Elected officials from the U.S. and South Korea spoke at various times about their support of the bill and the cause of peace in Korea.

KAPAC Board chair Augustine Choe in his welcoming remarks thanked the South Korea delegation and the many representatives of Korean community organizations and peace organizations assembled for the conference. Choe said that the 300 people assembled represent 30 million globally who have a passion for Korean peace. He emphasized that KAPAC’s push for legislation is the best path for achieving peace in Korea.

KAPAC and separated families

For some KAPAC members, including executive director and co-founder Casey Choi, interest in the cause of peace in Korea was sparked by the story of their own separated families. Choi’s father was separated from his family because the border was physically relocated after the war broke out due to a change in the area of occupation by the North Koreans. After that, the border was heavily guarded and access cut off to ordinary people. “He never had any chance to see or meet or hear about his family in North Korea,” Choi said. “And two and a half years ago, he passed away.” Choi said he promised his father he would bury his ashes in North Korean soil, but so far he has not been able to do so, because the 2017 travel ban is still in place.

Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) speaking at the event, said that she learned a lot about the divided families when the Congressional Asian American Caucus held a forum on U.S.-Korea policy that discussed the plight of divided families. Chu said she heard testimony from an 86-year-old woman, Soon Hwa Kim, who was a child when she fled her home in North Korea. “At the time, she expected to spend just a few months away, but it turned into decades of separation. …She told the forum that that her dying wish was to be reunited with her family,” Chu said.

Chu said that after the forum, she became a cosponsor of what was then H.R. 826, the Divided Families Reunification Act.

*David Kim, candidate for the 34th Congressional district of California, at the press conference. Photo by Martha Vickery*

David Kim, who is running for the 34^th House district, spoke at the conference as a candidate for one of the most Korean American congressional districts in the country. He explained that District 34 takes in most of Los Angeles Koreatown, that it is the poorest district in California and one of the poorest in the nation. His was a dynamic speech from the perspective of a next-generation Korean American leader who is ready to lead on Korea peace issues.

Kim said he remembered as a child singing a folk song in his weekly Korean school about wishing for tong-il, or reunification (Uriui sowoneun tong-il). He suggested that he and his millennial-age Korean American contemporaries may have learned about the divided Korea, and may know that their parents longed for reunification, but that his generation did not experience that longing in the same personal way.

Asked later if Korean American millennials can get behind a peace treaty bill, he replied that perhaps the issue of Korean peace is “not relevant to Korean American millennials unless they believe it’s relevant. Because a lot of Korean American millennials don’t know that there’s been no end to the Korean War. I would say a very small fraction are aware that there is still a Korean War going on.” From a standpoint of awareness and education, he said, “there could definitely be more focus on this.”

Kim said although millennial Korean American legislators, such as Reps. Andy Kim and Marilyn Strickland, have been elected in recent years, none has taken the lead on the peace treaty bill. If and when he is elected, Kim said, one goal will be to raise the number of cosponsors to 100. The bill needs a “critical mass” of support, and given the large Korean American constituency in his district, Kim said, it should be an issue he can take on and get support for.

*Casey Choi, KAPAC executive director and Augustine Choe, KAPAC board chair; at right, KAPAC conference goers assemble at the Capitol.*

The travel ban catalyst

When KAPAC was first established, KAPAC founder Casey Choi said, he met with some Congress members from his area of Orange County, California to ask them to work on exceptions to the travel ban for Korean American family members of North Koreans. Through those conversations, he said, he was persuaded that the reach of KAPAC had to broaden to the whole country, that a durable peace with North Korea needed to be the overall goal, and that such a goal would probably require a new bill for Congress to get behind and vote for.

In the whole history of lobbying for a formal peace treaty, several resolutions calling for peace have been introduced by a variety of pro-peace and pro-reunification groups. There has been movement toward peace at various times, notably toward the end of the Clinton administration, but no initiatives have had permanent positive effects, Choi noted.

That KAPAC was founded the same year as the travel ban was not a coincidence, Choi said. There were some diplomatic efforts by the U.S. government to reach out after the 2017 travel ban was established, but there has been no diplomatic response from North Korea.

Choi said he learned a couple of important things through following this early effort: That it is not very easy in North Korea to track down family, and that the North Korean regime does not attach much value to families being reunited. “Their priority is to secure their own regime,” he said. Also, he said, he learned that the North Korean government works in a very top-down fashion. There is a mismatch with the U.S.’s very different diplomatic structure, with lower-level career diplomats doing a good deal of the basic work prior to high-level diplomatic negotiations.

It is logical that the Trump administration was able to persuade North Korean leader Jong Un Kim to meet with Trump in Hanoi (2019), Choi added. The efforts to establish a peace process failed because Trump walked out of the meeting “but his idea was not that bad,” Choi said. The top-down approach Trump took resonated with the way North Korea wants to do international diplomacy.

Pursuing peace on a path through Congress

Strategically, he said, the KAPAC founding group decided it was better to reach out to Congress through a lobbying organization and introduce a peace bill after concluding that behind-the-scenes diplomacy and working with their own California representatives would not be enough.

There was a sense that taking action was time sensitive. The current state of cold war could turn into a hot war easily, Choi pointed out. “North Korea is completely capable of waging another war against South Korea,” Choi said, which would wreak devastation and suffering on both Koreas.

Sherman is walking a narrow path to negotiate broader bipartisan support for the bill despite Washington hardliners who would demand only capitulation from North Korea. Although bill has garnered strong support in in the House, getting it through a Republican-dominated Senate will be another kind of challenge. There probably will not be a vote during this session, Choi predicted.

Choi said he was encouraged by the strong showing by South Korean progressive legislators at the conference, indicating a growing constituency of South Korean voters who want a peace treaty. That leaning was apparent in the recent 2024 bi-election, Choi mentioned, in which the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) emerged victorious, winning a majority of the 300 seats in the National Assembly, with 175 of seats to the conservative People Power Party’s (PPP) 108 seats. Voter turnout was 67 percent, which was the highest record in 32 years.

*Space is at a premium in congressional offices as KAPAC delegates asked their U.S. representatives for support and thanked them for their pledges of support for the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act.*

Peace as a way to prosperity

South Korea has done well for the past 74 years despite the constant specter of a future war. Yet, Choi said, not many foreign companies invest in South Korea, which probably has to do with the long shadow cast by North Korea’s missile development.

A deal that would effectively manage the nuclear issue would be a win-win for the two Koreas, and therefore, for the U.S., Choi explained. From the North Korean perspective, if the U.S. could lift sanctions in exchange for a nuclear weapons control agreement, the North’s national security and economy would benefit. The sanctions are supposed to control for materials that could be made into weapons “but in reality, sanctions harm the everyday running of North Korea” and even contribute to food shortages, he said.

To those who would criticize the bill as making a deal with a “rogue nation,” Choi said, “You know what? I don’t need any formal diplomatic efforts and dialogues with my friend. It’s actually for my enemy, the ones we don’t trust. …We need to give them some kind of security cushion, that we are not going to invade. That is in the declaration, and that’s why it is an important peace-building gesture for North Korea.”

*Reviewing the text of the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act in a congressional office.*

Taking care of the peace process in this generation

Choi said another objective of KAPAC is maintaining an appropriate pace for passing the bill and pushing for speedy action on the peace process that will follow, including obtaining exceptions to the travel ban. “I don’t want to drag this on for a long time. I want to finish it as soon as possible, so that we can start seeing some changes by the U.S. government.”

So far, the process of getting support for the bill through co-sponsors has been slow but steady, however, the route could be streamlined if the support is there. “They could mark it up in committee and put it to a vote, and they could pass it,” he said. “Consensus is important, but the number of co-sponsors does not really matter.”

Another reason for progress and speed, he said, is the history of attempts at peacemaking that have not moved forward at all, or have moved forward, then backward. The weight of responsibility for this process has been heavy, Choi said, for him and other children of wartime immigrants. “It should not be like this for our offspring,” he said, referring to Korean American young adults. “We should not be giving this difficult and big problem to our next generation. We should finish it in my generation, and I really believe we can do it.”

The Korean American Public Action Committee (KAPAC) maintains a website at this link: https://www.kapac.net. Progress of the bill is on the U.S. Congress tracking website at this link.

*Hopeful KAPAC members at the conference.*

One brother’s crossing

July 29, 2024 by Joanne Rhim Lee

Nuclear Family ~ By Joseph Han

(Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, 2022, ISBN# 978-1-64009-594-6)

Review by Joanne Rhim Lee (Summer 2024)

At first glance, the Cho clan in Joseph Han’s debut novel Nuclear Family seems like a typical Korean American immigrant family in Honolulu. With the help of their 20-something daughter Grace, Umma and Appa run a popular Korean plate lunch restaurant (“plate lunch” is a very Hawaiian reference to an old-fashioned restaurant serving hot lunches.) Grace’s older brother Jacob has a job teaching English in South Korea, as part of his broader quest to learn more about his heritage. The building of the restaurant business has not been easy for the family, but Appa thinks they are finally on their way to achieving the American Dream.

Then one day, while working at the restaurant, Grace hears a story on TV about a Korean American man who was shot while attempting to cross the DMZ into North Korea. Who would attempt to pull off such a ridiculous and dangerous stunt? But then she looks more closely at the television, and notices that the man in question looks suspiciously like her brother. It couldn’t be…

But of course it is Jacob, and soon she has to break the news to her parents that their son (who was shot but not killed) is now being detained by the North Korean government. Soon it’s all over the local and international news, with the general consensus being that Jacob was a spy, though for whom it’s not clear.

In the ensuing weeks, Umma and Appa attempt to recover from their shock, while also mourning the loss of many of their regular customers, including old friends who avoid eye contact on the street. They also receive several prank calls telling them to go back to North Korea where they came from, even though neither of them has ever been there.

Appa’s nerves are frayed. On top of their son’s dangerous predicament, they were so close to opening up a second location of the restaurant and finally being able to purchase their own house. After his son’s crossing of the DMZ, and the news about it, business is flagging. He becomes very short-tempered, and when a cockroach lands on Umma in the restaurant, he freaks out and tries to kill it, which is not a good look in front of their few remaining customers.

Grace tries her best to dissociate herself from the stress by avoiding her parents and getting high with her friend David whenever possible. Suddenly, the façade of the perfect Korean American family has come crashing down.

Han’s chapters shift back and forth in time between various family member’s perspectives, including the isolated Jacob. The author hints at some reasons why Jacob may have attempted a crossing of the DMZ. We learn that during a tourist-trap tour of the DMZ, Jacob became incensed at his tour guide’s simplistic depiction of the Korean War, and how the role of the U.S. is conveniently left out. Why not tell the whole story, and explain that Korea was just a convenient playground for superpowers with larger international agendas?

Back home in Hawaii, Appa fears for his son Jacob’s health and safety, but he also does not know how to connect with his own son. Years ago, he saw Jacob crossing the street in Chinatown and was about to roll down his window and ask if he needed a ride, but then he saw that Jacob was holding hands with another man. Was that really Jacob, or were his eyes deceiving him? Without a clear conclusion, he drove away in silence.

In addition to the four main members of the nuclear family, Han includes the perspectives of his grandparents, Halmeoni and Haraboeji, and the stories of how they were separated from their own family members during the Korean War. Halmeoni is now old and weak, and can barely walk without help, but she remembers being a little girl in Korea, walking up and down the vast Korean peninsula searching for her family. We learn that Harabeoji had another family in Korea that he was separated from before he met Jacob and Grace’s Halmeoni and started a new family.

The author uses his text in creative ways, sometimes repeating the same word over and over across an entire page to convey the DMZ, or a squiggly line in the form of the 38^th parallel (which is not a straight line, as those familiar with Korean geography will know) to divide sections or chapters.

Han also draws upon his own experiences as a Korean American in Hawaii to depict the lives of the fictional Cho family sharing quirky insider tidbits about the unique Asian American melting pot of Honolulu. In January 2018, people living in Hawaii woke up to an emergency alert on their phones, saying that there was an incoming ballistic missile and that they should seek immediate shelter. Many thought that it was North Korea dropping a nuclear weapon on Hawaii, and said goodbye to their loved ones. Clearly, it was a false alarm, but one that woke many people up to what was really important in their lives – this incident is also reflected in the lives of the Cho family.

The stories of each member of the Cho family epitomize the Korean concept of han – the feeling of grief, resentment, and regret stemming from so many individuals’ stories, as well as the collective history of Korea as a colonized land taken over by foreign powers and divided into two, a move that has divided families for more than 70 years. The division of Korea is now a permanent wound that is a unique and painful part of Korean and Korean American culture, and reverberates in the lives of all Korean families today.

Opinion

June 29, 2024 by raistlin

A new peace movement for a new generation | By Nuri Yi and Jeremiah Kim (Summer 2023)

*Springtime at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea.*

To be a young Korean in the spring of 2018 was to open your eyes and see the world cast in a new light, clear and fresh as morning. That April, North Korean leader Jong Un Kim and South Korean President Jae-in Moon met at the Joint Security Area within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) for the third inter-Korean summit since the Korean War (special coverage of the 2018 summit appeared in the Vol. 21, Summer 2018 issue of Korean Quarterly, available in the KQ digital archive which is coming soon). It was the first face-to-face meeting of the two Korean leaders in 11 years.

June 30, 2019: North Korea’s Jong-Un Kim and South Korea’s Jae-In Moon embrace at the DMZ, while Donald Trump looks on. This was the first time a sitting U.S. president crossed over into North Korean territory.

During the meeting, Kim joked that he had brought some of North Korea’s famous Pyongyang-style naengmyun (cold buckwheat noodles) to share with Moon. In that moment, something we took for granted was suddenly imbued with greater meaning: A simple bowl of noodles became the symbol of a people’s hope and yearning to be together again.

The meeting set in motion an unprecedented year of summits and talks among leaders from the North, the South, and the U.S. Throughout the 2018-2019 peace process, millions of us in the peninsula and across the diaspora felt ourselves being pulled toward new horizons. For the first time, we saw our lives as part of a journey to discover a path to peace and reunification.

Perhaps the most striking image from the 2018-19 period was of the June 2019 meeting of then-President Donald Trump with Kim when the two shook hands and stepped over the DMZ into North Korean territory. The sight triggered cognitive dissonance — wasn’t this the same man who had threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” only two years earlier? But there it was: A sitting U.S president, for the first time ever, visiting North Korea and meeting with its leaders. Watching this unfold, we tried to make sense of the disparity between the mainstream portrayals of Trump as a political joke, versus the sober reality of an American leader breaking with nearly 70 years of U.S. policy in the long history of the Korean War.

The 2018-19 talks ultimately failed to produce a peace treaty. Nevertheless, after 2019, something important had changed. For young people who have only ever known the peninsula in its division for more than two generations, it marked an opening of consciousness.

The Kim-Trump-Moon summits were pivotal in that regard. We expected the meeting between Kim and Moon to be jarring — a leader we had been taught to fear and hate coming face-to-face with one of our own leaders from the South. Perhaps it would be tense and distant from the years of mistrust. But instead, both leaders warmly greeted one another, and smiled in a manner that was at once familiar and incredibly normal. When added to this picture, Trump did not appear to be a disruptive outlier but as a part of the trio. Seeing this meeting did something to us. It made us yearn for the day that we might be able to reunite in the warmth of shared brotherhood. It made us believe that peace was a genuine, if uncharted, possibility.

This dawning awareness forced us to ask new and challenging questions. What were the real obstacles to peace, and what forces needed to come together to overcome these obstacles? Was there something missing in our understanding of the Trump phenomenon? What explained the constant barrage of ideological attacks on North Korea, even during peace talks? Gradually, we began to realize the enormity of the peace question and its significance to the Korean people — but not just to Koreans.

July 27, 2023 marked the 70th anniversary of the armistice agreement that placed the Korean War into a state of ceasefire without formally ending the war. We are now, incredibly and painfully, living through the 73rd year of the Korean War. This ongoing war is so old that it is beginning to pass out of living memory, for people on both sides of a still-divided land.

Amid the recent celebrations of Liberation Day from Japanese occupation, we find ourselves today with the Yoon administration in South Korea and the Biden administration in the U.S. pushing for a “mini-NATO” in East Asia alongside Japan. Coupled with the reinstatement of massive U.S.-South Korea war exercises under Biden, tensions on the peninsula have worsened to an unnerving fever pitch. The 2018-2019 peace process, though left incomplete, remains as the most recent high point in North-South-U.S. relations.

Since those years, young Korean Americans have taken different paths. Some have entered the existing Korea peace movement: A loose but well-connected network of nonprofits and progressive-leaning groups that campaign to end the Korean War, lift sanctions on the North, and reunite separate families. Others have made it into the political establishment of Washington, D.C., joining congressional offices, foreign policy think tanks, and lobbying groups that often advocate for regime change and increased sanctions. Many of us are interested in Korean affairs, even among those who are less politically active. Beyond the contemporary impact of the “Korean Wave” in pop culture, there is the looming specter of the partition of Korea which remains with us as a piece of the present, not the past; it has shaped our collective identity and political role in America over the generations.

It is within this context that a recent commemoration of the armistice on July 27-28, termed as a National Mobilization to End the Korean War, brought together activists and supporters of Korean peace in Washington D.C. The event generated some attention in the national media, ranging from supportive op-eds written by participants to unfair attacks painting the organizers as “pro-North Korean” agents simply because they are advocates for peace.

As two attendees of the gathering, we acknowledge and appreciate the sincerity and hard work of the organizers. We feel nevertheless that the mobilization showed many of the limitations of the Korean peace movement in its current manifestation.

Thematically, the event focused its strongest rhetoric on the harm and trauma imposed on generations of Koreans due to the war and its unresolved status. Demographically, most participants were either Korean Americans or white allies. They represented various sponsoring organizations. Politically, the organizers’ primary targets were the Washington elites, and in particular Democratic members of Congress who might be inclined to support a bill calling for renewed diplomacy toward a peace treaty.

This yearly congressional effort is likely destined to stay in limbo, pending a seismic change in the overall political landscape. The Trump movement was the elephant in the room; if Trump was mentioned at all, it was to dismiss him as an egotist whose role in the 2018-2019 peace talks was entirely selfish, erratic, and minimal, if not outright coincidental. Although the present-day dangers of nuclear war were discussed during the commemoration event, the Biden administration and its cast of unabashed neoconservative war-hawks were strangely portrayed as an alternative that was safe and could be reasoned with. Few concrete ideas were offered when it came to the question of how to build broader and more sustained popular support for Korean peace.

This gets to the heart of the issue: Korean Americans, as a part of the greater American society, know that we are impacted by changes that occur in the U.S. However, we have not yet fully recognized the most significant development in the U.S. in recent years — a change that has meaning for ourselves, Korea, and the world. Underneath narratives of racial antagonism or partisan division that dominate the airwaves, the faint outlines of something different can be seen: A new people’s peace movement is emerging in the U.S.

This is not an institutionalized peace movement of nonprofits. It is a peace movement that is only just starting to take shape — it has no central organization, no single ideology or platform. It originates from different corners of American life that have yet to join together as one.

Nevertheless, there is discernible movement in the political life of this country, propelled by a common sentiment: The American people are tired of war. Americans understand intuitively that endless wars have poisoned the well of American life — that the violence and chaos we foment abroad often finds its way back home. Moreover, ordinary people understand that the wars our nation wages are fundamentally un-democratic enterprises, to which they have not consented nor can benefit from — and which have mounting costs, in both money and human lives.

Few exemplify this political reality better than the combined phenomena of Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Cornel West. In what will be one of the most consequential elections in U.S. history, three major presidential candidates are campaigning explicitly on an anti-war agenda. The nascent anti-war movement finds its expression through a populist coalition that is converging around these figures, transcending traditional party lines. Together, Trump, Kennedy, and West likely represent the anti-war aspiration of more than half of the U.S. population.

In some ways, the outlines of this aspiration can be traced back to that pivotal event in the spring of 2018. While much can be attributed to the efforts of the two Koreas, we must also recognize that the 2018-19 peace process was made possible, in part, because tens of millions of Americans — including the “deplorables” who support Trump — expressed their readiness for a change in this country’s war policy around the world.

Kennedy, an independent candidate and formerly a Democratic challenger to Biden, is likewise gaining some traction precisely because he seeks to dismantle the American war machine, invoking the legacies of his father, his uncle, and Martin Luther King Jr. To this equation, West also brings a trenchant critique of U.S. empire rooted in the Black radical tradition. At a time when the Biden administration is stoking nuclear confrontation with Russia, China, and North Korea, these populist candidates matter, not because they are perfect, but because they capture an unprecedented and growing anti-war sentiment among Americans.

From the 20-year disgrace of Afghanistan to the multi-billion dollar proxy war in Ukraine, some Americans are asking, “How exactly have we been led into disaster after disaster, and now to the brink of nuclear catastrophe, without ever having had a say in the matter?”

Indeed, a growing number of Americans share a simmering anger and distrust toward their country’s corrupt, war-obsessed ruling elite. Across lines of color, class, and creed, we are facing the prospect of a nation in decline, a hegemon collapsing under its own weight. We wonder about our own future. Yet few, if any, look to the existing political establishment to resolve the crisis. The predominant direction of change in America is the widening gap between the elites and the broader group of ordinary people: A crisis in the legitimacy of those who presume to rule over the rest of society.

No serious effort toward peace can afford to reject out of hand the sentiments of these broader swaths of the American people. In fact, they must be embraced and understood as the best way for the U.S. to achieve its unfulfilled promise of peace toward Korea.

This year’s anniversary of the Korean War armistice offers an opportunity to reflect — not simply on the ongoing tragedy of 70 years of ceasefire without peace, but to reassess how a peace movement must be developed today to fulfill the possibilities of the future. To do this, we must understand America today and the places where the impetus and drive for peace exist.

The Korean War era shaped the formation of the U.S. deep state permanent war apparatus, with its indiscriminate bombing campaigns abroad and the targeting of Americans at home under McCarthyism. This entrenched super-state remains fundamentally undemocratic and anti-human, working against the interests of the American people and people of many other nations today. While the American government must be party to a peace agreement ending the Korean War, it is the American people who must transform and reorient the state towards peace — and can only do so with broad support and national unity.

Korean American peace activists cannot afford to pitch themselves solely as an “ethnic” or “minority” pet cause for an affected nationality. If there is to be a chance for the Korean War to finally end, there must be a peace movement that anchors itself deeply within a wide swath of Americans — going beyond the assumptions of primarily white liberal-left groups that often look down upon the rest of the U.S. population.

Neither can a peace movement honestly call itself a peace movement if it is obediently hitched to the wagon of the Democratic Party, which has become associated with the permanent security state and which hosts some of the most fervently pro-war elements of the federal government. A genuine peace movement will seek to connect Korea to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, rejecting the endless war agenda of a depraved system which only the ruling elites see as desirable.

The Korean diaspora indeed has a significant role to play in building such a peace movement. To direct our energies toward a genuine peace coalition can be our contribution to advancing the struggle of the strivings of Koreans in Korea, both North and South. As the younger generation, we can speak on the lingering effects of war — not just as Koreans but as Americans.

The trauma of war has, to some extent, clouded our ability to understand our history. An over-emphasis on trauma conditions us to believe that the brutality of war and the separation of families are incomprehensible forces that have turned all Koreans into a special group of victims. We are prevented from seeing the truth: That our pain is what connects us to a war-torn humanity, at home and abroad; and that the division of our homeland is ultimately a human problem whose resolution will bring new knowledge and energy to the world.

March 25, 1967: Martin Luther King Jr. leads a march in Chicago against the U.S. war in Vietnam, mounting a crusade to transform America from an empire of war to a nation of peace. Banner reads, “Men are not our enemies. If we kill men, with whom shall we live?”

We are not alone in this endeavor. The Civil Rights Movement, a mass movement that transformed people and the U.S. as a whole, offers a model and precedent for progressive struggle in this country. The courageous examples of Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali, in their stand for the American people and against imperialist wars, came from a broader understanding of war as the antithesis of democracy and as the enemy of the poor.

As inheritors of this history, we must fundamentally reconceive of a new peace movement today as a democratic movement; democratic in that it takes the choice of war out of the hands of the elites and places it into the hands of the people. Peace is the universal issue around which many different kinds of people — including different subgroups of the Korean American community — can come together to know one another, find common ground, work out differences, and develop stronger unity and vision on our own terms.

Peace is also the language through which we as young Korean Americans can rediscover the meaning of our civilization and its contributions to the human family. Peace is the mandate which calls us to love and believe in the American people, of whom we are a part. It is not a coincidence that the media and ruling elite want us to view Trump and his supporters as irredeemably ignorant and backwards, just as North Korea is depicted as inhumane and backwards. Peace urges us to consider that there may be something human in North Korea’s experience of war, hardship, and fierce resilience, which parallels the experiences of South Koreans and from which we can learn. Likewise, peace calls us to question narratives that tell us to distrust our own countrymen. It is time for us to seek out the truth for ourselves. By striving to understand the people of this nation and our homeland, we will know ourselves better, and realize our capacity to rise to the calling of history.

From the peace talks of 2018-19 to the current moment of dangerous escalation, many of us can feel the swelling currents of Korea’s long journey through war and division, reaching us here in the U.S. Each of us is called to reimagine our own stake in Korean peace and reunification from a narrow demand to a broader task of fulfilling the promise of real democracy in America.

America need no longer linger as a lonely empire threatening the world. We can play a role in reforging this nation into a democratic world house of peoples that can join humanity in its strides toward peace and freedom. Time has given us a precious opportunity — a unique moment of possibility in the course of human events. It rests in our hands to decide what we will make of it.

How can we actually improve human rights in North Korea?

June 22, 2024 by Christine Ahn

Instead of increasing pressure and sanctions, the Biden administration is more likely to improve the daily lives of North Koreans by creating a state of peace | By Christine Ahn (Summer 2024)

*Workers sort maize in Hamhung, North Korea.*

Human rights in North Korea are currently in the spotlight. In addition to a recent conference on North Korean human rights held in Honolulu, there’s also a new documentary, Beyond Utopia, about North Korean defectors that is receiving Oscar buzz.

We can expect to hear more about North Korea human rights this year, the 10-year anniversary of the United Nations Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a landmark report that concluded that North Korea was committing crimes against humanity.

While there are many legitimate concerns about human rights in North Korea, the question is how can we actually improve the daily lives of North Koreans? And is the current U.S. approach helping or hurting the situation?

While many in Washington advocate for more pressure in the form of sanctions and an information offensive, history has shown that these actions do not improve human rights. Instead, they increase tensions, and North Korea responds by doubling down on its nuclear weapons program. As Elizabeth Beavers and Su-mi Jeon noted for The Hill, “the status quo has been an unmitigated failure in terms of improving both rights and security.”

North Korea is already one of the most sanctioned countries in the world, and evidence suggests that sanctions are worsening the humanitarian situation. Dr. Kee Park of the Harvard University Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and a neurosurgeon who has performed surgeries in North Korea calls the sanctions a “complete economic blockade“ and “warfare without bullets.”

“Sanctions kill,” Park argues. “We know it and we should not accept that… We have allowed our leaders and our examples of our morals to deteriorate. We have become barbarians because we accept the death of children and women in the name of national and regional security.”

Sanctions and the U.S. travel ban on North Korea have also significantly hindered the delivery of humanitarian aid, according to Joy Yoon, the co-founder of IGNIS Community, a nonprofit organization working in North Korea. And high military tensions are not conducive to humanitarian aid work.

What is fundamentally missing in the human rights discourse is recognition of the ongoing state of war on the Korean Peninsula, which provides the North Korean government justification to invest its limited resources on defense and maintaining a national security state. (The Korean War only ended in an armistice, so the U.S. and North Korea have technically remained in a state of war ever since.) The U.N. Special Rapporteur on DPRK Human Rights, Elizabeth Salmon, has noted that North Korea’s militarization severely impacts human rights because the government under-invests in socio-economic development, which disproportionately affects children and women.

Instead of continuing the status quo of more pressure and sanctions, ending the state of war with a peace agreement would be more conducive to improving human rights and security — specifically by building trust, sapping the militarism that undergirds the human rights abuses, and creating the conditions to engage more effectively on human rights.

As Tomás Ojea Quintana, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in North Korea, said in his 2020 report: “A declaration on peace and development in the Korean Peninsula, and a swift resolution of the armistice status, would create the atmosphere and space needed for further discussions on denuclearization, less isolation, more access, and respect for human rights.”

In fact, in 2019, following the historic peace summits between the two Koreas and the U.S., North Korea engaged in the first ever Universal Periodic Review at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, and then participated in a two-week-long human rights workshop. Peace summits also led North Korea to self-impose a moratorium on nuclear and missile tests, to cooperate with South Korea on removing landmines in the DMZ, and to repatriate the remains of U.S. servicemen.

Not only have decades of war, sanctions, and isolation forced North Korea to adapt and become more resilient to pressure. But China and Russia, two members of the UN Security Council, are no longer willing to go along with the U.S.-led calls for more sanctions.

To truly create genuine human security and the conditions for improved human rights, we need to end the unresolved Korean War — which is only justifying the endless arms race, keeping families separated, and continuing the risk of nuclear conflict. “What will improve the ordinary North Korean people’s situation is more engagement with people from the outside world, not less,” said Cassie Kim, a North Korean defector now living in the U.S.

Global News

May 13, 2024 by raistlin

75 years after the Jeju 4.3 Massacre, Koreans want a U.S. apology | By Jon Letman (Summer 2023)

*Protesters in 2008 calling for a revision of the Jeju 4.3 Special Law demanding compensation, discovering the truth and the restoration of honor for the victims. The law was revised in 2022.*

Jeju Island, a popular vacation and honeymoon destination, explodes in a riot of pink cherry blossoms each spring. But the season in Jeju also reminds residents of a period of tremendous political upheaval and violence known variously as the “April 3 Incident,” or the “4.3 Uprising,” or simply “4.3.” This year, Koreans mark 75 years since the Jeju April 3 Incident.

Seventy-five years ago, this island, strategically located between China, Japan, and the Korean peninsula, was awash in blood and scarred by bullets and fire in one of Korea’s most brutal episodes, all while under U.S. military rule.

In the aftermath of World War II, the newly-liberated peninsula was emerging from Japanese colonization (1910-1945), and Koreans were determined to develop a self-reliant, independent and unified nation. On Jeju, opposition to a divided Korea was especially strong. Three months after the Japanese were ousted, a new occupying force — the 59^th Military Government Company — arrived on Jeju with tank landing ships and established the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK).

What followed was a chaotic rupturing of Jeju society and a paroxysm of violence that resulted in an estimated 30,000 deaths (10 percent of the population), widespread displacement, and the destruction of some 300 villages and tens of thousands of homes.

In the 1940s, Jeju was a largely agrarian society comprised mainly of independent farmers who grew barley, buckwheat, citrus, and other crops. Immediately after the war, Jeju’s population swelled by roughly 25 percent, as conscripted soldiers, newly-liberated laborers who had been forced to work in Japan, and other displaced people returned. Rising unemployment, inflation, and a cholera outbreak led to heightened social tensions.

Following a poor barley harvest, USAMGIK’s ill-informed decision to impose a highly restrictive grain import policy, and to reinstate Japanese colonial-era grain collection, bred mistrust and led to worsening living conditions and festering discontent. Meanwhile, local groups like the Jeju Island People’s Committee and other civilian groups sought independence, liberty, the preservation of a unified Korean peninsula, and the removal of any vestiges of Japanese colonial rule.

For its part, U.S. military and government authorities were concerned to the point of obsession with countering Soviet and communist influence out of a fear of Jeju becoming a “red island.” Tension on Jeju mounted as the USAMGIK rebuilt Jeju’s police force, turning to former Japanese collaborators (considered by many Koreans to be traitors). The reconstituted constabulary bureaucracy rooted in colonial rule was determined to crush left-wing groups and anyone labeled a communist. A thirst for vengeance was growing among police, military, and people’s committees on both the left and the right.

By 1946, police were clamping down hard on the Jeju Island People’s Committee and other left-wing groups. Demonstrations and mass arrests surged.

As the U.S. authorities expanded Jeju’s police force, doubling it to what it had been under Japanese occupation, right-wing paramilitary groups grew stronger. At the same time, shipping disruptions and grain distribution practices exacerbated food shortages.

While peace and order on Jeju unraveled, the U.S. was also supporting anti-Communist forces in Greece, spawning the Truman Doctrine and a policy intended to contain the spread of communism. Some U.S. government officials compared the Greek civil war to anti-communist containment on the Korean peninsula, prompting Truman to refer to Korea as the “Greece of the East.”

The trigger

On March 1, 1947, Jeju police shot into a crowd at an independence demonstration, killing six civilians. When police went unpunished, the lack of accountability fueled anger. As general strikes and mass arrests increased, the USAMGIK bolstered its support for right-wing forces. Chaos and violence spread as police targeted civilians and suspected insurgents. Arrested people were forced into tiny, overcrowded cells.

On the morning of April 3, 1948, armed rebels attacked a dozen police stations, igniting a period of some of the most wanton violence in modern Korean history. Although USAMGIK was the ruling authority at the time, it took no action to prevent the murder, rape, torture, and destruction that swept across the island. During the autumn of 1948, violence raged as civilians were killed with bamboo spears, and entire villages were razed.

Fearing targeted reprisals, villagers fled beyond the five-kilometer coastal area into the island’s interior no-go zone to hide in caves, giant lava tubes, or the forests of volcanic Mt. Halla. At what are some of Jeju’s most popular tourist attractions today, civilian massacres were carried out.

At the heart of the 4.3 Incident was widespread opposition to a U.S.- supported election scheduled for May 10, 1948, that would create a separate Korean government in the south, dividing it from the north. For the U.S., the election was the most important event since 1945. Among Koreans in the south, there was strong political opposition to the election. Some 90 percent of those who registered to vote across southern Korea said they did so under duress. Overall, Jeju had the lowest voter turnout in the country, the highest election-related injury and death rate, and the election results were deemed invalid.

Ultimately, a south-only government was formed, the Republic of Korea, headed by U.S-backed Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first president. In a letter to Truman, Rhee wrote, “…the immediate establishment of an interim independent government in the American zone will set up a bulwark against advancing communism.” Rhee also expressed confidence that the U.S. would be permitted to build a permanent naval base on Jeju following the establishment of a South Korean government.

When the Republic of Korea was established on August 15, 1948, the U.S. military was still in command of Korean forces but refrained from an overt display of force to avoid unwanted attention. U.S. military authorities were in control of and aware of the violence on Jeju, but the priority of suppressing anyone considered to be a communist was paramount.

*Jeju citizens awaiting execution during the Jeju uprising, 1948.*

A robust response

In late 1948, Syngman Rhee was informed that U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted guerillas in Korea to be “swiftly eliminated” and that American support would require a “robust response.” According to a U.S. Army G-2 report, between 14,000-15,000 residents of Jeju were killed in 1948. In one mass execution the following year, 249 people were killed with the Rhee’s approval, an event that was all but unreported outside of Jeju.

By September 1954, violence had waned, and restrictions eased, but for decades even mentioning 4.3 was effectively taboo. Those who did so risked being labeled North Korea sympathizers, facing imprisonment, or worse. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that the 4.3 uprising entered public discourse. In 1999, the South Korean parliament passed the Jeju 4.3 Special Law for Fact Finding and Reputation Recovery to establish truth, restore the honor of victims, and provide financial reparations.

In 2003, South Korea’s President Moo-hyun Roh apologized for the government’s role in 4.3. In 2005, Jeju was dubbed an “island of peace,” and in 2013, April 3 was designated a national memorial day. Former President Jae-in Moon called the 4.3 Incident “a historical fact that no force can deny,” but years later, Jeju journalist and author Ho-joon Heo interviewed retired American military advisors who had been on Jeju during the 4.3 Incident and claimed to know nothing about the massacres happening around them.

As the drive for reconciliation has gained momentum, many 4.3 survivors and their families say the time has come for the U.S. to acknowledge and apologize for its role. “The U.S. government’s apology regarding the role of the U.S. military government and the U.S. military advisory group has been delayed,” said Hee-bum Koh, chairman of the Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation.

Koh noted that in 2018 more than 200 South Korean civil society organizations gathered 100,000 signatures, demanding a U.S. apology which was submitted to the U.S. Embassy in South Korea. Koh points to previous U.S. presidents who have expressed remorse for past acts of injustice or mourned the extreme violence committed by the U.S. and said it is time for the U.S. to apologize for what happened under its authority.

*Empty tombs placed in the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park commemorate 3,895 people whose bodies were never recovered after being arrested without due process. Photo by Stephen Wunrow*

“The families of the victims have been waiting for 75 years,” Koh said “It would be better to receive an official apology sooner rather than later.” He said it would be especially desirable if, rather than just a high-ranking official, the U.S. president offered a word of condolence and took responsibility for the U.S. involvement in the 4.3 Incident.

“An honest reckoning with the past,” Koh said, “can contribute to the development of a stronger alliance between our two nations.”

No apologies

Asked to characterize the role of the U.S. military on Jeju during the 4.3 Incident and about Korean demands for an apology, a State Department spokesperson said in an email, “the Jeju Incident of 1948 was a terrible tragedy, and we should never forget the devastating loss of life.” They added that “as close allies committed to democratic values and promoting human rights, the United States shares the resolve of the Republic of Korea to work together to prevent such tragedies in the future anywhere around the world.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Heo, who spent more than 30 years researching the uprising for his book “American Involvement in the Jeju April 3 Incident: What the US Did on Jeju Island,” said that the U.S. role in the Jeju 4.3 Uprising is well preserved in U.S. government documents, photographs, and press reports from the time. Heo writes that Truman and other U.S. leaders knew about the massacres on Jeju, but were more concerned with losing control of Korea.

In his book, Heo quotes a 1947 New York Post article which reads: “South Korea’s jails are overflowing with political prisoners as a result of undeclared war by its rightist police on leftist elements […] While American authorities deplore the notoriously brutal police methods, they look favorably on the current campaign because the Communists are the target.”

Heo said there needs to be more awareness of the U.S. role in the carnage on Jeju Island during the months of the uprising among American politicians, scholars, journalists, and the public. Seeking the truth, he said, should not be a means to punish but rather a path toward reconciliation and can serve as a global model for confronting historical injustice and human rights violations.

University of Connecticut history professor Alexis Dudden calls Jeju the “core of the post-1945 conundrum and collapse of what still continues to be called Pax Americana.” She said that Jeju was arguably the precursor to the Korean War, which began after widespread civil conflict and bloodshed had already occurred elsewhere in Korea.

“The Jeju massacre stands as history for what a total blood bath looks like,” Dudden said. “Jeju was huge because the sheer violence was supported by the U.S. military government, pushed under, and denied.”

Dudden called 4.3 a “massacre in plain sight which an open civil society is still grappling with, and it is the harbinger of the kind of violence that we’re living in today.”

*The 4.3 Peace Park museum honors the victims of the 1948 massacre. Stephen Wunrow photo*

First-class strategic importance

Today on Jeju, as they recall the horrors of 4.3, peace activists say real peace remains elusive. Activist Sung-hee Choi says that what took place during 4.3 served as a model for scorched-earth policies in other parts of the world, from Southeast Asia and Central America to the Middle East. She implores Americans to learn Jeju’s history to better understand U.S. foreign policy. According to Choi, the colonial pattern has been repeated countless times. “You frame the people. You divide the people. You target the people. You justify the killing,” she said.

According to Choi, peace activists on Jeju are still targeted under South Korea’s expansive National Security Act, which she calls an oppressive law dating back to the 4.3-era.

She added that the U.S. has retained access to strategically important Jeju, so coveted by the U.S. after World War II.

As recently as early March, a U.S. (Arleigh Burke-class) guided-missile destroyer made a scheduled port call at the Korean naval base on Jeju for what the commanding officer said was to “ensure our forces can operate together effectively and maintain peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region.” The destroyer’s visit was preceded by the port call of a Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine in Busan. For more than 16 years, Choi and other activists have protested daily outside the Jeju naval base, calling for an end to the militarization of Jeju and the Korean peninsula. (Check out KQ’s coverage of the Jeju naval base issue)

During World War II, Jeju was a staging ground for Japanese air attacks. As early as 1885, Japanese newspapers reported on presumed Russian ambition to control the island, while a Washington Post article the same year called Jeju’s strategic position “of first-class importance.”

On April 26, 2023, President Joe Biden hosted South Korean President Suk-yeol Yoon for a state visit, in part to celebrate 70 years of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. Yoon, who was the first conservative South Korean president to attend a 4.3 ceremony, has also been accused of revisionist policies.

As 4.3 survivors and others continue to demand a U.S. apology, any mention of the Jeju 4.3 history seems highly unlikely to happen, given the U.S.-ROK commitment to bolster their decades-old calcified front against China, Russia, and North Korea.

On Jeju, where the winter-blooming red camellia is a symbol of the victims of 4.3, the roots of a conflict watered in blood have seen the sunlight, allowing the truth to bloom at last. The truth-telling gives Koreans a chance to reconcile with their past. In turn, Americans should take the opportunity to do the same.

Check out KQ’s feature story on Jeju “Dark Tours” which visit massacre sites and gives information to interested individuals and groups.

*Dark clouds over Hallasan, Jejudo. Photo by Stephen Wunrow*

This article originally appeared in inkstickmedia.com and is reprinted with permission.

Are North Korea’s latest threats rhetorical or real?

February 3, 2024 by John Feffer

It’s not too late for the U.S. and South Korea to offer Jong Un Kim an offramp from the conflict he has yet to initiate | By John Feffer (Winter 2024)

The Korean War ended more than 70 years ago, and a tense peace has reigned ever since on the Korean peninsula.

The two Koreas have exchanged artillery fire, battled in the economic and diplomatic arenas, and even covertly dispatched spies to each other’s territory. But the threats of a resumption of conflict, disproportionately coming from North Korea in recent years, have been rhetorical. The firepower of the South Korean military, backed by a U.S. defense pact, has deterred Pyongyang; the sheer number of soldiers in the North Korean army, backed by a small but operational nuclear arsenal, has deterred Seoul.

But borders don’t seem quite as inviolable as they once did. Russia has invaded Ukraine, Israel has sent forces into Gaza, and even Venezuela recently seemed to contemplate an incursion into Guyana. The U.S., meanwhile, has recently attacked various targets abroad, from the Houthis in the Red Sea to Iranian commanders in Syria.

Against this geopolitical backdrop, are the latest threats emanating from Pyongyang still rhetorical?

North Korean leader Jong Un Kim sounds more and more embattled and belligerent. In power since the death of his father at the end of 2011, he has been constrained by a hemorrhaging economy and uncompromising adversaries abroad. The growth rate of the North Korean economy wasn’t too bad at the beginning of his tenure. Since 2017, however, the arrow has simply gone downward, with a devastating 4.1 percent contraction in 2018, followed by a further 4.5 percent decline during the pandemic year of 2020. International sanctions have made North Korea dangerously dependent on China for trade, which explains in part Jong Un Kim’s current interest in covering his bets by improving relations with Russia.

Meanwhile, the two leaders that promised some form of engagement with Pyongyang — South Korea’s Jae-in Moon and Donald Trump — are no longer in office. South Korea’s current government is very cool toward engagement. Joe Biden, focused on a raft of other foreign policy challenges from Ukraine to Gaza, has not expressed much interest in expending political capital on a risky venture like negotiating with Pyongyang.

Washington’s failure to remain engaged with North Korea is the primary reason that longtime North Korea watchers Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker believe that Jong Un Kim has abandoned the default approach of more-or-less peaceful coexistence in favor of launching an attack against South Korea. In some ways, Kim is following the logic of Hamas, an illiberal force also in charge of a largely failed entity. Kim, too, perceives his adversaries as complacent, uninterested in any real negotiations, and vulnerable to a surprise attack. Presiding over an “open air prison” in Gaza, Hamas decided it had nothing left to lose. The North Korean leadership, in charge of an impoverished country with a horrific human rights record, may well have decided that it also has run out of options.

“The literature on surprise attacks should make us wary of the comfortable assumptions that resonate in Washington’s echo chamber but might not have purchase in Pyongyang,” Carlin and Hecker write in 38North. “This might seem like madness, but history suggests those who have convinced themselves that they have no good options left will take the view that even the most dangerous game is worth the candle.”

Carlin and Hecker don’t have what the Israeli intelligence community possessed a year before the October 7 attacks, namely a detailed description of preparations to launch a surprise attack. They are relying on official North Korean statements eschewing reunification of the peninsula and a constitutional change that now identifies South Korea as an adversary rather than as tanil minjok (“one people, one blood”).

This week, reports based on satellite images showed the destruction of Pyongyang’s iconic Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification, also called the Arch of Reunification, which Kim earlier referred to as “an eyesore,” and called for its demolition.

North Korea has also recently conducted a rash of missile tests, including one with a hypersonic warhead, as well as military drills near the maritime border that seem designed to provoke a response from the South.

As sober analysts, Carlin and Hecker are not given to overstatement, so their warnings must be taken seriously.

At the same time, the usual North Korean approach has been to make wild threats to get the attention of an otherwise indifferent U.S. government in order to pave the way for a fresh round of negotiations. Missile launches, nuclear tests, and promises to turn South Korea into a “sea of fire” have all, in the past, signaled not an interest in war but, perversely, a determination to restart peace talks with newly attentive adversaries. Also, Kim might be eyeing elections in South Korea where the pro-engagement opposition party is hoping to increase its parliamentary majority in the April elections and in the U.S. where Donald Trump is now running even or better against Joe Biden in the polls. Trump has long boasted of the 27 “love letters” he exchanged with the North Korean leader. Perhaps, Kim strategizes, the love could continue if Trump is reelected.

Beware wishful thinking. Most analysts misinterpreted Vladimir Putin’s warlike rhetoric and military preparations at the end of 2021 as merely a bid for Western attention and a better bargaining position at the negotiations table. Conventional notions about the deterrence of superior force — Israel, NATO, South Korea — may not apply in a world of increasingly volatile leaders and increasingly violated borders.

Kim’s closer relationship with Putin may well prove pivotal in North Korean calculations. Beijing has traditionally attempted to rein in Pyongyang because an overly provocative neighbor is not good for the Chinese economy in addition to boosting U.S. military presence in the region. Moscow, on the other hand, might be sending different messages, given Putin’s more confrontational approach to the West. Just as the war in Gaza has proven a boon to the Kremlin, in that it has distracted attention and military hardware away from the European theater of operations, a conflict on the Korean peninsula would be an even greater draw on U.S. and European resources.

In the late 1940s, Stalin was skeptical about the advantages of North Korea attacking South Korea. Jong Un Kim’s grandfather, Il Sung Kim, eventually convinced Stalin otherwise and won Soviet support for the attack on the south that took place on June 25, 1950. Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has indicated that he will visit North Korea “at an early date,” his first trip there since 2000. Pundits and policymakers take note: Putin’s visit might tip the balance one way or the other in North Korea’s deliberations over war and peace.

In the meantime, it’s not too late for the U.S. and South Korea to offer Jong Un Kim an offramp from the conflict he has yet to initiate.

Reprinted from Foreign Policy in Focus.

Korea’s war, America’s future

October 11, 2023 by Nuri Yi, Jeremiah Kim

A new peace movement for a new generation | By Nuri Yi and Jeremiah Kim (Summer 2023)

At a 70th milestone, no progress in an unending war

September 5, 2023 by Hankyoreh

Historian Bruce Cumings on slim prospects for a Korean peace treaty | By the editorial staff of Hankyoreh (Summer 2023)

*Historian and author Bruce Cumings. Photos by Stephen Wunrow*

July 27, 2023, marked the 70th anniversary of the signing of the armistice agreement that halted the Korean War. This 70-year milestone also represents an ongoing threat today, as concerns of clashes related to North Korea’s nuclear program have recently flared up, and no peace treaty is in the offing.

During an interview with the Korean newspaper Hankyoreh, Bruce Cumings, author of The Origins of the Korean War and a distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, assessed that the prospects for peace in the Korean peninsula are challenging, given the “strategic patience” polices of the Joe Biden administration and the increased pressure by the Suk-yeol Yoon administration against North Korea

In particular, Cumings criticized U.S. policies of the last few decades for being too entrenched in the theory that North Korea will collapse, commenting that the U.S. could begin to solve the Korean Peninsula problem by coolheadedly perceiving reality.

The following is an excerpt of a recent interview by Hankyoreh:

Hankyoreh: In marking the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, the two Koreas are each claiming that they have won and are expressing hostility toward each other. No sober reflection is to be found. What is your take on current developments regarding the Korean Peninsula?

Cumings: North Korea is moving closer to China and Russia; and South Korea is moving closer to Japan and the U.S. So it’s not quite a Cold War situation, but it is a new alignment. North Korea had wanted normalized relations with the U.S. for many years. I don’t think they want that now. And I don’t think the Biden administration would be at all interested in normalizing relations. So you have an alignment of three [countries on each side]: China, Russia, and North Korea; and South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

This is unusual because several years ago, China and North Korea were having rather difficult relations. So I think as long as the war in Ukraine is going on, and American relations with China are getting worse, and they’re very bad with Russia, this has the effect of freezing the relationship between the two Koreas.

The ideal situation from my point of view is when you have a liberal president in South Korea and a liberal president in Washington, which happened during the Clinton administration. And that showed that direct talks with North Korea could be very fruitful, including freezing their plutonium for eight years.

Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun (both past progressive South Korean presidents) did as much as they could to try and keep the U.S. and North Korea talking to each other. I think they made great achievements. And President [Jae-in] Moon also tried to do his best to engage with North Korea, but he was saddled with Donald Trump, who was a very erratic president — one day he’s wanting to blow North Korea out of the water and the next day he wants to talk to Kim Jong-un. So unfortunately, the Biden administration’s policy is one of strategic patience like the Obama administration.

We haven’t had any substantive talks with North Korea; it’s not a strategy. It may be strategic patience, but what’s the strategy? The result of it is that North Korea just piles up more atomic bombs and ICBMs, which can’t be the goal of the U.S. policy toward Korea. So I’m pessimistic now. But we hope that in the future, both in Seoul and Washington, you would find presidents interested in engaging with North Korea.

Hankyoreh: It’s been more than 40 years since you wrote The Origins of the Korean War. I am aware that a historian is not one who predicts the future, but I can’t help but ask whether you had any idea of how the future of the Korean Peninsula would turn out at the time you were writing the book.

Cumings: Well, when my first volume of The Origins of the Korean War came out in 1981, both Koreas were under dictatorships. And in the case of South Korea, the Gwangju rebellion had just occurred the year before my book appeared. The situation was quite terrible in South Korea. A crisis that began with Gwangju lasted seven years, until June 1987. I had my book banned by [then-President and dictator] Chun Doo-hwan, which only made it sell more copies. It was kind of an underground publication in Korea.

When I came to Korea, I came back with Kim Dae-jung in 1985 as part of a foreign delegation to protect him. And that was my first visit in almost 15 years, because I had not been able to get a visa. South Korea wouldn’t give me a visa because of my criticism of the dictatorship. And the KCIA people followed me everywhere. It was almost funny because, as an American, I knew I had the privilege that they weren’t going to hurt me, but they certainly did follow me.

But you’re right, at the end of that decade, historical changes took place with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I wracked my brain to try and figure out what might happen to the two Koreas. I was asked many times for my opinion because my book had circulated. I have argued that North Korea is not going to collapse. And we shouldn’t expect it to collapse, but have to deal with the reality that North Korea and the North Korean leadership know how to hold on to power. I took a lot of criticism, including from my wife’s family. And also for some editorials that I wrote because Koreans in the South expected unification to be around the corner when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Maybe more important, the Bush and Clinton administrations premised their policy toward North Korea on the idea that North Korea was on the verge of collapse, which lasted all through the ’90s. I consistently argued that that was foolish. I don’t like to brag about anything, but I’d been right. And the reason that I’ve been right, I think, is because I try my best to understand the nature of the North Korean regime, from its inception in the late 1940s down to the present.

Koreans are one of the oldest people in the world in terms of continuous occupation of their territory for thousands of years. And the primary political forum that they had for those thousands of years was a dynasty, a monarchy. And the North Koreans have never known anything but the monarchy, or Japanese dictatorship, or the dynasty of kin. And we can all deplore that and say, “Isn’t that terrible,” and so on. But it does not affect North Korea whatsoever.

President Clinton and his advisors became interested in engaging with North Korea. In 1994, Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang and met [North Korea founder and leader] Kim Il-sung. Working with Kim Dae-jung in Seoul, they engaged in North Korea and had a variety of talks. I was very optimistic at that time.

But then George W. Bush just demolished the Clinton policy toward North Korea, and we came close to attacking North Korea. And North Korea, I think, had no choice but to go ahead and develop nuclear weapons. I say that because if I were running North Korea in the context of the war in Iraq and the “axis of evil,” and all of those things Bush did, I would think that nuclear weapons were my only deterrent to attack by the U.S.

Hankyoreh: Since the new administration [of current president Suk-yeol Yoon] came to office in Seoul, inter-Korean relations and the relations between North Korea and the U.S. have clearly deteriorated. What do you think is behind this change?

Cumings: I think it’s a combination of North Korea continuing to build up its nuclear arsenal and shooting off missiles. We have an adversarial relationship between Pyongyang and Washington, one of the worst in a long time. And then you have a conservative president in Seoul who follows his predecessors like [right-wing past presidents] Park Geun-hye, Park Chung-hee and others thinking that the way to deal with North Korea is to get tough and confront it. And that never has worked. It yields no positive outcome. With that combination, I’m quite pessimistic right now on the 70th anniversary of the armistice that anything good is going to happen.

I can’t emphasize enough that American policy has been so stupid toward North Korea most of the time, based on fallacious assumptions, not on any kind of intelligence-gathering or real knowledge of the North. It’s based on false assumptions.

For 20 years, the assumption was that North Korea was going to collapse because the Eastern European communist countries had collapsed, and they thought North Korea was a puppet of the Soviet Union or a creature of the Soviet Union. So when the Soviets collapsed, presumably North Korea would collapse. And I’ve always argued — in my first book, and ever since then — that North Korea, North Vietnam during the ‘50s and ‘60s before the war ended, and China all represent anti-colonial revolutions, not revolutions guided by Moscow.

All the Eastern European regimes were implanted by Stalin and a country like East Germany had almost 400,000 Soviet troops on its territory when Gorbachev allowed East Germany to democratize. There were no Soviet troops in North Korea after 1948 or in China. The American policymakers from the Roosevelt and Truman administrations never understood the power and the force of the anti-colonial revolutions in the world which lasted from 1945 to the collapse of the Portuguese Empire in 1975. And it’s a very important instructive point, especially for young people, that often intelligence goes forward based on completely erroneous assumptions. And then you follow policies that are completely erroneous.

I can give one example: In 1995, John Deutch was the head of the CIA, and he gave a public testimony in Congress where he said the only question today is not if North Korea will collapse but when North Korea will collapse. And within 48 hours, the head of the North Korean army, Kim Kwang-jin, said it was no longer a question of whether we will have a new Korean War but when. This kind of summarizes what was wrong with American policies. If you have a collapse the likely outcome would be a second Korean War, not something like East Germany collapsing.

Hankyoreh: I think this is one of the reasons why you believe this kind of maximum pressure on North Korea will not work.

Cumings: The unfortunate fact is that in the last almost 20 years, North Korea has become impregnable because it has nuclear weapons and delivery systems of all kinds, from cruise missiles to ICBMs. And it’s not an arsenal like the Soviet Russian arsenal or the U.S. arsenal. But it’s enough to deter anybody from attacking North Korea. And therefore, maximum pressure on North Korea doesn’t mean much except that the country is sanctioned by the U.S. and South Korea in many, many ways, and that hurts ordinary people. But it clearly does not hurt the leadership. So I suppose maximum pressure is more related to President Yoon’s standing with the South Korean people trying to show that he’s tough and so on. But it doesn’t fundamentally work.

Hankyoreh: What do you think North Korea’s current strategy toward the U.S. is? Could we say that its intention to give up nuclear weapons has definitely decreased in the time since 2018-2019 when the North and the U.S. had talks going on? As the crisis deepens, some point out that the U.S. should have accepted the closure of the Yongbyon nuclear facility in 2019.

Cumings: One of my friends who was in North Korea asked, “How many times can you sell the Yongbyon facility to the United States?” I think this was another attempt to do so. And North Korea now has a stockpile of plutonium that’s much larger than it used to be. Back in 1994, it had 6,000 fuel rods pulled out of the Yongbyon reactor, enough for a couple of bombs. But now they have much more. So in a sense, it’s an obsolescent factory for plutonium. And I don’t think the U.S. took it very seriously.

I’m talking about serious people, not President Trump. I believe President Trump did some good things in Korea like suspending South Korean and American joint military exercises that the North sees as quite threatening. And he met twice with Kim Jong-un, which was good. But he was very erratic and knew nothing about the Korean situation or hardly any other international situation. But I give him credit for doing something no other sitting president had done. And I’m sure he got to know Kim Jong-un a bit during their meetings. But when Trump and his aides walked out of the meeting in Hanoi, without even eating lunch with the North Koreans, it was very humiliating and made things very tough for Kim Jong-un to go back to Pyongyang empty-handed. It was gratuitous and stupid. Even if nothing was going to be accomplished, they could have at least had lunch together. And since then, relations have really gone downhill.

Hankyoreh: On the topic of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader is making gestures that his daughter Kim Ju-ae could be his successor. What should we make of this display?

Cumings: I could be wrong, but I think the North Koreans are just playing with the world opinion and South Korean opinion. Let’s face it, Kim Jong-un is not going to retire anytime soon. He’s in his late 30s. I would expect him to hold power for several decades. Why is he parading his daughter? I don’t know. But it could be that he thinks it’s funny that world opinion and the world press suddenly says, “Oh, this must be the successor.” He has a son as far as I know. Nobody has seen him. Given the kind of conservative dynastic arrangements of North Korea, I would expect the son would succeed Kim Jong-un, not the daughter. Kim Jong-un is a little overweight, but he’s very robust. He doesn’t seem to have chronic health problems. And so even the South Koreans and many Americans wouldn’t like to hear this, I’m pretty sure he’ll outlive both of us. Well, maybe not you.

Hankyoreh: The U.S. government seems to have returned to the “strategic patience” of the Obama era, emphasizing unconditional dialogue but with no action. Do you think it would be possible to resume North Korea-U.S. dialogue under Biden?

Cumings: The Biden administration will say any day of the week it is ready for unconditional talks with North Korea at any time about denuclearization. It’s kind of like if you were to be holding a machine gun and I say I will be happy to talk to you about gun control when you get rid of your gun. Meanwhile, I have 50,000 machine guns trained on you.

In the case of North Korea, the U.S. intimidates North Korea time and time again with American nuclear weapons, in bombers and the USS Kentucky nuclear submarine full of nuclear weapons which came to Busan recently. This has been a consistent policy of one president after another to use nuclear blackmail against North Korea. I think it should be outlawed to threaten a non-nuclear country with nuclear weapons. The U.S. did so from 1950 to 2006. Then North Korea got the bomb and now it’s asking North Korea to give up their deterrent. For the U.S. to continue to send the USS Kentucky to South Korean ports politically means it has no interest whatsoever in talking to North Korea because it’s putting an insurmountable obstacle in front of the opening of talks. And then combined with North Korea and China and Russia being closer than they have in decades, it’s just a stupid policy.

Maybe when Biden is re-elected, he’ll have the freedom to pursue a more constructive policy toward North Korea. I was at a conference with Siegfried Hecker, a physicist who directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory for many years, and has done wonderful work on North Korea. He’s been there many times. Siegfried said that he gave a presentation to the U.S. Senate after he had been to North Korea. He talked to the Senate and testified about his trip to North Korea.

And after he was done, Biden came over and sat with him for two hours to talk about North Korea. Biden could not have a better advisor than Siegfried Hecker. So that gives me a little bit of hope. Right now, because an election is coming up, he doesn’t want to go overboard and try something new with North Korea. But in a second term, we’d have a president who at least knows a lot about North Korea.

Hankyoreh: If Trump were to pull out a victory in 2024, what kind of approach do you think he would take? Do you think Kim Jong-un would anticipate Trump coming back?

Cumings: That’s a very hard question to answer because I think he was very happy to meet with Trump. I think it was just awful that Trump and his people got up and left the table in Hanoi. However, Trump did several things like suspending the military games and meeting directly. The trouble is, if Trump were reelected, this country would be in a crisis unlike any before because vast numbers of Americans really love Trump, and he would try to be a dictator.

Trump is very hard to predict because he’s a mercurial figure who says one thing on Tuesday and the opposite on Wednesday. The best thing I can say about Trump when it comes to foreign policy is that he couldn’t care less what the foreign policy establishment in Washington is saying and thinking. He’s the first president like that. He would be more experienced. He came into office in 2017 completely inexperienced, but he had four years in office and three after his presidency to learn something about foreign affairs. But my assumption is he won’t be reelected.

Hankyoreh: It seems that North Korea and China are growing closer, as well as North Korea and Russia, as demonstrated by not only the Chinese delegation attending the armistice ceremony, but the Russian defense minister as well. Russia was not a direct participant in the Korean War. There is a lot of talk about a “new” Cold War. As you know so well, the Korean War broke out at the beginning of the Cold War.

Cumings: Yes, it’s a very important development. I was surprised that the Russian defense minister showed up in Pyongyang. I wasn’t surprised by the Chinese delegation, because they signed the armistice. And because China and North Korea are much closer than they were back in 2014 or 2015, when there was a lot of difficulty in the relationship between Pyongyang and Beijing. But it’s almost a physical principle that when the U.S. is hostile to China, it’s always hostile to North Korea. This would bring China and North Korea together.

In the case of Russia, Russia has very few friends in the world because of its invasion of Ukraine. And so, they’re all over the world trying to make friends. There are rumors, I think that haven’t been proven, that North Korea is supplying weapons to Russia in this war. In any case Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran have closer relations today than they have many years and they form a kind of foursome of anti-American regimes.

I’m sure North Korea feels that it has more backing now than it did 10 years ago. And this directly affects the sanctions on it because China and Russia are not really very serious about implementing sanctions on North Korea. So it gives North Korea more breathing space. But as you said, it’s reminiscent of the Cold War. And one of the dangers of the war in Ukraine now for a year and a half is that somehow the U.S. and Russia would get into military conflict and that would be very bad. From the Korean standpoint, it suggests it’ll be a long time before positive developments happen on the Korean Peninsula between the two Koreas.

Hankyoreh: You have emphasized U.S. responsibility for the division of the Korean Peninsula. You’ve also stated that you felt a sense of responsibility as an American. Do you think there is anything the U.S. should do regarding that kind of historical and moral responsibility?

Cumings: John J. McCloy, one of the four figures in American foreign relations in August 1945, told Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel to go into an adjoining room and find a place to divide Korea. That was on August 10, 1945, 24 hours after Nagasaki had been obliterated by the second atomic bomb. The Soviets were not directly notified about this, but MacArthur included in his August 15 declaration of victory over Japan that Korea will be divided at the 38th parallel. The U.S. bears a tremendous responsibility for unilaterally dividing Korea.

In my second volume on the Korean War — it’s Chapter 33, called Who started the Korean War? — I developed three different scenarios for how it might have started, including a provocation by the South supported by the U.S., but I made no commitment to that position. And in the conclusion to that chapter, I said that asking who started the Korean War is a political question and if you keep asking it and answering it one way, you will never have reconciliation between the two Koreas because the two Koreas and the U.S. and the Soviet Union and China were all responsible for this war.

The older I get, the more I just find it unfathomable that during the occupation before the war, the U.S. rehired every Korean who worked for the Japanese, particularly in the national police and the military. And then you have anti-Japanese guerrillas running to the north — a civil war is going to break out sooner or later. And, of course, most Americans, including a lot of historians, don’t accept that and they say that North Korea was a Soviet implant and puppet. But I was able to read through a lot of captured North Korean documents relevant to the origin of the war and the North Korean regime, which took me two years. And I came to think it was a classic anti-colonial nationalist regime. And it still is. So the U.S. bears a terrible responsibility for being so stupid as to take traitors and put them in power in the late 1940s.

Americans, not knowing anything, are calling it the “Forgotten War.” It’s an unknown war because Americans even at the time were not able to know what was really happening. You had censorship in Korea under Gen. MacArthur and you had McCarthyism in the U.S., where you could lose your job if you said the wrong thing about the Korean War. It was the most repressive period in American political history. So it’s an unknown war and the more people know about it, the better the chances that reunification might someday happen.

Hankyoreh: The Origins of the Korean War has been republished in Korea in a new and complete translation. Is there anything you would like to say to the readers of this book, especially young readers?

Cumings: I was very gratified that a good Korean translation finally appeared for my two volumes. (Volume I of Cumings’book was translated into Korean in the 1980s; a new and complete translation of both volumes was published last month). And I’m deeply indebted to the translator for his very hard work. It represents 20 years of hard labor in the archives and writing it on my part. I don’t think it’s usual that one book published in 1981 and another one published in 1990 would be translated and published in 2023. But I guess, if I can say so, it shows the importance of the questions I tried to deal with in that book.

This article originally appeared in Hankyoreh.

Korean armistice, Ukrainian ceasefire

August 22, 2023 by John Feffer

Pity the country that has no armistice, but pity the country that needs an armistice | By John Feffer (Summer 2023)

*Two people stand in the ruins of a building in Pokrovsk, Ukraine, that was brought down by a Russian missile attack.*

In his famous essay about democracy, the British novelist E.M. Forster celebrated the political system’s encouragement of diversity and its tolerance of criticism. However, he only gave two cheers for democracy, rather than three, because democratic systems tend toward inefficiency and mediocrity. Although better than the alternatives, democracy deserves only qualified praise.

So, then, what about the armistice that spelled a temporary end to the Korean War 70 years ago, just recently commemorated? It certainly deserves some praise. After all, the armistice ended three years of terrible bloodletting. It created an international mechanism to keep the two warring sides from violating the terms of the agreement. And it has proven quite durable, having lasted for seven decades.

But the armistice also didn’t officially end the Korean War. It marked what was supposed to be a temporary truce. Both sides hoped for the reunification of the peninsula, though they obviously had different visions of what that reunification would look like. Nor has the armistice given way to a more durable peace.

The armistice redrew a line through the Korean Peninsula that U.S. military officials initially established at the Potsdam Conference in 1945 as World War II was coming to an end. That line runs not only through Korean territory but also through Korean families, Korean culture, Korean language, and one way or another the souls of every Korean person wherever they might live.

Until the 1970s, the armistice divided two relatively similar countries. Both Koreas established authoritarian regimes (with only a brief democratic interregnum in the South), rebuilt roughly equivalent economies, and maintained rather conservative and parochial cultures. But then South Korea struck off in a different direction and became a much more prosperous country, with democratic institutions and a culture open to the world. Reunification seemed structurally feasible 50 years ago, despite the obvious differences in ruling ideologies. Today, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), created by the armistice, separates two vastly different worlds.

The armistice saved lives. But it has also institutionalized a deeply hurtful division.

The war in Ukraine resembles the Korean War in many respects. There was an initial invasion that stopped short of occupying the entire country. Ukraine, like South Korea, fought back with the assistance of powerful allies (though without the addition of allied boots on the ground). After a year of back and forth, the two sides have battled to a near standstill.

In the next weeks and months, Ukraine’s counteroffensive could break through Russian lines. Ukrainian forces, with the military hardware supplied by the U.S. and European Union, could push Russian occupying forces out of the Donbas and even out of the Crimean Peninsula.

With that outcome in mind, Ukraine is currently rallying international opinion behind its version of a peace plan that calls for the exit of all Russian occupying troops and Ukrainian control of all its pre-2014 territory. Kyiv is hoping that a successful military campaign will create irreversible momentum behind a peace plan that attracts near-universal endorsement.

But the Russian army has dug itself deep into occupied territory, establishing several rings of fortifications and minefields that make it difficult for the Ukrainian army to advance. The Ukrainian counteroffensive has made some headway, but it has been slow.

Meanwhile, any hopes of a political change inside Russia have been stymied. Although there have been several challenges to Putin’s authority, most recently the attempted mutiny by the Wagner Group mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian president remains relatively secure in power. A presidential election next year will likely return Putin to office, especially since he has jailed, killed, or exiled any viable competitors.

Without a military breakthrough in Ukraine or a political breakthrough in Russia, the two sides will be looking at the same situation that confronted Korean forces in 1953. They will be stuck on either side of a line of demarcation that creeps only a little bit in one direction or another.

In that scenario, faced with a stalemate on the ground, international mediators will propose an armistice. Neither Russia nor Ukraine will be happy with a status quo that falls short of their ultimate goals. But exhausted by the fighting and short on resources, they likely will be willing to cut their losses and negotiate.

Here is where the Korean War analogy starts to break down. The Korean armistice separated two sovereign nations of shared ethnicity. Although an international authority was involved in administering the strip of territory separating the two countries, it was not involved in the governance of either North or South Korea.

The situation in Ukraine is more complicated. Although Russia has technically incorporated the Donbas and Crimea into the Russian Federation, the international community has not recognized those new borders. An armistice in Ukraine would deal not only with the cessation of conflict, it would have to address the political status of these occupied territories.

Russia has a high degree of comfort dealing with regions of ambiguous status. The frozen conflicts in Georgia and Moldova produced Russian-allied enclaves that have received very little international recognition but have nevertheless challenged the territorial integrity of those countries. Following this pattern, Moscow’s fallback position would be to use Russian involvement in the Donbas and Crimea to make it more difficult for Ukraine to function as a unitary country and complicate its plans to join the European Union. An armistice of this nature would turn Ukraine into an enormous gray area on the edge of Europe — territorially compromised, economically challenged, and not fully inside Western alliances.

Kyiv, meanwhile, might count on the populations of the Donbas and Crimea to decide to rejoin Ukraine, either after an internationally supervised referendum or through partisan warfare. Despite the economic losses Ukraine has suffered, its prospects will still be rosier than Russia’s since it will be the beneficiary of European largesse and trade.

For this reason, a ceasefire signed by Ukraine and Russia in 2024 will not likely last until 2094. Unlike Korea’s armistice, the Ukrainian counterpart will be truly temporary. It will be replaced either by resumed fighting or undermined by economic and political realities.

It’s too soon to cheer any kind of armistice in the Russian war in Ukraine. Neither side is willing yet to stop fighting. Koreans who long for a reunified peninsula will understand the desire of Ukrainians to reunite all regions of the country. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht’s aphorism about heroes: Pity the country that has no armistice, but pity the country that needs an armistice.

On a 70th anniversary, “han”, joy and a history lesson

August 14, 2023 by Alison Choi

Young and old activists join in DC action agitating for peace-first diplomacy to end U.S.’s longest war | By Alison Choi (Summer 2023)

Korea peace advocates march through Washington DC on the 70th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, calling for the end of the Korean War. The banner is by Chicago artist Aram Han Sifuentes. Photo by Constance Faulk

On the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean armistice agreement, I marched with Korean American elders and organizers, as well as allies, including veterans and humanitarian groups in a commemorative three-day event in Washington, DC dubbed Korea Peace Action: National Mobilization to End the Korean War. I was in the first cohort of a 30-Under-30 advocates’ group sponsored by the trailblazing Korean peace organization Women Cross DMZ, which organized the event.

The July 27 start date of this event is significant to the Korea peace movement because it is 70 years after the 1953 armistice or cease-fire that ended combat in the Korean War. This date of commemoration is intended to draw attention to the 70-years that the Korean Peninsula has been in a state of extreme militarization and political tension. This state of non-resolution of the war has also kept the Korean people divided, including thousands of families who were permanently physically separated by the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), established to divide Korea into two parts.

The remedy for this dangerous state of readiness and ongoing tension is a peace treaty – it is the goal of the Korea Peace Now coalition, and a necessary first step to restore normal relations between the two Koreas, and with the U.S.

The tension has escalated significantly this year, with increasingly more frequent and intense joint military U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) exercises near the DMZ, and tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea).

Geopolitical, military, and nuclear science experts who spoke at a conference on the final day of the Korea Peace Action event called on the U.S. to engage in peace-first diplomacy toward the DPRK, an approach they say is critical to averting the growing risk of nuclear conflict. Members of the 30-Under-30 cohort worked closely with elder activists to build the momentum for this clear call to action. Our presence honored the late activist Hyun Lee, a lifelong advocate for peace on the Korean peninsula.

Artist Dohee Lee quietly prepares for the event, “Unbind Your Heart: Korean Han / Grief Transmutation Circle,” behind a temporary altar holding small objects from attendees representing peace and healing. *Photo by Constance Faulk*

During three days of action, I engaged in several activities with the cohort; we attended a congressional press conference, visited our members of Congress, and participated in a han/grief transmutation ceremony with shamanic artist Dohee Lee. With Lee’s guidance, we cried and transmuted our ancestral grief into joy and action.

We also marched in a Korea Peace rally from Lafayette Square to the Lincoln Memorial. Enduring both heat and rain, we rallied in front of the White House and on the city streets, from Pennsylvania to Constitution Ave — more than 500 of us, chanting and walking arm-in-arm for peace. We also helped run an academic conference on denuclearization and peace on the Korean peninsula. During the three days, we built strong relationships that will form the bedrock of an ever-growing peace movement.

As a third-year Ph.D. student in history, I learned so much more than I had ever encountered in my studies or in everyday life. The activities and presence of other activists awakened me to the urgency of achieving peace on the Korean peninsula.

My parents and grandparents immigrated from Seoul to the U.S. in the 1970s. My parents — both 1.5-generation Korean Americans — moved to Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, where I was born and raised. My grandparents were young children during World War II and the Korean War that occurred immediately after, but they have never shared their wartime experiences with me.

However, I grew up knowing that my lineage descended from both the north and the south. I was told that the ancestral lands of my father’s family lie along what is now the DMZ in Korea. My mother’s side is from the south, and by the time the Korean War began, both sides of my family were south of the 38th parallel (roughly the location of today’s DMZ). I do not know the exact names of our ancestral villages, nor do I know the details of what my family went through during the Korean War. I do know, of course, that I cannot visit the north where my family is from under the current diplomatic regulations. I also know that my grandparents and ancestors before them endured unspeakable traumas of war and occupation by the Japanese that have been passed down to me.

*Hana Marie Kim, youngest member of the 30-under-30 cohort, spoke at the July 27 Congressional press conference about her family’s separation as a result of the Korean War. Photo by Constance Faulk*

Attending the Korea Peace Action mobilization as a 30-Under-30 activist has enlivened my identity as a Korean American and made me more acutely aware of the responsibilities I now shoulder as a peace activist of the next generation.

For example, I learned that the U.S., representing the United Nations Command, signed the Korean Armistice agreement on behalf of South Korea in 1953. Therefore, the Korean War cannot formally end without the signature of the U.S. The dynamics of power that preserve the ceasefire of the Korean War reveal the imperial relationship between the U.S. and South Korea.

The South is unilaterally disempowered from ending the war that divides it from the North, perpetuating U.S. militarization of the Korean peninsula and the mandatory conscription of South Korean men. Meanwhile, the people of North Korea suffer due to U.S.-led sanctions on agriculture and healthcare that inflict indiscriminate damage against civilians.

Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Kee Park, who has visited North Korea numerous times to conduct surgeries, train surgeons, and bring critical medical supplies, pointed this out during the conference. “Sanctions kill,” Park said, “We know it and we should not excuse it. …We have become barbarians because we have accepted the deaths of women and children in the name of national security.” I learned in depth during the conference that the political failure of the U.S. to prevent the nuclear armament of the North further signifies the U.S. orientation towards perpetual war in the Pacific and desire to dominate the Pacific at all costs. These were sobering facts to absorb about the role of the U.S. in preventing Korea’s peaceful reunification.

In Lafayette Square in front of the White House, hundreds gathered for a rally to advocate for peace on the Korean peninsula, as part of the events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement. Photo by Constance Faulk

The DC gathering was also timed to galvanize support for H.R. 1369, a House bill in Congress that seeks to officially end the Korean War and review restrictions on travel to North Korea. It was introduced to the House in March 2023 and represents an actionable step to achieving peace on the peninsula.

Seeing my Korean elders march through Washington D.C. in 96-degree weather and rain showers, holding up protest banners, and welcoming us young activists into the movement, brought up anger, gratitude and grief in my body. I felt anger for them because their lives have been framed by war and struggle, and they deserve rest and peace. I felt gratitude for the warmth of my elders, who clink beer glasses with us and embrace all of our Korean and American identities. I feel grief because the elders embody the ancestral struggle for peace and liberation from colonialism, militarism and war.

*Knotted strips of cloth represented the collective han of participants in the ceremony entitled “Unbind Your Heart” event, led by Dohee Lee as part of the Korea Peace Now* commemorative event.

During the han/grief transmutation ceremony, we unraveled knotted strips of colored cloth to symbolize the release of our grief and that of our ancestors who have passed and experienced colonialism, war, and division. Many of us then carried this ribbon-like cloth through the streets of Washington D.C. as we marched and chanted for peace.

When I returned to my hotel room from the rally, I strung my ribbons through the handle of my carry-on luggage so they could be with me as I made my way back home to Chicago. I carefully untangled the ribbons from my suitcase handle when I got home and laid them out for a few days. I had yet to decide what I would do with them.

One week after I was back from the event, an idea came to me. I set up my small step ladder opposite the doorway frame in my studio apartment and hammered two nails on either side. I draped my yellow, blue, magenta and purple ribbons between the two nails, and tied a single knot on either end of each ribbon.

Now, when I walk through my doorway, I feel like the ribbons are watching over me and reminding me of the ongoing fight for peace in Korea, and the many knots of grief and trauma we have yet to untie. I think of my newfound friends who I bonded with under the hot DC sun, sharing kimbap and chanting “Korea Peace Now!” These ribbons hold the energy of han, grief, and joy that were infused and transmuted during Dohee Lee’s ceremony on the historic 70th anniversary of suspended peace and Korean liberation.

This reflection marks the beginning of my journey as an engaged and angry Korean American who wishes to see a unified, peaceful Korea in her lifetime. I hope more Korean Americans and other supporters and allies will join the movement and learn about the history of the Korean War and the U.S. role in it – a history that is not yet part of mainstream U.S. consciousness.

As a first step, I would encourage anyone interested in advocating for peace in Korea to r each out to congressional representatives to encourage them to sign H.R. 1369. Beyond that, I would encourage joining the Korea Peace Action movement, and talking with loved ones about what peace on the Korean peninsula means.

My participation in this event reminded me that peace activism for Korea brings me in community with all Koreans, whether on the peninsula or in the diaspora, and all of the people and places affected by U.S. militarism and U.S.-led wars. I am here for my ancestors, and I am also committed to fight for our present and future generations to come.

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