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and its implications for the future of Korean food sovereignty By Moe Taylor | November 2, 2023 On October 10th, 1958, Kim Il Sung, leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), visited the Kiyang Machinery Factory in what is today part of the major port city of Nampo. Addressing the workers, he framed the task before them as a crucial battle in a broader struggle to rebuild from the destruction of the Korean War, and create a prosperous, socialist society. Empowering the nation’s cooperative farms with tractors would be the catalyst for a revolution in food production. “Since ancient times, our people have said that to live well is to eat white rice with meat soup every day,” Kim told those present. “But in order to do that, we need to be producing 5 to 7 million tons of grain per year.”[1] While the Kiyang Machinery Factory was to manufacture 3,000 tractors that year, its longer-term goal was 10,000 annually. This was not merely to meet the needs of the DPRK, however. While the complete mechanization of agriculture in the northern half of the peninsula would require 30,000 tractors, Kim asserted, the South, richer in farmland, would require an additional 50,000. In other words, Korean unification was assumed to be on the horizon, and the millions of poor farmers in the South had to be considered in setting production goals. On this basis, a goal of 80,000 tractors was proclaimed.[2] A month later the first Korean-made tractor rolled off the assembly line. The boxy, bright-red “Chollima 28,” named after the magical flying horse of Korean folklore, was equipped with a 28 horsepower (HP), 2-cylinder diesel engine, a gearbox transmission, and a 3-point hitch. Six years later, by which time tens of thousands of these machines had arrived at cooperative farms throughout the country, Kim told a national meeting of tractors operators that they were “the vanguards of the rural technical revolution,” entrusted with the “history-making task” of “freeing the farmers from arduous labour.”[3] The Peruvian intellectual Genaro Carnero Checa (1930-2010) marvelled at how the DPRK successfully developed a domestic tractor industry while struggling to recover from the widespread devastation wreaked by the US military during the Korean War. For Carnero, it was an example of the kind of grassroots initiative and working-class ingenuity that distinguished those difficult years.[4] According to Carnero, ordinary workers, lacking blueprints and all but the most basic tools, fashioned the Chollima 28 through a feat of reverse-engineering in which they disassembled and studied a foreign model piece by piece. This onerous process of trial and error included ten unsuccessful prototypes, including one which could only drive backwards, to which Kim Il Sung is said to have responded, “the important thing is that the tractor is moving.” This story, recalled by many foreign visitors to what was renamed the Kumsong Tractor Factory in the early 1970s, contains an additional point, subtly made but no less important: the DPRK’s allies preferred to sell them tractors rather than share their technology. But for the DPRK leadership, relying on imported Soviet, Polish, or Romanian tractors could not meet the party’s ambitious goals of mechanization and self-reliance. Fundamentally, the DPRK’s aim was to become an industrialized nation with a sufficient degree of domestic manufacturing capacity, rather than a dependent exporter of raw materials. Thus, in 1958 the DPRK became a rare case of a developing country manufacturing its own tractors – a high-tech, high-value industry then dominated by the industrialized countries of Europe and the United States (as it still is today, although to a lesser extent). Followed by the rapid and widespread mechanization of its farming sector, it was a remarkable achievement which earned the DPRK widespread admiration among the newly-independent nations of the global South. By the 1970s the DPRK was producing 5,000-7,000 tractors annually. While this fell short of the ambitious target of 10,000 set by Kim Il Sung in 1958, it was nonetheless impressive, and meant the government likely achieved its goal of having one tractor for every 10 hectares of arable land.[5][6] The South Korean government estimated the North had produced some 136,000 tractors by 1984.[7] Grain production grew in parallel, with annual yields likely reaching approximately 8 million tons by the end of the 1980s.[8] While there is some debate over the DPRK’s exact agricultural output in the decade, there is broad consensus that it was impressive by developing world standards, and that the country was likely self-sufficient in grain.[9] Of course, tractors were not the only or even the most important factor in greater yields. Rice transplanting and threshing machines, chemical fertilizers, extensive irrigation schemes including the construction of canals, reservoirs, and water-pumping infrastructure, and ambitious land reclamation efforts were all part of the transformation of farming in the DPRK.By contrast, in the same period South Korean agriculture remained private, small-scale, and mostly unmechanized. Most farmers were poor, heavily indebted, and owning an imported tractor from Japan, the US or Europe was but a fantasy. Even smaller, two-wheeled power tillers, which the government encouraged, typically cost more than most farmers’ annual income in the 1960s.[10] By 1980, there still only some 2,500 tractors amongst South Korea’s 2.12 million farming households.[11] In the 1970s the DPPK became an outspoken advocate of the Non-Aligned Movement and South-South Cooperation. The latter concept held that developing countries could overcome what they might lack individually in natural resources, expertise, or technology by trading and cooperating amongst themselves in a spirit of solidarity. It offered an alternative path to development than that of the global capitalist market dominated by the Triad (the United States, Western Europe, and Japan). In this context, Pyongyang gifted large numbers of tractors to friendly countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The biggest recipient region was Africa, where at least 11 countries received significant shipments of North Korean tractors in this period (grants of anywhere from 20 to 100 tractors to a single country were typical). These tractors were often part of larger assistance packages in the areas of farming, fishing, food processing, irrigation, and land reclamation. They could include tractor harrows, plows, trailers, and spare parts, other kinds of agricultural machinery and implements, fishing boats, and boat motors. In many countries the DPRK also constructed standing facilities for the production of salt, sugar, cooking oils, and flour, poultry slaughterhouses, shipyards and dockyards, and factories for the manufacture of fertilizer, pesticide, agricultural implements, and water pumps.[12] Despite these accomplishments, the DPRK’s food system met calamity in the radically altered geopolitical, economic, and ecological conditions of the post-Soviet era. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, the DPRK abruptly lost its primary source of trade, and most crucially, affordable oil supplies. On the heels of this economic crisis came the climate disaster of July-August 1995, when the country experienced massive floods resulting from torrential rains – the heaviest recorded in the country in seventy years. This flooding wiped out farmland, but also emergency grain reserves, many of which were stored underground. Flooding also crippled the DPRK’s domestic energy production capacity as it damaged or destroyed hydropower stations, coal mines, irrigation systems, and transportation networks. In this sense, the DPRK was an early victim of the extreme heavy precipitation events caused by climate change that have since become more frequent around the world.[13] The floods of 1995 were followed by more extreme weather in the following years that further damaged the agricultural sector, including above-average temperatures and drought.[14] The loss of its primary source of affordable energy imports, combined with the damage done to its domestic energy sector, was devastating for the DPRK’s highly mechanized food system, by severely restraining its ability to power tractors, water-pumps, and transportation, and produce fertilizer and spare parts. One 2000 study estimated that eighty percent of the country’s farming machinery was in disuse.[15] The result was the near implosion of the economy and a famine that may have killed as many as one million people,[16] a grim period North Koreans refer to as the Arduous March (gonanui haenggun). Despite the hardships the DPRK has endured since the 1990s, the hardening of both US and UN sanctions since 2017, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Kumsong Tractor Factory still operates today. In December 2022, the DPRK press announced a new tractor model, the harlequin-green Chollima 1104.[17] At 110 HP and with a traction capacity of 20 kilonewtons (KN), it is the most powerful North Korean tractor model to date. These developments have occurred in the context of what various analysts have recognized is the government’s determination to raise agricultural production and strengthen food security since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the Eight WPK Central Committee in December 2021, Kim Jong Un called for the country to “increase the state investment in agriculture and thus decisively strengthen the material and technical foundations of agriculture,”[18] stressing the need for science-based policy, greater mechanization, and special subsidies to cooperative farms. Pyongyang’s diplomatic activity abroad is another indicator of the importance it places on strengthening food security. The primary benefit the DPRK has sought in its bilateral relations with Brazil, for example, is cooperation and assistance in soybeans – learning Brazilian production techniques, sharing germplasm, while opening DPRK seed banks to the Brazilian Agricultural Research Enterprise (EMBRAPA).[19] In the author’s personal experience, efforts by DPRK scientists and policy makers to collaborate with their foreign peers – efforts made near-impossible by the existing sanctions regime - have largely focused on agriculture, fungiculture, aquaculture, child nutrition, and renewable energy. While South Korea has witnessed remarkable economic growth over the last forty years, its agricultural sector faces severe challenges of its own. In recent decades the country has witnessed a troubling reduction in farmland and domestic food production. In the context of rapid industrialization and urbanization, farmland has shrunk 33.6 percent, from 2.29 million hectares in 1970 to 1.52 million in 2022.[20] In 2020, South Korea’s rate of grain self-sufficiency dropped below 20 percent for the first time in history, while the country was importing 54.2 percent of its food, making it one of the most food-dependent nations in the OECD.[21] Moreover, as South Korea has been fully incorporated into a neo-liberalized global economy, its agricultural sector is more vulnerable to foreign competition. The recent controversy over Chinese-made kimchi is exemplary (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese imports had come to supply 40 percent of South Koreans’ kimchi consumption).[22] Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic, the global climate emergency, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have exposed the fragility of a highly globalized and fossil fuel dependent food trade system. The fact that in the West the global food crisis appears to have lost the attention it received during 2022, when the FAO reported that approximately 9.2 percent of the world’s population faced hunger, does not mean it went away.[23] Moreover, the reduction in carbon emissions the climate crisis demands will need to include more localized food systems as part of a part of a broader process of, as Nicolas Graham puts it, “lessening the spatial disjuncture between production and consumption” through “partial deglobalization and the shortening of commodity chains.”[24] Greater integration of the North and South Korean agriculture sectors could be a pathway to both strengthening food security in the North and decreasing food dependency in the South. We caught a glimpse of such potentials during the high-point of North-South dialogue during 2000-2008, when South Korean companies explored producing kimchi, medicinal herbs, and dairy products, among other things, in the North for export to the South.[25] Increased scientific collaboration in areas such as agronomy, plant nutrition, and soil chemistry, and collaborative environmental stewardship, also present logical steps forward, and again, is a form of cooperation that made significant headway prior to 2008.[26] How the DPRK leadership has handled its food security issue at various points over the last thirty years deserves to be thoroughly scrutinized, and criticism levelled accordingly. However, the familiar refrain in the West that the DPRK government “builds nukes while its people starve” simplifies a much more complex situation by ignoring several crucial factors. First, the contribution of the United States government and its allies to food insecurity in the DPRK through coercive sanctions that strangle the economy, handicap domestic food production specifically, and block the efforts of other states and NGOs to deliver humanitarian assistance, in what US policymakers have confessed are a deliberate attempt to induce regime change through increasing hardship on the civilian population.[27] Secondly, the role of the United States and its allies in escalating tensions and increasing the danger of war on the Korean peninsula, which recently has included the stationing of a US nuclear ballistic missile submarine at Busan, the creation of the Japan-South Korea-U.S. Trilateral Alliance (JAKUS) and the expansion of joint US-ROK-Japan war exercises, and Japan’s decision to double defense spending while revising its defence policy. The latter, according to many analysts, amounts to a work-around of its constitutional prohibition on waging war.[28] Lastly, as serious as the DPRK’s food insecurity issue is, there are no shortage of US-allied governments in Asia and throughout the global South, praised by Washington for their “free market” and “robust democracy,” who have comparable or significantly worse issues of hunger. Consider India, the fifth largest economy in the world, where the Modi government is estimated to spend several billion dollars annually on its nuclear weapons program,[29] and scores significantly worse on the Global Hunger Index than does the DPRK.[30] Fundamentally, therefore, the tragedy of food insecurity in the DPRK is one of many consequences of the absence of peace on the Korean peninsula. An end to the hostile policy of the United States and its allies, including military aggression and coercive sanctions, would make possible the rehabilitation of DPRK’s agricultural sector by enabling it to interact with foreign markets, import crucial inputs, and re-engage in international cooperation, within a broader process of economic recovery. The DPRK’s impressive experience in feeding its population through innovative farming methods and cooperative labour would have the opportunity to rejuvenate and evolve in line with contemporary advances in renewable energy, sustainable agricultural, and DIY manufacturing empowered by Open Source and 3-D printing. Ultimately, peace and unification would open the possibility of Koreans building an integrated, peninsula-wide green agricultural sector based on goals of sustainability, food security., and food sovereignty. Moe Taylor is a historian, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) scholar, and a Senior Policy Analyst with the Canadian government. He is the author of North Korea, Tricontinentalism, and the Latin American Revolution, 1959–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He lives in Toronto. [1] Kim Il Sung, “Uri ŭi himŭro ttŭrakttorŭrŭl saengsanhaja” [Let us build tractors by our own efforts], October 10, 1958, in Chŏnjip, vol. 22 (Pyongyang: Korean Workers’ Party Publishing House, 1998), 379-390, here 380. [2] Ibid., 384. [3] Kim Il Sung, “Tractor operators are the vanguards of the rural technical revolution,” February 20, 1964, in Works, vol. 18 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House,1984), 158-165, here 158. [4] Genaro Carnero Checa, Corea: Arroz y Acero (Lima: Ediciones Siglo XX, 1974), 141. [5] Randall Ireson, “Food Security in North Korea: Designing Realistic Possibilities,” February 2006, Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 8. [6] The basis for the author’s claim is a comparison between South Korean government figures on the numbers of tractors in the DPRK between 1974 and 1984, and World Bank estimates of total arable land in the DPRK in the same period. According to this combined data, in 1974 the DPRK had 72,008 tractors and 2.2 million hectares of arable land. By 1977 the number of tractors had increased to 88,000, and by 1984 there were 136,000 tractors while hectarage of arable land had expanded to 2.285 million. See Puk'an Kyŏngje T'onggyejip [North Korea Economic Statistics] (Seoul: Ministry of Unification, 1996), 208-11; https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.ZS?view=map. [7] Puk'an Kyŏngje T'onggyejip, 208-11. [8] James H. Williams, David Von Hippel, and Peter Hayes, “Fuel and Famine: Rural Energy Crisis in the DPRK,” 2000 Nautilus Institute policy paper: https://nautilus.org/publications/books/dprkbb/energy/dprk-briefing-book-fuel-and-famine-rural-energy-crisis-in-the-dprk; Meredith Woo-Cumings, “The political ecology of famine: the North Korean catastrophe and its lessons,” ABD Institute research paper no. 31 (January 2002), 23; Ireson, “Food Security in North Korea,” 6. [9] John Feffer, “Korean Food, Korean Identity: The Impact of Globalization on Korean Agriculture,” paper written as Pantech Fellow in Korean Studies at the Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University (2004), 16-17; Edward Reed, “Agricultural Development in Two Koreas: Common Challenges, Different Outcomes,” in Outside Looking In: A View into the North Korean Economy, edited by J. James Kim and Han Minjeong (Seoul: Asan Institute for Policy Studies, 2014), 22-52, here 31; Ireson, “Food Security in North Korea,” 6; Woo-Cumings, “The political ecology of famine,” 24. [10] Hyungsub Choi, “Imported machines in the garden: the kyŏngun’gi (power tiller) and agricultural mechanization in South Korea,” History and Technology 33, no. 4 (2017), 345-366, here 354. [11]Joanna Boestel, Penelope Francks, and Choo Hyop Kim, Agriculture and Economic Development in East Asia: From Growth to Protectionism in Japan, Korea and Taiwan (London: Routledge, 1999), 139. [12] Communist Economic Aid to Non-Communist LDCs, 1987, June 1988, CIA Directorate of Intelligence reference aid, 239-257, Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90t00008r000400340001-5. [13] FAO/WFP crop and food security assessment mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, FAO/WFP special report, November 25, 2011, 10-1; Woo-Cumings, “The political ecology of famine,” 28-29. [14] Daniel Goodkind and Loraine West, “The North Korean Famine and its Demographic Impact,” Population and Development Review 27, no. 2 (June 2001), 219-238, here 223. [15] Williams et al, “Fuel and Famine,” 12. [16] Goodkind and West, “The North Korean famine,” 225-34. [17] Korea (Pyongyang) no. 806 (December 2022), 202-203. [18] “Great Programme for Struggle Leading Korean-style Socialist Construction to Fresh Victory: On Report Made by Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un at Eighth Congress of WPK.” Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), 9 January 2021. [19] Danilo Marcondes de Souza Neto, “Distant Friends? Twenty Years of Brazil-DPRK Diplomatic Relations (2001-2021),” North Korean Review, 18, no. 2 (Fall 2022): 5-20, here 11. [20] Jimin Lee et al, “Vulnerability assessment of rural aging community for abandoned farmlands in South Korea,” Land Use Policy 108 (2021): 1-2; “South Korea farmland decreases,” Hankyoreh, September 11, 2009: https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_business/376210.html; Kang Yoon-seung, “Arable land down for 10th consecutive year in 2022,” Yonhap News Agency, February 27, 2023: https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20230227002700320#:~:text=SEJONG%2C%20Feb.,rice%20paddies%2C%20data%20showed%20Monday. [21] “South Korea’s grain self-sufficiency rate dropped below 20%, creating serious concerns for the country’s food security,” Agroberichten Buitenland, August 7, 2022, Netherlands Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality: https://www.agroberichtenbuitenland.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/south-koreas-grain-self-sufficiency-rate-dropped-below-20-creating-serious-concerns-for-the-countrys-food-security; “Market Overview – South Korea,” Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada agri-food industry overview, 2021: https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/international-trade/market-intelligence/reports/market-overview-south-korea-0. [22] Joori Roh and Minwoo Park, “To tackle a kimchi crisis, South Korea banks on massive cabbage warehouses,” September 30, 2022, Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/tackle-kimchi-crisis-south-korea-banks-massive-cabbage-warehouses-2022-09-30. [23] Somesh Jha, “Is a global food crisis the new normal?,” Al Jazeera, August 29, 2023. [24] Nicholas Graham, “Planning and the Ecosocialist Mode of Cooperation,” Monthly Review 75, no. 3 (July-August 2023): 126-141, here 137. [25] Felix Abt, “When ‘Sunshine’ Ruled on the Korean Peninsula,” The Diplomat, online edition, 11 July 2016: https://thediplomat.com/2016/07/when-sunshine-ruled-on-the-korean-peninsula; Feffer, “Korean Food, Korean Identity,” 33. [26] Edward Reed, “Agricultural Development in Two Koreas: Common Challenges, Different Outcomes,” in Outside Looking In: A View into the North Korean Economy, edited by J. James Kim and Han Minjeong (Seoul: Asan Institute for Policy Studies, 2014): 22-52, here 49. [27] Paul Liem, “Peace as a North Korean Human Right,” Critical Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (2014): 113-126, here 113-114. [28] William Sposato, “Japan’s Defense Plans Are Big, Popular, and Expensive,” Foreign Policy, 10 April, 2023. [29] The Indian government is notoriously secretive when it comes to its nuclear budget. For an overview of the available data and best estimates, see Urvashi Sarkar, “What’s known—and not known—about India’s nuclear weapons budget,” Bulletin of Atomic Scietists, November 2, 2021, [30] Klaus von Grebmer et al, 2022 Global Hunger Index (Bonn/Dublin: Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe, October 2022), 43-46.

By Simone Chun | September 20, 2023 | Originally published in Counterpunch Peter Kuzinick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, has described the US as “the most war-making country” in the world. Case in point is the newly-minted Japan-US-Korea alliance (JAKUS), which is being lauded as a historic step toward peace and stability by the Biden administration, but in fact fuels the rising danger of war in the Asia-Pacific as part of Washington’s relentless quest for a US-led unipolar world. On August 18, the first Japan-Korea-US (JAKUS) trilateral summit took place at Camp David amid the deployment of US nuclear assets to the Korean Peninsula, with the ostensible pretext of “enhancing deterrence and cooperation” against North Korea and China. President Biden has stated that such trilateral meetings will take place, “not just this year, not just next year, forever,” virtually guaranteeing that the 80,000 US troops garrisoned in Japan and South Korea will remain there as the permanent spearhead of a future regional war. The US has long sought to formalize such a trilateral alliance against China, with more than 13 trilateral meetings held since 1994 in an ongoing attempt to seal the deal. Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”, which began the escalation against China, was succeeded by Trump’s “Free and Open Indo-Pacific”. Biden rebranded his version as the “US Indo-Pacific Strategy,” intensifying the pressure on South Korea to join Washington’s anti-China bloc, broadening the scope of regional war games to include US nuclear assets, and finally culminating in the Camp David Trilateral summit. The JAKUS is part of the manufacture of consent for the buildup to war in the Asia Pacific. The axis’s 4 takeaways merit particular attention. First, the trilateral alliance formalizes regular war games, enhances military intelligence-sharing and advanced missile network integration specifically targeting China, introduces a collective security framework through the so-called “commitment to consult,” and creates an anti-China economic bloc. Clearly, these measures are not defensive, but amount to the creation of a “mini-NATO” in East Asia in preparation for war against China. Second, the axis fuels Japan’s remilitarization. For years, Japan–a “failed peace state” actively girding for war under a so-called pacifist constitution–has used the North Korean threat as cover for a rearmament program targeting China. Prime Minister Kishida announced that Japan will double military spending within the next 5 years and develop “counterstrike measures”–a euphemism for pre-emptive strike capabilities–in direct contravention to its constitution. Japan has already purchased US-made missile systems capable of targeting the Chinese mainland, and deploys its warships far beyond Japanese maritime zones. In effect, Biden’s axis fuels Japan’s long-simmering imperial ambitions by intertwining them with Washington’s hegemonic quest at the cost of placing Japan–propped up by South Korea–in the front lines of a brewing US-led war against China. Third, the trilateral alliance is made possible by Biden’s steadfast backing of unpopular leaders in Japan and Korea whose extreme far-right ideology is based on egregious revisionism that whitewashes Japan’s historical war crimes and tramples the rights of victims of Japan’s brutal 35-year colonization of Korea. Japan’s crimes against humanity, its sexual enslavement of 200,000 mostly underage Korean girls (“comfort women”), and forced conscription of 150,000 Korean laborers have all been swept under the rug. South Korea’s deeply unpopular far-right president Yoon Suk-yeol, whose anachronistic McCarthy-era anticommunism fuels his eagerness to serve as the linchpin of Biden’s Cold War, has done his best to whitewash Japan’s historical crimes in Korea in order to facilitate Washington’s tripartite pact. Against considerable domestic backlash, Yoon nullified the 2018 South Korean Supreme Court ruling holding Japanese firms liable for conscription of forced labor during the occupation of Korea and normalized the US-brokered General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), which calls for the bilateral exchange of sensitive military information between South Korea and Japan. Former president Moon Jae-in nearly canceled the GSOMIA in November 2019, after Tokyo imposed retaliatory trade sanctions on South Korea following the Supreme Court rulings on wartime forced labor. Meanwhile, Kishida, doubling down on his uncompromising allegiance to the far-right faction of the LDP, has led the rehabilitation and resurrection of Japan’s brutal militarism. To drive home the point, just three days before the JAKUS summit, Kishida made a ritual offering to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, which honors convicted war criminals such as wartime Prime Minister Tojo, who was executed for crimes against peace. The blatant historical denialism of Biden’s Axis of War renders Washington’s vision for the future of Northeast Asia morally and politically untenable. Fourth and most seriously for South Korea, the trilateral alliance subordinates it to the US-Japan diad, trampling its sovereignty and forcing it into the front lines of any US-led war in Asia. Tim Shorrock points out that Biden’s “Asia Czar,” Kurt Campbell, “sees Japan and its right-wing ruling Liberal Democratic Party as the linchpin of the US alliance system in the Asia region,” and views South Korea as a subordinate partner to the US and Japan. Likewise, Noam Chomsky observes that “South Korea [is] enlisted by being occupied by the United States,” serving as a permanent US military base while Washington maintains carte blanche to deploy South Korean personnel against China or any other US-designated “threats” in the region. General Kim Byung-joo, former Combined Forces Command Deputy Commander and current member of the South Korean National Assembly, warns that the trilateral alliance destroys South Korea’s hard-won diplomatic framework of balanced diplomacy and opens a Pandora’s box of historically proven dangers. The JAKUS fits all too well with Japan’s proven history of repeatedly invading Korea in order to secure mainland bridgeheads against other enemies. As in the past, by virtue of its geography, the Korean Peninsula remains Japan’s stepping stone and gateway to the continent. With the US military already firmly entrenched in South Korea, Japan is virtually guaranteed to use a “security crisis” on the Korean Peninsula as a pretext to dispatch and even base troops on South Korean soil in furtherance of its renewed imperial ambitions, handily facilitated by the US. Step by step, the US has been clearing the path for the Japanese military to once again operate on Korean soil. Apart from providing doctrinal cover for the deployment of Japanese forces to South Korean soil, the US has significantly evolved the nature of Japanese involvement in joint military exercises with South Korea. Unlike the past US-led joint naval exercises conducted in international waters, the latest maneuvers involve the operation of Japanese ground, sea and air forces in a consolidated rehearsal for the entry of the Japanese military into the Korean Peninsula. Mindful of the catastrophic consequences of forcing Korea down a proven and disastrous historical path, Kim considers Japan’s involvement in a crisis on the Korean Peninsula as the biggest single risk of Biden’s JAKUS, likening it to “letting a tiger into your own living room.” Thus, the alliance ushers in a bleakly high-risk, no-gain scenario for South Korean security and sovereignty by subordinating the nation’s interests to those of Washington and Tokyo, subsuming it in the intensifying power struggle between the US and China on the one hand and Japan’s resurgent militarism on the other. But Washington’s quest for global hegemony does not place only Korea, nor indeed just the Asia Pacific at risk. Noam Chomsky has stated that “war with China would mean the end of humanity,” as such a confrontation would carry the chilling and very real risk of spiraling into all-consuming nuclear world war. Global solidarity is needed more than ever to hold the Biden administration accountable and to prevent the inevitable outcome of its dangerous policy of brinkmanship in the Asia Pacific. Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, a lecturer at Northeast University and an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors, and serves on the advisory board for CODEPINK. She can be found on Twitter at @simonechun.

By Simone Chun | July 27, 2023 | Originally published in Truthout Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, which brought a cessation of hostilities between the opposing parties, but left the peninsula locked in a permanent state of war. Article IV of the armistice stipulates: “​Within three months after the Armistice Agreement is signed and becomes effective, a political conference of a higher level of both sides beheld by representatives appointed respectively to settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea [and] the peaceful settlement of the Korean question…” Nonetheless, the U.S. has to this day refused to sign a permanent peace treaty or withdraw its troops from South Korean territory. Campaigning for an end to the 70-year U.S. military occupation of Korea and a formal end to the Korean War, thousands of South Koreans will form a human peace chain around the 3,600-acre U.S. military base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, on July 27. Known as Camp Humphreys, the garrison is the largest U.S. overseas base in the world, hosting nearly 28,500 combat-ready U.S. troops and battle-ready materiel. In solidarity, 840 Korean and international organizations are holding more than 300 peace actions around the world to call on President Biden and Congress to officially end the Korean War with a formal peace agreement. One of the organizers of the Pyeongtaek peace chain signaled that more such actions were planned for the future, stating that: “July 27 will mark the first step towards finding peace in our land on our own terms. We will spread our movement to Gunsan, Jinhae, Busan, Jeju … and will not give up until the job is done.” The common thread in this year’s global Korea peace action is the renewed focus on the U.S.’s role in one of the most brutal wars of the 20th century. In three years of war, the U.S. dropped over 635,000 tons of bombs on the Korean Peninsula — more than it dropped in all WWII theaters combined. Indiscriminate carpet bombing and napalming destroyed nearly 90 percent of major cities and villages in North Korea, killing an estimated 4 million, more than half of whom were civilians. Infrastructure was obliterated, farmlands razed, families shattered and more than 2 million children orphaned. The world’s most militarized Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) was established along the 38th parallel, permanently dividing the nation, leaving 10 million family members separated and more than 80 million Koreans living in a state of perpetual war. According to historian Bruce Cumings, the tragedy of Korea’s division was the result of the “wrongs of high-ranking leaders of the US who carelessly and rashly divided this historical country after 1945” in furtherance of U.S. hegemonic interests and against the will of the Korean people. The Korean War had started as a civil war for unification, but developed into a global war as foreign powers perceived both threats and opportunities arising from this strategic theater. I.F. Stone, who framed the Korean War in the context of the global Cold War by documenting how the United States intentionally refused to let hostilities end, noted that: The dominant trend in American political, economic, and military thinking was fear of peace. General Van Fleet summed it all up in speaking to a visiting Filipino delegation in January 1952: “Korea has been a blessing. There had to be a Korea either here or some place in the world.” In their introduction to the new edition of I.F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War, Tim Beal and Gregory Elich argue that Stone unmasked the “ugly reality of how the United States intentionally kept the war going long past the point where either side could make any significant gains on the ground.” They continue: The eruption of full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula presented an opportunity to advance U.S. geopolitical interests and those of key Asian clients and put imperialism at the center of U.S. foreign policy in Asia.… What resulted from it was to ‘supplant European and Japanese colonialism and replace it with U.S. dominance’… inaugurating imperialism at the center of U.S. foreign policy, with the military industrial complex at the apex. Thus, the ongoing Korean War inaugurated the “permanent war economy” of the Cold War, setting the United States on the path to militarism and perpetual conflict. In Korea, it meant the signing of a “Mutual Defense Treaty” in 1953 between the U.S. and South Korea that unleashed massive militarization in both the North and South; the American nuclearization of the South (1958-1991), which set in motion the North’s eventual nuclearization; building up and subjugating South Korea’s military as an appendage of U.S. force projection; extracting more than $1 billion per year from South Korean taxpayers for the privilege of hosting Washington’s network of military bases and personnel; and reducing the South Korean nation to voiceless frontline cannon fodder in Washington’s new hegemonic “Pivot to Asia,” which is set on a deliberate course toward war with China. "Fear of Peace": Biden has Escalated Provocative War Games in Korea Fast forward to the Biden administration, and the U.S.’s “fear of peace” is manifested in the rapid militarization and escalation toward a kinetic new East Asian war. Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have been carrying out a series of provocative war games and drills aimed at the North, and more importantly at China, mobilizing the nuclear aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz, the Japanese Destroyer J.S. Umigiri and advanced aerial assets over Korean waters, as well as U.S. B-52s and ground-based THAAD anti-missile systems. These “largest-ever live-fire drills” field some 2,500 troops and 610 weapons systems near the North Korean border as well as U.S. nuclear-armed submarines, reintroducing U.S. nuclear weapons to South Korea for the first time since 1981. This deliberate escalation of regional tensions is greatly facilitated by South Korea’s far right president Yoon Suk-yeol, who has systematically capitulated to Washington’s anti-China agenda against the wishes of the majority of South Koreans, and at great cost and risk to the nation. The newly minted Washington Declaration flouts South Korean national interests and public opinion by forcing the nation squarely onto the front lines of Washington’s aggressive militaristic push into East Asia. Japan, which has for years used the North Korean threat as cover for rearmament against China, is another driving force behind the escalation. With sustained U.S. support, Tokyo has made great strides toward transforming into a formidable military power capable of counterbalancing China. Its imperial ambitions intertwined with the U.S. hegemonic quest in East Asia, Tokyo has secured Washington’s blessing for doubling military spending within the next five years, developing preemptive military strike capabilities and acquiring advanced offensive U.S. ordnance capable of reaching targets on the Chinese mainland. “The United States Is Developing an Attack — Not Impending, But Already Underway — on China” With the Korean Peninsula fast becoming a focal point for a potential U.S.-China war, I invited Noam Chomsky to examine the ramifications of Washington’s new Cold War. Speaking on the JNC TV-sponsored webinar, Chomsky voiced significant concern over heightening regional tensions. He characterized the Korean Peninsula as a pivotal component of U.S. hegemonic interests in East Asia, and explained that the U.S. purposely stokes conflict because a hostile North Korea justifies the continued buildup of U.S. military assets in South Korea, which is crucial to its hegemonic ambitions in East Asia. In his uncompromising critique of U.S. imperialism, Chomsky lays out Washington’s approach to confronting China, and sounds an unequivocal warning of the danger of war: The United States is developing an attack — not impending, but already underway — on China. The military dimension includes expanding NATO, but concretely, in official terminology … “encircling China with a ring of Sentinel States,” including South Korea, leading all the way to Japan and Australia, that are heavily armed with U.S. advanced precision weapons aimed at China … a war with China would mean the end of humanity… “For All of South Korea’s Existence, It Has Been Subordinated to the United States” Commenting on the report that 80 percent of Koreans oppose Washington’s imposition of its anti-China policy on South Korea, and that Washington’s policies vis-a-vis China and North Korea run directly counter to the sentiments of the majority of South Koreans, Chomsky points out that most of the world in fact opposes the U.S. effort to launch a major new Cold War both in Europe and in Asia: There is a confrontation between two versions of world order: a multipolar versus a unipolar world. The multipolar world order is the UN-based world order and the “human-based order,” which is proposed by China, by the Global South and by most of the world, which the U.S. is opposed to. A unipolar world, which the U.S. is in favor of, is what’s called a rules-based international order, an order in which the United States sets the rules, and if it doesn’t like the rules, it throws them out…. Most of the world is refusing to support the U.S. effort to launch a major new Cold War both in Europe and in Asia. Most of the world just says, “No, it’s not our fight. We do not want to join in the conflict with Russia or certainly not with China.” Chomsky points out that the new Cold War is a “severe threat,” especially against South Korea, because South Korea is “right in the middle of it” and because the U.S. views South Korea as a “permanent military base from which troops can be available to operate anywhere.” Chomsky describes the Korean predicament as being “enlisted by being occupied … for all of South Korea’s existence, it’s been subordinated to the United States.” In other words, Korea will inevitably be drawn into any future U.S.-led regional conflict as a “force multiplier,” and frontline cannon fodder to further U.S. imperial objectives in the Asia and Pacific and beyond. According to journalist and activist K.J. Noh, Korea’s inevitable co-option into U.S.-led wars evinces its near-complete loss of sovereignty and more specifically, U.S. domination and control of the South Korean military. Pointing out that the U.S. has had continuous wartime Operational Control Authority (OPCON) in South Korea for 73 years, Noh argues that the Pentagon maintains de facto and de jure control of one of the largest and best-equipped militaries in the world, inclusive of some 600,000+ frontline Korean troops and 3.1 million reservists, as well as all military bases, weapons and infrastructure in South Korean possession. These combined forces and materiel are not intended to bolster the U.S.’s defensive posture for the benefit of South Korea, but in fact form a “U.S. imperial force” and “threat projection platform” deployed on a de facto U.S. outpost, providing a forward military presence on the Asian mainland. “The Major Step Has to Be Towards a Peace Treaty” Chomsky identified a formal peace agreement between the two Koreas and the restoration of South Korea’s sovereignty as crucial conditions for peace in the Korean Peninsula. Korean sovereignty, he stressed, must be regained on Korea’s own terms, adding that a “a peace treaty is a major step toward achieving such a goal,” without which South Korea remains an “occupied country”: With regard to Korea, the major step has to be to move towards a peace treaty, as North Korea has been requesting for a long time. The U.S. has been rejecting it, but as long as there’s no peace treaty between the South and the North, South Korea is an occupied country. In the absence of a peace treaty, it will remain so. It is in the interest of all the people of Korea to move towards a peace agreement, and there’s every reason to believe that it’s possible…. This is an issue that will have to be resolved in South Korea, and it won’t be easy. The question is whether South Korea wants to remain subordinated to the United States or join most of the rest of the world in moving towards a global order with independent sources and centers of control, not just the United States … but that’s a decision that needs to be made in South Korea. Regaining sovereignty, unity and peace based on the principles of self-determination will not be easy. On the one hand, the U.S. will not willingly end its occupation of South Korea, and, on the other, according to Chomsky: “the North Korean threat provides justification for the right-wing conservative regime in the South. Relaxation with North Korea would mean conservatives losing power in the South.” Indeed, one of the biggest current obstacles for inter-Korean peace is the “liberal” Biden administration’s support for the extreme far right administration of Yoon Suk-yeol, who is eager to prove his administration’s worth as a linchpin in Washington’s new Cold War in Asia. While Yoon’s regime has been rankled by approval ratings as low as 22 percent and widespread protests against endemic domestic crackdowns as well as dangerous brinkmanship with the North, Yoon’s “republic of prosecution” enjoys Washington’s support as long as it eagerly toes the line of U.S. hegemonic unipolarity. Lauded as the “perfect US partner,” the Yoon administration has doubled down on internal repression while importing seven times more U.S. weapons in its first year than in the last five years combined. Biden’s bolstering and militarization of the repressive Yoon regime harkens back to Washington’s sordid history of propping up the brutal military dictatorship in South Korea, and what Chomsky refers to as the institutionalization of sub-fascism under U.S. tutelage. On 70th Anniversary of the Armistice Agreement, U.S. Imperialism Must End The 70th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice is a reminder of how U.S. imperialism has not only thwarted peace in the Korean Peninsula but is currently shaping a new Cold War that could easily spiral into a catastrophic nuclear conflict. Washington’s imperialism — the “central characteristic of U.S. foreign policy” — is making the Korean Peninsula into the most dangerous place in the world. During the most intense period of inter-Korean rapprochement under the 2002-2007 Roh Moo-hyun administration, Chomsky pointed out that the global and historical significance of peace in Korea goes beyond the immediate task of reducing regional tensions: “Progress on the Korean Peninsula is a turning point in 500 years of Western rule … creating a new paradigm that leads to independence through unity and integration [by] overcoming the structure of division and disintegration, which was the typical method of aggression, domination, and governance by Western and American colonialists for five centuries.” Opposing U.S. imperialism and brinkmanship in Korea and throughout the Asia-Pacific region is more important than ever. The U.S. peace movement must make opposition to U.S. imperial policy a focal point of its struggle, and support South Koreans as they campaign to regain their sovereignty and independence, end Korea’s neocolonization by the United States and regain control of their destiny. Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, a lecturer at Northeast University and an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors, and serves on the advisory board for CODEPINK. She can be found on Twitter at @simonechun.

By Tim Shorrock | July 26, 2023 | Originally published in The Shorrock Files The U.S. Introduces a New Trilateral Alliance with South Korea and Japan that Could Keep US Troops in Asia Forever WASHINGTON – On July 27th, the United States and South Korea will mark the 70th anniversary of the armistice in Panmunjom that ended combat in the Korean War and created the bilateral security arrangement that keeps 28,500 U.S. soldiers in Korea today. But if that armistice was designed to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula and the surrounding Asia region, it has failed miserably. Korea remains bitterly divided and in a continual state of technical war. Tensions between the combined forces of the United States and South Korea and nuclear-armed North Korea are as high as they have ever been, with nearly every day bringing another tit-for-tat military escalation. Meanwhile, military maneuvers, some involving China and Russia, have turned the seas and skies around the Korean Peninsula into one of the most dangerous spots in the world. “The intensity of nuclear threats that the US and North Korea are trading has reached an extreme, surpassing even the levels of 1994 and 2017, when the Korean Peninsula was pushed to the brink of war,” the progressive daily Hankyoreh declared in its lead story on July 25. At the DMZ, “Millions of troops on both sides stand ready to plunge back into battle at a moment’s notice,” the New York Times noted in a massive photo presentation on life at the Korean border. That is hardly a record to boast about as we observe the past 70 years of American policy in Korea and Northeast Asia. The latest confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea occurred last week, when the Pentagon dispatched the USS Kentucky, an Ohio-class nuclear submarine equipped with ballistic and cruise missiles mounted with nuclear warheads, to a South Korean port for the first time since 1981. On Monday, it sent another nuclear submarine, the Los Angeles-class USS Annapolis, to dock at the South Korean naval base on Jeju Island. It is equipped with Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles and no nukes, but the U.S. and South Korean message from these visits was unmistakable. While the Kentucky was in Busan, President Yoon Suk-yeol paid a personal visit to the submarine and warned that any nuclear provocations by North Korea could “lead to the end of its regime.” In response, Kim Jong Un’s military – as it has been doing all year – launched two short-range ballistic missiles into the East Sea. It also issued a blunt warning about the US deployment of nuclear-armed submarines, saying it “may fall under the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons” specified in DPRK military doctrine. A week earlier, Kim Yo-jong, Kim’s powerful sister-aide, condemned “eight straight days” of US Air Force reconnaissance aircraft conducting “provocative aerial espionage” near her country’s borders. “There is no guarantee” such aircraft will not be shot down in the future, Pyongyang’s defense ministry added – an ominous reminder of its 1969 shoot-down of a U.S. Navy EC-121 spy plane. Outside of Korea, meanwhile, American political and military leaders are talking openly about the inevitability of full-scale war with China, North Korea’s closest ally. That possibility, along with threats to use U.S. atomic weapons in Korea, drove Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to the bargaining table at Panmunjom in the 1950s. Despite Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s recent opening of a dialogue with Beijing, however, leaders of both political parties seem intent on exacerbating the conflicts with China, with no end in sight. But rather than using the 70th anniversary of the armistice to honor the dead and find a way to make a permanent peace among the still-warring parties, President Biden and his national security team are touting the virtues of a three-pronged military alliance between the United States, South Korea, and Japan as the most effective way to confront North Korea. As envisioned by U.S. leaders, this alliance could keep the forever war in Korea going for another 70 years and even longer. Few Americans are aware of these proposals. But they will be soon. On August 18th, President Biden will welcome President Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to his presidential retreat at Camp David for their first-ever meeting alone. The three leaders have met before to talk about common interests, but only on the sidelines of multilateral events where other countries were present. Camp David will thus mark “the first time the three countries’ leaders will be meeting separately for the purpose of holding a trilateral summit,” Korea’s JoongAng Daily reported from Seoul. From my perspective of 45 years of reporting on the U.S. role in Korea and Japan, this is a major development. The idea of an alliance linking the United States and South Korea with Korea’s former colonizer would have been unthinkable at the time of the Korean War, when memories still burned of Japan’s brutal colonial rule. Because of these political barriers, President Biden and the Washington neocons who back a tough U.S. stance in Asia have explained the budding alliance as a unified, eleventh-hour response by Tokyo and Seoul to China’s emergence as a military and economic power in the Pacific and a smart way to contain North Korea and its nuclear ambitions. In truth, as I have found in research in the National Archives for my next book, Washington has been encouraging Japanese rearmament and the merging of Japanese and Korean strategic interests since the first years of the U.S. military occupation of Southern Korea (it lasted from 1945 to 1948, when the Republic of Korea was created as a separate state). US officials began seriously pressing for Japanese involvement in Korea during the Vietnam War, particularly after South Korea and Japan – under intense US pressure – signed a 1965 treaty normalizing their ties for the first time since World War II. During the Obama administration, U.S. officials tried hard to create an alliance with Tokyo and Seoul by encouraging the two countries to end their long-running dispute over Imperial Japan’s cruel exploitation of Korean sex slaves known as “comfort women.” But during the presidency of Moon Jae-in, a former dissident who championed engagement with North Korea over military confrontation, the idea was flatly rejected. Relations deteriorated after Japan’s Abe government imposed export controls in South Korea in retaliation for a court decision that allowed Korean citizens to sue Japanese corporations for using Korean forced labor during World War II. In retaliation, Moon’s government suspended its military intelligence sharing arrangements with Japan. All that changed when Biden came to office in 2021 and Yoon, a right-wing militarist sympathetic to Japan, was elected to succeed Moon as president in 2022. Both leaders rejected Moon’s engagement policies, and for reasons of their own have embraced the idea of Japan playing a much greater role in military operations. The first signs of a renewed alliance emerged in October 2022, when three countries restarted trilateral military exercises that ceased in 2017 with a series of missile defense drills by their respective navies. Yoon also restored the intelligence-sharing. As they unfolded, the Pentagon called the trilateral drills a symbolic move towards “the interoperability of our collective forces,” while the conservative Japan Times noted they pushed “trilateral security ties closer than ever.” “We’re never satisfied until every operation is a partnered operation all the time,” Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, told reporters. But the drills, particularly South Korea’s sharing of intelligence data during the exercise, triggered a sharp attack from Pyongyang. “The U.S. and its followers will get more and more exposed to security crisis facilitating its final ruin for its frantic moves to tighten their military alliance against the DPRK and expand the war drills for aggression,” Kang Jin-song, an international affairs analyst, said in an article released by the North’s Korean Central News Agency. Despite the recognition of the alliance by North Korea and many in the media, the US-ROK-Japan alliance has not been explained well to the American people. Moreover, the very idea of a trilateral alliance, particularly one aimed at containing China, is rejected as unrealistic and inaccurate by some U.S. foreign policy experts, including liberals and leftists who see Japan and South Korea as autonomous players within the larger U.S. alliance framework in Asia (when I pitched a shorter version of this piece to one publication, the editor urged me to refrain from even using the term “trilateral alliance. I declined). That reluctance is a mistake. The evidence for a US-led military alliance linking the Kishida government in Japan and the Yoon government in South Korea is as plain as day. The foundation for the alliance was laid in Tokyo last March in a critical summit meeting between Yoon and Kishida. They reached an agreement to resolve the Korean claims that Japanese corporations exploited forced labor from Korea during World War II, thus clearing the way for “a tripartite alliance to meet security challenges in Asia,” NPR reported. Under its terms, Japanese corporations will pay no indemnities; instead, the costs to victims are being borne entirely by South Korea. The agreement was hailed by the Biden administration and pundits who support his hawkish policies in Asia as a masterpiece of diplomacy, and Yoon was rewarded with a rare state visit to the White House. During a joint press conference, Biden made clear that Yoon’s concessions had made possible a three-way relationship. “The Republic of Korea and the United States are working together, including through our trilateral cooperation with Japan, to ensure the future of the Indo-Pacific is free, is open, prosperous, and secure,” he said. “I want to thank you again, Mr. President, for your political courage and personal commitment to diplomacy with Japan.” A few weeks later, Biden met with Yoon and Kishida on the sidelines of the Group of 7 summit in Hiroshima. The US president again “commended” the two leaders “on their courageous work to improve their bilateral ties” and said the new trilateral relationship would be a critical element in his “Indo-Pacific” strategy. The other important piece to the trilateral military alliance was Kishida’s decision to raise Japan’s military budget to record levels. Under Japan’s latest plans, as described by the Associated Press and the Asahi, Japan has made the initial installment of a five-year, $315 billion military spending plan. If it meets this target, Japanese military spending will meet NATO standards and “eventually push its annual defense budget to nearly $73 billion – the world’s third biggest after the United States and China.” Moreover, in what I’ve described as a “crossing the Rubicon” moment, the LDP government has embraced a new counterstrike capability allowing its self-defense forces to undertake offensive actions for the first time since World War II. Although not stated publicly, Japan’s new policies are well understood by US planners as indicating its willingness to send Japanese troops to Korea in the case of a “collapse” of the North Korean regime. As I pointed out before Biden took office, ODNI director Avril Haines suggested in 2017 that this possibility should be part of US “intensive contingency planning” for North Korea that “must be done” with South Korea and “of course Japan.” Led by Campbell, Author of the “Asia Pivot,” Biden Aides Smooth the Way Last week, as the 70th anniversary of the war approached, Biden’s national security team visited both countries to emphasize the progress they have made on the alliance. Like many American interactions with its Asian allies, these encounters have resembled family therapy where parents soothe their squabbling children and reward them for making up. Playing the the role of Big Daddy is Kurt Campbell, Biden’s “Asia Czar,” or Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the National Security Council. A diplomat with close ties to military think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Affairs, Campbell served President Obama as his top US diplomat for Asia and the Pacific. He’s most famous for inventing the term “Asia Pivot, in which Obama and the Pentagon began shifting US forces from Afghanistan and the Middle East back to Asia as part of their refocus on China and North Korea. His role in the trilateral mechanism has been crucial. As I noted in a comprehensive piece on Biden’s potential Asia policies in 2021: With Tony Blinken and Avril Haines – now, respectively, Biden’s secretary of state and director of national intelligence – Campbell played a key role in the Obama administration’s attempt to stop North Korea’s nuclear programs with a combination of military pressure, secret cyber-attacks, and sustained economic sanctions. Campbell is also known as one of the most pro-Japan officials in government. He is a key figure in a policy faction that sees Japan and its right-wing ruling Liberal Democratic Party as the linchpin of the US alliance system in the Asia region. Like many officials and think tank “experts,” he views South Korea as a subordinate partner to US and Japanese efforts to force North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and contain the growing military power of China. On July 12, Campbell met in Washington with a group of lawmakers from Yoon’s right-wing People Power Party and strongly praised Yoon for showing “courageous leadership” in dealing with Japan, adding that “President Biden is also pleased with that,” according to state-owned Yonhap News. Two days later, on July 14th, he was in Seoul to co-chair the first meeting of the US-South Korea “Nuclear Consultative Group” overseeing the deployment of US strategic assets to Korea, as discussed by Biden and Yoon at their meeting at the White House last April. “As we speak an American nuclear submarine is making port in Busan today,” Campbell announced. “It’s the first visit of an American nuclear submarine in decades.” Even as a U.S. soldier apparently defected across the DMZ to North Korea that day, the US media failed to note the extraordinary sight of a low-level American official taking it upon himself to announce a momentous shift in policy towards Korea. That same day, Secretary of State Tony Blinken – who worked closely with Campbell as Obama’s deputy national security adviser – was in Indonesia for a multilateral forum on regional security. There, he met with Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa and the ROK’s Park Jin and “commended them ‘on recent progress in strengthening Japan-ROK ties and stressed the important of trilateral cooperation in tackling regional and global issues.'” The Pentagon got into the act in early June, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin “convened a trilateral ministerial meeting” in Singapore with Japanese Minister of Defense Hamada Yasukazu, and ROK Minister of National Defense Lee Jong-Sup. Their joint press statement committed the three sides to “concerted trilateral cooperation” and “enhanced trilateral security exercises” and welcomed President Yoon’s normalization of the “U.S.-Japan-ROK Trilateral Information Sharing Arrangement to facilitate coordination and cooperation among all three sides.” General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered a similar message on July 11th in a “Trilateral Chiefs of Defense Meeting” (the Pentagon’s headline) with his equivalents in Tokyo and Seoul. The three military officers agreed “to develop bilateral and trilateral response options” to Korean security and stated that “the US-Japan and US-ROK Alliances are essential to maintaining regional peace and stability.” Milley then flew to Tokyo, where he commended “Japan’s commitment to doubling its defense spending over the next five years.” In other comments, America’s top general mentioned “Japan’s need for improvements in cruise missile defense, early warning missile systems and air capabilities, all of which would help the United States as it looks to counter North Korea’s push for a nuclear missile program.” China figures in as well. Beijing, said Milley, has “invested enormously in their military and aspire to be the regional power in the next 10 to 15 years.” That “could be very unstable; it could be very dangerous, and I think having a powerful Japan, a militarily capable Japan that has a close alliance with the United States and other countries, will go a long way to deterring war…I have no doubt that the Japanese military could rapidly expand in scale, size, scope and skill very, very fast.” Biden, South Korea, and Japan: A Jarring Disconnect Despite these public pledges for a trilateral alliance, there is a huge and jarring disconnect between U.S. policy makers and the people of Korea and Japan. That was clear to my during my recent swing through Japan and South Korea. In Korea, the Yoon-Kishida agreement on forced labor has been widely denounced as a sellout. Yoon, a right-wing militarist who once was the country’s chief prosecutor, was already disliked because of his government’s incompetence and his crackdown on the Korean labor movement, which he has accused of North Korean sympathies. Now, many Koreans are appalled at his one-sided pact with Japan and his praise for Kishida and the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been one of the most consistent denialists of Japanese war crimes. This has cost the United States important support in a country where a majority of people support the presence of U.S. troops. As recently as the 1990s, U.S. forces were hated by much of the population because of a system of military prostitution and a series of violent attacks on Korean women by American GIs in the bases near the DMZ. The animosity has ebbed in recent years, particularly after U.S. Forces Korea consolidated nearly all its bases in Korea at Camp Humphreys in Pyongtaek, 80 miles south of Seoul, where for the most part U.S. soldiers are out of sight, out of mind. But that could change with Yoon’s embrace of Japan. “After Yoon’s visit to Washington and the creation of the trilateral alliance with Japan, the Korean people may show in their own deep minds a sense of anti-Americanism,” Lee Boo Young, a prominent opposition activist from the 1980s, told me in Seoul. “U.S. policy makers may also drive Koreans to embrace their anti-Japanese feelings.” Lee, who once led anti-American demonstrations during the 1980s, is now the chairperson of a coalition called Urgent Action for Peace and Democracy in Korea. The disconnect also large when it comes to Korea’s history with Japan. In a jarring episode at the 60th anniversary of the armistice in 2013, President Obama delivered a militaristic speech at the Korean War Memorial in Washington and paid tribute to the “legendary General Paik Sun Yup,” who was in the audience that day. Paik was a U.S. favorite: he had commanded the famous ROK First Division in the early weeks of the Korean War and led the defense at the Naktong River when U.S. and Korean forces sheltered in the Busan Perimeter. Later, as the Northern forces fled north across the lines, he led Korean troops in the U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign against communist fighters in the Jiri Mountains south of Seoul. But Obama’s positive view of Paik is not shared in Korea, where he is despised – even by some in the government – for being as part of the Gando Special Forces, a notorious unit of the Japanese Imperial Army that hunted down Korean independence fighters in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s. In 2009, under the conservative government of Lee Myung-bak, a presidential committee placed Paik’s name on a list of 705 prominent collaborators with the Japanese. And when Paik died in 2021, the Moon Jae-in government refused to allow his remains to be buried in the National Cemetery, citing his collaboration with Japan (in contrast, the U.S. military in Korea named a building after Paik at its headquarters at Camp Humphreys). In the latest development in this dispute, President Yoon’s veterans ministry this month deleted a state burial record describing Paik “as a pro-Japanese figure, saying that such an expression was written with no legal grounds.” A similar phenomenon has played out with Prime Minister Kishida’s LDP predecessor, the late Shinzo Abe. In 2022, Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, was assassinated with a firearm by a former member of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. American politicians from every faction of the establishment – President Biden, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Mike Pompeo among them – took to social media to praise the former prime minister as a great statesman, humanitarian, and American ally. But most Japanese knew him as the grandson of the notorious Nobusuke Kishi, the former war criminal who, with US backing, was Japan’s Prime Minister from 1957 to 1960. Like Kishi, Abe was a prominent denialist of Japanese war crimes as well as a major supporter of the far-right Unification Church of South Korea’s Rev. Sun Myung Moon. When the media revealed that the assassin shot Abe to avenge his mother, who was pressured to donate her family fortune of around $700,000 to the Unification Church, and more and more stories came out on Abe’s ties to the Moonies, the assassin became a folk hero to much of the public and a black mark on Abe’s dominant faction in the Liberal Democratic Party. Finally, there is the issue of American military bases. It’s important for Americans to know that the enormous string of U.S. bases in Korea, Okinawa, and Japan will provide the firepower and soldiers in any future war with China or North Korea. But these bases are not always welcomed by the people who live there and are seen by many as dangerous threats to peace. This is particularly true in Okinawa, where 70 percent of U.S. bases in Japan are concentrated. There, citizens have voted time and time again to seek the removal of the U.S. Marines from their islands. Their concerns were spelled out to me during my recent trip to Okinawa. One day in April, I visited the contested site at Henoko where the Japanese government is building a new air base for the U.S. Marine Corps. Afterwards, I sat down with Yoshimi Teruya, Okinawa’s vice governor and a leader of its independence movement, for an exclusive interview. He told me that Americans must understand the huge and unnecessary burden of U.S. bases on his prefecture since the end of World War II. “American military forces came here 78 years ago and never left,” he said. “Are they going to stay here 100 years? There’s no country in the world where foreign troops have stayed for a century!” That question, of course, could also be asked about the entire region, particularly South Korea. 70 years is a long time; will US forces be in Korea and Japan another century? If US policy continues like this, they could be. Tim Shorrock, a Korea Policy Institute Associate, is a Washington-based journalist who has been writing about the Korean Peninsula for over 40 years.

By CAAM | July 27, 2023 | Originally published in CAAM "Today, amid escalating tensions between the United States and North Korea, it is essential that we examine the terrible human toll of America’s longest-running war before it erupts into renewed fighting." —Deann Borshay Liem, Director of 'Crossings' It has been exactly 70 years since military commanders of the United States, North Korea, and China signed an armistice to halt active combat in the Korean War. They recommended that the corresponding governments return within 90 days to settle the question of the withdrawal of foreign troops from Korea and “the peaceful settlement of the Korean question.” But a formal peace agreement was never reached: the war technically continues to this day. That war has defined my identity and continues to guide my life’s work. When I was adopted from South Korea in 1966 at the age of eight, everyone thought I was a war orphan. My documents indicated that my father had died during the Korean War and my mother died giving birth to me. I had no other family. I dealt with my adoption by forgetting everything about Korea. The amnesia was so complete that if my Korean mother had looked me in the face, I would not have known who she was. My journey to recover my memories and recuperate my lost identity led me to make two personal documentaries, First Person Plural (2000) and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2010), both of which explore adoption, identity, and memory. It was through the making of these films that I came to understand that the trauma underlying my adoption stemmed from the Korean War—and that the war is a collective trauma that has defined much of the Korean diaspora. Much of my current work as a filmmaker is about challenging the dominant U.S. narrative of the Korean War as past and “forgotten.” Inspired by what author Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “ethical remembering,” my films focus on the voices of those who are often marginalized, including war survivors and their descendants, women, and adopted people impacted by the war’s legacies. What I have found in highlighting stories of ordinary people through films like Memory of Forgotten War, Geographies of Kinship, and the oral history project, Legacies of the Korean War, is that it is through their eyes that we can begin to understand the war’s complexities, the ways in which the war divided family members politically and geographically—and how it has forced divisions within people’s hearts. My most recent film Crossings is another act of ethical remembering that foregrounds the voices of Korean women and their tenacious desire for reconciliation at the DMZ, and the steadfast solidarity of women peacemakers globally to end this intractable conflict. Fought between 1950-53, the Korean War was the first “hot war” of the Cold War era, one that is notorious for its brutality. The U.S. military carried out what many scholars refer to as a “scorched earth” campaign destroying homes, crops, livestock and sometimes entire villages. Devastation was particularly acute in the north through heavy air bombing. In spite of 4 million deaths (including 3 million Koreans, a majority of them civilians) and the constant threat of renewed fighting, most Americans have no idea the Korean War never ended. Yet generations of Koreans bear the emotional scars of having lost loved ones to death or national partition, many still unable to speak openly about atrocities suffered by family members who lie buried in unmarked mass graves. Post-war generations are cut off from the experiences of their parents and grandparents because the latter are unable to articulate their wartime trauma, often passing on this trauma to the next generation through their silence. Today, amid escalating tensions between the United States and North Korea, it is essential that we examine the terrible human toll of America’s longest-running war before it erupts into renewed fighting. As it turns out, I was not orphaned during the war. I was born after the fighting had ended and was adopted during the Park Chung Hee military dictatorship. The fact that the war lacked resolution led South Korea to focus all its resources on building a strong military while pursuing an export-led economic development strategy. There was no social safety net for women like my mother, who did not die in childbirth, but was a widow with five children. With international adoptions serving as a pressure valve for over-population and rampant poverty, I was funneled into an increasingly industrialized adoption system that would eventually send 200,000 children overseas. On this 70th anniversary of the armistice, I am thinking of all the families that continue to be divided by Korea’s ongoing partition. Although I will forever be grateful that I found and reunited with my Korean family, I continue to live with the anguish that, as a child, I was forced to forsake their memory in order to survive in America. I’ve come to understand that the self-erasure of my early years in Korea was abetted by the fact that the Korean War, the main event that shaped who I am, had already been erased in the national consciousness of my adoptive country. The Korean War is seared into the collective memory of Koreans on both sides of the DMZ. Of the millions of divided family members, about 20,000 have been temporarily reunited in 21 rounds of family meetings since 1985. Tens of thousands on both sides of the border are on waiting lists to be selected by lottery for the next round of reunions. Most of those waiting are in their 80s and 90s, holding onto life for the possibility of seeing their parents, children, spouses, or siblings again. It’s long past time to replace the Korean War Armistice with a permanent peace agreement, and for divided families to reunite. Seventy years is enough. Deann Borshay Liem is an Emmy-winning documentarian known for films that explore war, memory, family and identity. Her film, Crossings, about 30 women peacemakers who cross the DMZ for peace, streams on PBS.org until August 22. Her film, Geographies of Kinship, airs on America Reframed/WORLD on July 27, 8pm ET/5pm PT. See mufilms.org for more info.

July 25, 2023 An opinion piece by Lawrence Peck published in Newsweek, July 14, 2023, alleges that events scheduled in Washington DC on July 27 and 28 calling for an end to the Korean War constitute an “exercise in deception” organized by “pro North Korean groups,” Women Cross DMZ,” and their “dupes.” The events are part of the National Mobilization to End the Korean War, organized by a broad coalition of peace groups, including Women Cross DMZ and Nodutdol. The Korea Policy Institute is pleased to be a co-sponsor of the National Mobilization to End the Korean War and also signatory to a letter from Nodutdol to the Biden administration, “calling for an end to the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to North Korea.” KPI urges its associates and readers to lend their unqualified support to this national mobilization to end the U.S.’ longest ongoing war. For further information regarding the national mobilization’s efforts to bring an end to the Korean War, see H.R.1369, the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act. See also Crossings which documents the 2015 journey of international women peacemakers across the Korean DMZ, calling for and end to the Korean War. Crossings is screening on the World Channel for 30 days starting July 22, 2023, and is also available with Korean subtitles. Women Cross DMZ responded to Lawrence Peck’s opinion piece in an email to Newsweek opinion editor, Jason Fields. NOTE: On July 14, 2023, Newsweek published an opinion column titled “North Korean Stooges Step Into the Light” by Lawrence Peck. This article contains false statements about Women Cross DMZ intended to undermine our reputation and credibility. On July 15, 2023, we sent the following email to Deputy Opinion Editor Jason Fields asking to retract the article. We are posting it here in order to set the record straight. Dear Jason, I am writing to you on behalf of Women Cross DMZ in response to the July 14 opinion column “North Korean Stooges Step Into the Light” by Lawrence Peck. We are deeply disturbed that a widely respected journalistic publication such as Newsweek would publish an article containing false, defamatory, and harmful accusations against our organization and other peace advocates, especially without seeking a response from the subjects of such attacks. Mr. Peck accuses our organization, Women Cross DMZ, of being “pro-North Korean” and our activities to promote peace on the Korean Peninsula as “an exercise in deception” constituting “a foreign influence operation targeting Congress.” He accuses Women Cross DMZ of working in collaboration with the North Korean government to benefit the Kim Jong Un regime. These are baseless claims. Among the “evidence” Mr. Peck provides to back his claims is an opinion article—although not labeled as such—in the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner noting that Women Cross DMZ Executive Director Christine Ahn met with a diplomat at the DPRK Mission to the United Nations. To attribute nefarious motives to the meeting is both dishonest and irresponsible. The meeting was a necessary procedural step to arrange the 2015 women’s peace symposium, the DMZ crossing, and subsequent efforts to meet and engage with North Korean women—not, as the article suggests, evidence of collaboration or deception. Women Cross DMZ has also met with representatives of the U.S. and South Korean governments, because we believe that face-to-face engagement is essential to fostering dialogue, trust, and understanding—the building blocks for peace and lasting security. Mr. Peck also points to statements made by Christine Ahn that are critical of the U.S. military presence in South Korea. Being critical of the fact that the U.S. military poisons the water, robs farmers of their land, and destroys ecosystems — not to mention the annual U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises prompt North Korea to react with provocative military actions — is also not evidence of being “pro-North.” Being pro-peace and pro-engagement does not equal supporting any government. Our work is widely lauded by prominent experts and leaders, including the former UN Special Rapporteur human rights in the DPRK. Among the broad coalition of allies who stand with Women Cross DMZ are Nobel Peace laureates, feminist authors, peace activists, human rights lawyers, professors, former parliamentarians, faith leaders, humanitarian aid workers, filmmakers, artists, a retired Army Colonel, and a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. Nowhere in Women Cross DMZ’s literature, speeches, media, or reports have we praised the North Korean regime. As our financial reporting demonstrates, we are funded entirely by U.S.-based foundations and individual donors, none of whom are based in North Korea or have any ties to the North Korean government. Sadly, these attacks to discredit our organization and the growing movement for peace on the Korean Peninsula are nothing new. It is worth noting who is funding these attacks and why. Of note, Lawrence Peck is the managing editor of the One Korea Network, which has espoused conspiracy theories about election interference in the U.S. and South Korea and has routinely attacked our pro-peace message. It is funded by a largely unknown and wealthy oligarch, Honolulu resident Annie M.H. Chan. As noted in a lengthy investigative report published by The Nation last year, Ms. Chan is the chairwoman of both One Korea Network and the Korea Conservative Political Action Conference, the South Korean branch of the Conservative Political Action Conference. In 2021, One Korea Network and the Korea Conservative Political Action Conference paid for fear-mongering advertisements, including full-page ads in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and a Times Square billboard, attacking bills supporting peace on the Korean Peninsula and family reunions with Korean Americans and their loved ones in North Korea. Ms. Chan appears to have financial motivations for these attacks. She is a director of IP3 International, which markets the export of U.S. nuclear technology around the world in a global energy race against Russia and China. At one point Ms. Chan was also listed as director of “strategy & innovation” at IP3’s subsidiary, Allied Nuclear, which “helps international governments procure U.S. nuclear technology.” According to investigative reporter Eli Clifton, “Chan’s One Korea Network appears to echo the perspectives of IP3 and Allied Nuclear, cheering South Korea’s plans to export nuclear power technology and to maintain the country’s existing nuclear technology.” Chan is pushing radical conspiracy theories to fan the flames of great power competition between the US and China, which would clearly benefit her business interests. Mr. Peck must not be given a platform to repeat his conspiracy theories about Korea peace activists without disclosing the financial motives of such attacks. In light of the falsehoods and conspiracies throughout Mr. Peck’s article, as well as the fact that it fails to meet basic journalistic principles of fairness, we request that you retract this article in its entirety. At the very least, in the interest of fairness, we hope you will give us a similar platform to explain why we advocate for peace. Amid a dangerous escalation in tensions on the Korean Peninsula, we urge Newsweek to refrain from amplifying baseless accusations seeking to discredit the longstanding efforts of organizations and individuals who have dedicated their lives to building lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. In the future, we hope you will invest in nuanced, evidence-based reporting and cover the full diversity of perspectives on this issue. Thank you for your attention.

By Martin Hart-Landsberg | May 25, 2023 | Originally published in Monthly Review There is a lot of talk lately about the federal budget, with Democrats and Republicans arguing over whether to raise the debt ceiling and allow the government to borrow enough money to fund already approved agency budgets and programs. But you know what they never argue about—financing the military. Showing the love In December 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, approving “national defense” spending of $858 billion for fiscal year 2023. The act covers Pentagon spending as well as work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That total represents a 4.3 percent increase over the previous year’s authorization, the second biggest increase in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II. If spending on other military-security related programs were added, such as homeland security, veterans’ care, and Ukraine related military aid, the total would exceed $1.4 trillion. The National Defense Authorization Act was overwhelmingly approved by both houses of Congress. The House of Representatives passed it 350 to 80. The Senate 83 to 11. In fact, Congress actually voted to give the military $45 billion more than what Biden and the Pentagon had originally requested. Now, that is showing the love! In March, the military proposed a national defense budget for fiscal year 2024 of $886 billion. We shall see how much that figure will grow once Congress takes it up. Military drivers The ever-growing defense budget is said to be needed to keep us safe. Left unsaid is that the roughly $80 billion increase over last year’s National Defense Authorization Act is itself bigger than the military budgets of every country in the world but China. That country’s military budget, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, is $293 billion. North Korea, another country said to be a major threat to U.S. security, has a military budget of approximately $4 billion according to the U.S. State Department. One reason we spend a lot is that our government and corporations have an expansive view of our national interest, one that takes in the entire globe. And they want a military presence everywhere to defend it. As the military analyst William Hartung points out, we have “750 U.S. military bases scattered on every continent except Antarctica, 170,000 troops stationed overseas, and counterterror operations in at least 85–no, that is not a typo–countries.” China, in contrast, has a total of eight foreign military bases, one in Djibouti and the rest on human-made islands in the South China Sea. Another reason is that military spending is directly profitable for a core set of major U.S. corporations. More than half of national defense spending goes to private firms, with the largest share going to the top five military contractors, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These firms aggressively push for adoption of new weapons systems, regardless of their effectiveness, and use their deep pocketbooks to gain Congressional approval. The current head of the House Armed Services Committee received over $444,000 in campaign donations from weapons-making companies in the most recent election cycle; the head of the Defense Appropriations Committee picked up $390,000. The military also does what it can to create a favorable environment for its budget requests and recruitment efforts. The Department of Defense, using our tax money, has long worked closely with filmmakers to boost the image of the military as a defender of the nation and an attractive career. For example, it played a major role in the script development and filming of the popular film Top Gun: Maverick. One study using internal Defense Department and Agency documents found that “the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows.” The Pentagon has also generously funded foreign policy think-tanks, helping to shape the national conversation on national security by funding research papers and developing the experts that appear on news shows to provide commentary on critical issues. And it has long partnered with the National Football League, directly paying teams to host ceremonies honoring veterans and stage full-field flag displays and stadium flyovers by military jets. The military also runs an aggressive recruitment program in high schools. A case in point: its Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program. Some 3500 high schools across the country have JROTC programs, with their classes taught by military veterans and with textbooks written by the military. And while participation in the program is supposed to be voluntary, the New York Times found that “thousands of public-school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.” The Army reports that “44 percent of all soldiers who entered its ranks in recent years came from a school that offered JROTC.” The military is now even offering programs to fifth graders. STARBASE programs are said to help students with their STEM education and a growing number of schools, short on funding, are happy to have the military take over some of the educational burden. Classes are held at National Guard, Marine, Air Force Reserve, Army, and Air Force bases across the country, where young students are taught by military approved instructors and get to see all the onsite military hardware. The costs The militarization of our country comes at high cost. At the top of the list is the possibility of war. The Biden administration seems determined to use our military to drive a new cold war in Asia largely to isolate and economically weaken China. In April 2023, Biden announced that the U.S. will be deploying nuclear-armed submarines to South Korea for the first time in more than 40 years. That same month, the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, at U.S. urging, agreed to hold joint missile defense and anti-submarine exercises to counter North Korea and “promote peace and security in the Indo-Pacific region,” with special emphasis on “peace and security in the Taiwan Strait.” The Philippines recently granted the U.S. access to four additional military bases. These were needed, said the U.S. Secretary of Defense, because “the People’s Republic of China continues to advance its illegitimate claims” in the South China Sea. The U.S. will soon be holding bilateral military exercises with Australia, which are, according to Australian officials, designed to “demonstrate our ability to receive large volumes of personnel and equipment into Australia from across the Indo-Pacific and stage, integrate and move them forward into the large exercise area.” And thanks to U.S. efforts, even NATO now lists China as one of the organization’s greatest threats because of its challenge to the “interests, security and values” of NATO member countries The threat of war with China, or possibly North Korea is real and growing. But even if war is averted, U.S. actions are fueling the militarization of the Asian region, with governments throughout the region boosting spending on their respective militaries to the detriment of their people’s wellbeing. We suffer a similar fate. For example, the U.S. defense budget now gobbles up more than half the federal discretionary budget, limiting the amount of money available for public health, education, housing, environmental protection, and transportation. The growth in military spending has also led to the militarization of our police. For years, the Pentagon provided surplus military equipment to police agencies, allegedly to support the “war on drugs.” This transfer dramatically changed police training practices and relations between police and community members, especially people of color, who came to play the role of the enemy that needed to be suppressed. The militarization of our foreign policy has also promoted a sense of American exceptionalism and national superiority. This development, encouraged by many of our elected leaders, has intensified distrust and dislike of people of color and immigrants, often leading to acts of violence against them. It has also contributed to growing rightwing efforts to purge books from our libraries and classrooms that include passages that might lead to a critical understanding of the American experience. More could be said, but hopefully the point is clear: we need to build an anti-militarism movement, one that targets not just the size of the military budget, but more importantly our foreign policy which sees domination and violence as an acceptable, if not desirable, way to promote our so-called national interest. It’s a big challenge, but the cost of inaction is too great to ignore. Martin Hart-Landsberg, Korea Policy Institute Board Member, is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon; and Adjunct Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea. His areas of teaching and research include political economy, economic development, international economics, and the political economy of East Asia. He is also a member of the Workers' Rights Board (Portland, Oregon) and maintains a blog Reports from the Economic Front where this article first appeared.

By Tim Shorrock | May 17, 2023 | Originally published in The Shorrock Files To receive updates on Tim Shorrock's latest research, archive, anthology & podcast about the DMZ, subscribe to DMZEMPIRE at: https://www.patreon.com/DMZEMPIRE/posts South Korea’s 5.18 Truth Commission is seeking U.S. military and intelligence records for its far-reaching investigation into the 1980 uprising, a turning point in the 70 year-old U.S.-ROK alliance. It also wants answers about Chun Doo Hwan and other coup leaders who were trained in U.S. Army Special Forces schools and served in Vietnam. SEOUL – A South Korean truth commission investigating the Gwangju Uprising is seeking to identify the generals responsible for the mass killing that precipitated the city’s resistance to martial law and the repression they imposed after retaking the city from its traumatized citizens on May 27th, 1980. The May 18 Democratization Movement Truth Commission was created by a special law in 2019 during the administration of former President Moon Jae-in. Since then, its research staff has been interviewing former soldiers, democracy activists, and survivors and using forensic tools, including excavations of graves and use of DNA, to determine the total number of killed and injured during the seminal event. Its team of investigators is also seeking to document the origins of the uprising and expose the behavior of military and intelligence agencies during the period of severe repression that followed the defeat of Gwangju’s citizen army by the U.S.-backed South Korean Army. The commission will release its long-awaited report in June. The commission’s focus includes human rights violations by the Korean military and police, including murders, injuries, and sexual violence; identifying the whereabouts of missing persons and the identification of secret burial sites; distortions and coverups of the Gwangju democracy movement by Korean military and intelligence agencies and the Ministry of National Defense; determining responsibility for the helicopter machine-gunning of the Jeonil Building in downtown Gwangju on May 21, 1980; the confirmation or denial of reports, spread in recent years by right-wingers, that North Korean military officers infiltrated the Gwangju movement; and deaths or injuries to military personnel and the police. In its latest report, issued on May 17, the commission released testimony that martial law forces continued killing citizens in Gwangju on May 27, even after the official suppression operation had ended. As reported by Hankyoreh, the new revelations show that “the Chun Doo-hwan’s military regime’s claims of exercising its ‘right to self-defense’ to have been false.” The new report contains graphic images from a French photographer of the bleeding body of Kim Jong-yeon, a 19-year-old student, when he emerged from hiding on the 27th after the supposed end of the U.S.-sanctioned “suppression operation.” U.S. actions under scrutiny In a significant break from prior investigations of Gwangju, the truth commission has asked the U.S. government to provide more than 200 military and intelligence documents relating to the communications between U.S. and South Korean generals in the U.S.-South Korean Combined Forces Command (CFC) before, during, and after the civilian uprising, top officials said. Of particular interest are reports and minutes of U.S. military discussions with Chun Doo Hwan and the small group of loyalists around him. Chun, now South Korea’s most reviled president, seized control of the country in a rolling coup that began with his violent takeover of the ROK Army in December 1979 and culminated with his declaration of martial law across the country on May 17, 1980. The uprising in South Cholla Province began the next day after Chun’s martial law army occupied parts of Gwangju City. “Many of these documents are still classified and not disclosed yet,” Song Seon-tae, the commission chairperson, told me in an exclusive interview at his offices in downtown Seoul. These documents are important to the investigation because many of the Korean military documents concerning Gwangju have been “deleted, distorted, or changed,” he added. Song is a former secretary to the Prime Minister’s office and was an adviser to the 5.18 Special Investigation Committee of the Ministry of National Defense during the Moon administration. He said his investigators have also sought relevant military documents concerning the Gwangju Uprising from China, Russia, and Japan through the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. So far, 91 military and intelligence officials have been prosecuted for their role in Gwangju. They have two things in common, Song said: “one, they’re not telling the truth; and two, none have apologized to the victims or the public.” As a result, the commission is working from the “bottom to the top,” starting its interviews with lower ranking officers and working their way past the rank-and-file to the coup leaders responsible for the bloodshed in Gwangju. The release of U.S. intelligence reports or internal military communications within the joint command would not necessarily be detrimental to the United States or U.S. Forces Korea, the commission said. CIA and defense intelligence documents and reports, for example, might help the truth commission corroborate or disprove claims or denials about the incident made by the Chun group that controlled the Korean military before and after Gwangju. U.S. documents from 1980 could also be compared to South Korean intelligence reports for accuracy or signs of tampering or falsification. At the same time, U.S. intelligence on North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and the North-South border at the DMZ could disprove the ludicrous claims from right-wing forces that 600 or more North Korean military officers secretly came to Gwangju and helped direct the uprising. For decades, North Korea, the DMZ, and the Korean coast have been the most surveilled spots on earth, watched 24/7 by the most sophisticated spy planes and satellites in the U.S. arsenal. Any signs of North Korean infiltration at the time of Gwangju would have been cause for deep alarm and threats of military action. As I’ve reported extensively, neither occurred. Still, the request for U.S. military communications with Korean military and martial law commanders raises sensitive issues for the United States. The Gwangju Uprising is now considered as a pivotal event in South Korea’s march to democracy, yet for years was shrouded in mystery and controversy, particularly over the murky U.S. role. The uprising occurred at a time that the Carter administration was reeling from a string of policy disasters, led by the Iranian hostage crisis that followed the 1979 overthrow the Shah of Iran (who was installed in power by the CIA in 1954). With Iran dominating the headlines in 1980, Carter’s advisers did not want another crisis in Korea. Much of its response to Chun’s coup, therefore, was predicated on the need to avoid “another Iran,” as the meddlesome diplomat Richard Holbrooke said repeatedly at the time. Despite the state-sanctioned violence from May 18th to May 21st and the president’s professed focus on human rights, the Carter administration ultimately sided with the Korean martial law army when it recaptured Gwangju from the civilian militia on May 27th. That decision created the worst crisis in U.S.-South Korean relations since 1953, sparking years of anti-American feeling and creating fissures in the bilateral relationship that have never fully healed. Many Koreans would like to see a formal apology from Washington. They never got one from Chun. In 1996, the former president was tried and convicted on sedition charges for his actions in Gwangju. He was pardoned the next year by President Kim Young Sam at the request of the incoming president, Kim Dae Jung, the former opposition leader who was nearly executed by Chun after his coup. The notorious general died in 2021 denying any involvement in the massacre and without ever apologizing to the city. Recently, his grandson, Chun Woo-won, visited Gwangju and officially apologized to victim’s families for his grandfather’s assault on the city. Since the younger Chun went public, he has also made a series of sensational accusations of corruption against his family and his infamous grandfather. Who Gave the Shooting Orders? One of the key points of the investigation, Song told me, is to determine “who was in charge of the shooting orders” on May 21st, 1980, three days into the uprising. On May 18, after local police refused to physically attack the pro-democracy demonstrators, Chun’s Special Warfare Command’s paratroopers were ordered to do the job. Over the next three days, in battles all across the city, soldiers used boots, clubs, and bayonets to stomp, beat, and stab people to death. Citizens who protested were chased down into their homes and shot and beaten. By the night of May 20th, the city was in an uproar in a situation the CIA called an “insurrection.” At around 1 pm on May 21, Chun’s troops opened fire on a massive crowd of enraged citizens, bus drivers, and taxi drivers who had encircled them at their headquarters at the provincial capital building; dozens were killed in the fusillade. At this point, Gwangju locals, using weapons seized from nearby police stations and factories, began to shoot back. That evening, Chun withdrew his special forces and the martial law command drew a tight cordon around the city. According to secret documents seen by commission investigators, as well as interviews they have conducted, Korean army and local commanders on the scene claim they acted out of self-defense. “This is the logic they have used for 43 years,” Song said. The official death toll of the uprising, once thought to number in the thousands, still stands at around 200. But people in Gwangju believe the true number is closer to 450, with several dozen still unaccounted for. Most of the victims are buried at Gwangju’s National Cemetery, where local citizens and government officials gather every May 18 to commemorate the uprising. Asked about the commission’s conclusions about fatalities, Song, who witnessed the uprising, said the number of missing persons has yet to be determined. At the time, the national registry of deaths was only 10 years old and unreliable, Song said, and did not account for homeless people and those living on the edge. And strangely, after the wave of killing, many lower-income kids, such as shoe shine boys, “disappeared from the streets,” he said. “So we are very careful about our figures.” The Cherokee Files, Translated The U.S. documents in question were initially sought through diplomatic channels during the previous administration of President Moon Jae-in. The request, the commission said, included classified cables and reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, and the headquarters of General John Wickham, who was the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Forces Command and the U.S.-controlled UN Command in Korea at the time. The commission is also seeking classified information on two of the U.S. generals in command positions in the joint command at the time. Commission officials first requested the American documents in 2020 from the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the CIA through the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In response, the U.S. Embassy in Seoul and the State Department turned over around 140 diplomatic documents, many of them previously declassified. But since the requests for the military and intelligence documents were made by the commission, “there has been no response from CIA or DOD,” said Shin Dong Il, the team leader of one of Song’s investigation teams. In 2019, as one of his first tasks for the commission, Shin translated nearly 4,000 U.S. government documents about U.S. policy in Korea in 1979 and 1980 that I obtained in 1996 under a Freedom of Information Act request. Those documents, later dubbed “the Cherokee Files,” were the basis of my story in The Journal of Commerce that first revealed that the Carter administration gave a green light to the Korean government to replace the police with Korean army troops to control huge pro-democracy demonstrations that shook Korean cities in the spring of 1980. The truth commission is now using my FOIA documents to corroborate its own findings.Many of them are posted in my archives (an ongoing project). “Thank you for sharing your documents with us,” Song, who is from Gwangju and was arrested during the uprising, said as we began our interview. “They have been a great help to the work of our commission.” The most significant document in my collection, the minutes of a White House meeting on May 22nd, showed that, when U.S. officials decided the uprising was out of control, the U.S. generals running the Combined Forces Command backed Seoul’s use of army troops under the CFC to retake the city on May 27, 1980. A few days later, after the U.S. military (at its own request) deployed key intelligence and naval assets around the Korean Peninsula, soldiers with the Korean 20th Division released by the joint command attacked the last holdouts of the citizen army at Gwangju’s Provincial Capital Building and in a nearby complex owned by YWCA. About 20 people were killed in the final assault, including the chief spokesperson for the citizen army, Yoon Song-won. His body was identified by Norman Thorpe, a reporter for the Asian Wall Street Journal and one of a handful of U.S. and Japanese reporters who witnessed the last days of the uprising. The initial attacks by the paratroopers were captured on film by Jurgen Hitzpeter, a German photographer who evaded military roadblocks to get into the city with the help of a Seoul taxi driver. His exploits later became the subject of the famous film by that name. I visited his memorial and Yoon Song-won’s grave at the Gwangju Cemetery during a two-day stay in Gwangju in April. My stories about the previously hidden U.S. role in the events of 1980 were published on the eve of Chun’s trial in 1996, and ran simultaneously in the Korean magazine Sisa Journal. My account of U.S. complicity shocked and angered many Koreans, sparking demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy and strong denials from Washington. But with the sole exception of the Washington Post, my stories and the documents themselves were ignored by The New York Times and other U.S. media. In 2015, the city of Gwangju gave me an honorary citizenship in appreciation for my work. The Fort Benning Connection In the most significant part of its investigation, the truth commission is seeking to determine the chain of command in the U.S.-South Korean combined forces that organized the Korean military’s takeover of Gwangju after Chun’s forces were driven out of town. This is where my documents come in. As mentioned earlier, the declassified minutes from the National Security Council show that on May 22 – the day after the mass shooting – President Carter’s national security team made a fateful decision to help Chun’s martial law command put down the uprising. As I further reported in 2020, one of the participants in this crucial meeting – a senior official at the Pentagon – later admitted that the decision to restore “order” through the “minimum use of force” rather than seek a negotiated solution was made with the full knowledge that around 60 people had been killed by the paratroopers on May 21 and that Chun himself was responsible. Knowing that, it’s not surprising that many Koreans were bitterly disappointed and angered by the American intervention. As Kim Dae Jung told me in a 1985 interview while under house arrest in Seoul, “the Gwangju people kept order; paratroopers broke order. You should have criticized the paratroopers’ side, not the Gwangju people’s side. Your attitude was not just, not fair.” How and and why U.S. commanders carried out the White House decision, their ties with Chun, and their communications with their Korean counterparts in the Combined Forces Command, are the biggest unknowns to the investigators. That has led into a dark alley that investigators call “the Fort Benning connection” – that is, the close relationship between Chun and his accomplices with American generals and special forces operatives in Korea. These ties were forged in part at the U.S. Army’s special forces training school at Fort Benning, Georgia, where Chun and his chief accomplice, General Roh Tae Woo, were educated. Later, they were sealed in blood on the battlefields of Vietnam, where both Chun and Roh led Korean units in the U.S. war against communist-led insurgents in South Vietnam. During the 1970s, over 300,000 South Korean soldiers were dispatched to Vietnam, at U.S. request. Many of them, like their American counterparts, were responsible for atrocities against civilians. Chun Doo Hwan first emerged as a public figure after the October 1979 assassination of former President Park Chung Hee, whom he served as the commander of the Defense Security Command. He startled his U.S. allies on December 12, 1979, when he and General Roh Tae Woo directed a Korean division stationed near the DMZ to attack the Seoul headquarters of the Martial Law Command. By arresting its commander, Chun effectively seized control of the South Korean Army. His brazen move represented an unprecedented violation of the U.S.-Korean chain of command, and angered the U.S. Commander of the CFC, General Wickham. But the incident was quickly papered over and forgiven. In the aftermath of the “12/12 Incident,” U.S. embassy, military, and State Department officials claimed that Chun was an obscure general little known to US Forces Korea, and said they had been assured at the highest levels it would never happen again. But those claims were untrue, according to James V. Young, who was the military intelligence adviser to U.S. Ambassador William Gleysteen at the time. In a 2003 memoir called Eye on Korea, Young wrote that Chun was especially close to Col. Donald Hiebert, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who was the U.S. embassy’s defense attache in 1980. Hiebert first met Chun in the 1970s. At that time, “One of [Hiebert’s] frequent associates was a young colonel, Chun Doo Hwan,” Young wrote. “Hiebert had met the colonel in Vietnam, where Chun had commanded a battalion, and had continued their association in Korea. They met rather frequently.” Young said he met Chun for the first time at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in 1972 and several times after that, “usually accompanied by Col. Hiebert.” The path of the truth commission’s investigation into Chun’s U.S. military contacts is illustrated by a large chart in its offices (pictured below) showing the key names and faces in the U.S.-Korean chain of command on the days the Gwangju Uprising was crushed. Along with top Korean generals and officials, the chart lists at the top Ambassador Gleysteen, General Wickham, and Robert Brewster, the CIA Station Chief. Their actions at the time are well-known, in part due Gleysteen’s memoir, Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis, and General Wickham’s account, Korea on the Brink. But much less is known about the actions and communications of two American generals listed on the commission’s chart who were directly involved in the military planning for the retaking of Gwangju. Generals Sennewald and Rosencrans of the CFC Those officers, whose actions might be illuminated in still-classified CIA documents, were identified as U.S. Army Major General Robert Sennewald, the Assistant Chief of Operations for the US-Korean Combined Forces Command, and U.S. Air Force Lt. General Evan Rosencrans, the deputy commander of U.S. Force Korea and the Chief of Staff of the joint command. Both were deeply involved in the extensive U.S. and Korean military operations (including the declaration of martial law) launched to ensure the security of South Korea after the assassination of Park Chung Hee on October 26, 1979, and in the ensuing events leading up to Gwangju. Their initial priority was to protect the country against North Korean intervention. But as the student- and worker-led resistance to military rule picked up in the weeks after Park’s assassination, their tasks quickly turned to internal security and preventing any revolutionary change in the South that might jeopardize the U.S. military presence in Korea and its close relationship with the ROK military. In Gleysteen’s account, for example, General Rosencrans, the acting commander of USFK, was the first person to alert him to the “signs of unusual activity” within the Korean military on the night of Park’s assassination on October 26th. That same night, the Air Force general visited Gleysteen at home with ROK General Lew Byong Hion, the deputy commander of the CFC, to deliver the news that Park was dead. Lew, Gleysteen said, was “our principal channel to the Korean army.” He remained in close contact with Gleysteen and Wickham throughout this period. General Sennewald, described by Wickham as his “very able operations officer in Korea,” played a key role in the final suppression of the uprising as well. According to the commission, a Korean general who was Sennewald’s equivalent as CFC chief of operations has testified that he went to the U.S. general “to get written authorization” of the CFC’s approval for the release of the ROK 20th Army Division for the retaking of Gwangju. General Rosencrans was in the loop as well. On May 12, 6 days before the onslaught by Chun’s paratroopers, the Air Force general was “informed” by the Korean Minister of Defense that two brigades of Chun’s Special Forces were ready to reinforce the combat police to suppress demonstrations. This disclosure, as I pointed out long ago, directly contradicted a U.S. government “white paper” on the Gwangju crisis that denied U.S. officials had any knowledge of these special forces deployments. On May 18th, the first day of the uprising, Rosencrans accompanied Gleysteen and Brewster to their meetings with the acting (and powerless) president, Choi Kyu-ha and Martial Law Commander General Lee Hui-Song. In 1989, Lee testified to the first parliamentary investigation of Gwangju that he was formally asked after the 18th by the U.S. command to put off the 20th Division’s assault on the city until May 27th so the Pentagon could get its own assets in place to monitor the operation. Those assets included surveillance planes flown in from Okinawa and the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea. That later deployment, which was made public at the time, greatly cheered many of the fighters in Gwangju, including Kim Tae Jung, a commission researcher who was a student leader at Gwangju’s Chonnam University during the uprising (he was the MC at the now legendary torchlight rallies held in the city square during its liberation from May 22nd to May 27th). “People thought the aircraft carrier was a warning to Chun,” he said bitterly. “But we were wrong: it was his watchdog.” I interviewed Ambassador Gleysteen about his actions in 1996. In the days after May 18th, he told me, he tried to seek a compromise by urging “restraint” on the part of the people of Gwangju and asking the government to apologize for the initial killing, But Gleysteen said he was alarmed by the turn of events inside of Gwangju, particularly when citizens seized arms and emptied one of the local prisons that held several dozen long-term communist prisoners. “The point is, law and order was gone. It was chaos,” he recalled. Incredibly, he added: “Both sides at that point were rather equivalent.” Gleysteen stoutly defended the U.S. decision to allow the 20th Division to be released from the joint command to enter the city during the early morning hours of May 27. Wickham, he said, told him that the 20th Division had been “very careful and well-behaved” while on martial law duty in Seoul. In addition, “we did not want the special forces used even further, precisely because of what had happened.” When he received a last-minute request to mediate in Gwangju from a U.S. reporter on the scene, Gleysteen said the 20th Division was “already rolling.” In addition, Mr. Gleysteen said he had no idea of the authenticity of the group seeking the mediation, and thus decided not to act. “I grant it was the controversial decision, but it was the correct one,” he said. Gleysteen, whose parents were Protestant missionaries in China, died in 2002. When I published my stories in 1996, the Clinton administration would not allow anyone to speak on the record about Gwangju. Instead, I was referred to a senior State Department officer for a background interview. Gwangju “was an unspeakable tragedy that nobody expected to happen,” said the official, who was later assigned to a high-level position at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. “When all the dust settles, Koreans killed Koreans, and the Americans didn’t know what was going on and certainly didn’t approve it.” The State Department, he said, continues to believe that the United States “has no moral responsibility for what happened in Kwangju.” That remains the official U.S. position. Will the Biden administration turn over the documents? The outstanding request from the commission to the U.S. government for the still-classified military and intelligence documents on Gwangju is unlikely to be answered without public pressure. Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s right-wing, pro-U.S. president, recently partied with President Biden at a lavish White House celebration of their newly invigorated strategic relationship. He is not expected to rock the boat by pushing sensitive requests about American’s past ties with Chun. Many Koreans have dismissed Yoon as being excessively subservient to Biden, particularly after his capitulation to Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida over Korean wartime claims about forced labor. Moreover, many in Gwangju remember that Yoon’s ruling People’s Power Party includes members who have questioned the legitimacy of the uprising – an attitude made clear by a party banner hanging in front of the commission’s headquarters in Seoul. “What about that Gwangju ‘spirit?’ it mockingly read, a slap at the victims it has accused of falsifying claims for government compensation. As if in response, Gwangju itself spelled out its cynical take of Yoon in a political banner on the main street from the local branch of the opposition Democratic Party. It called for Yoon’s impeachment and, below, declared: “We worry for the future of the nation.” Back in Washington, Biden and the Pentagon have treated Yoon as a compliant, second-tier ally. With that kind of relationship, they have little incentive to expose their still-secret operations to help Chun and his group retain control over South Korea after killing hundreds of its citizens. While I seek comment from the State Department about the commission requests, perhaps an enterprising reporter from a mainstream outlet (and with access to the usual “intelligence sources”) could ask the White House if the Biden administration is ready and willing to share classified communications between U.S. and South Korean military and intelligence agencies with the truth commission. That could force Biden, or Secretary of State Tony Blinken, to take a position. Meanwhile, Gleysteen’s ambivalent comments from 1996 will have to stand as the last U.S. word on Gwangju. “Do I regret our decisions? I don’t think so.” Tim Shorrock, a Korea Policy Institute Associate, is a Washington-based journalist who has been writing about the Korean Peninsula for over 40 years.

By Dae-Han Song and Alice S. Kim | May 11, 2023 | Originally published in Globetrotter President Yoon Suk Yeol is rushing South Korea headlong into the middle of the new Cold War that the United States is waging against China. Yoon’s aspiration to position South Korea as a “global pivotal state” is turning the country into a bigger cog in the US war machine and stakes its security and economic future on a declining US-led global order. Yoon’s support of the US global order has taken him on a flurry of visits and meetings around the world, from the virtual Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) summit to the NATO summit in Madrid to high-level meetings in Japan and the United States. Most recently on his April 26 US visit, President Yoon and US President Joe Biden announced the “Washington Declaration” to deploy US nuclear-armed submarines to South Korea – reintroducing US nuclear weapons to South Korea for the first time in more than 40 years. When viewed against North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons as a strategic deterrent, these weapons in South Korea will more likely fuel a nuclear arms race rather than check Pyongyang’s nuclear program. As former South Korean unification minister Jeong Se-hyun observed, four out North Korea’s six nuclear tests occurred in response to the hardline stance of conservative South Korean administrations that refused to dialogue with the North. Ultimately, Yoon’s actions are putting South Korea on a dangerous path that further destabilizes inter-Korean relations and antagonizes China, its biggest trading partner. All the while, the move also forsakes the Korean government’s duty to advocate for reparations from Japan for Koreans exploited under Japanese colonialism and to prevent the discharge of radioactive waste from the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which lies upstream from South Korea. Yoon’s ‘global pivotal state’ The alarming return of US nuclear weapons to South Korea follows Yoon’s posturing to develop nukes in his country this past January as part of his evolving extremist hardline North Korea policy. More broadly, it forms part of Yoon’s greater foreign-policy agenda of inserting South Korea in the security architecture of the United States’ anti-China Asia-Pacific grand strategy. The Seoul administration’s “Strategy for a Free, Peaceful and Prosperous Indo-Pacific Region,” like Yoon’s recent activities, follows closely from the US Indo-Pacific Strategy, with the goal of building and enforcing a US-led “rules-based order” in the region with “like-minded allies” to contain China. For all its declarations of fairness and playing by the rules, this US-dominated “rules-based order” is at odds with the actual multipolar world taking shape as well as the multilateral nature of the internationally agreed-upon UN-based order. The United States has been leading the creation of regional minilateral bodies such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) or the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework as part of its “hybrid war against China” and engaging in unilateral aggression toward China in the form of “military, economic, information, and military warfare.” For example, the US is setting the stage to dispute China’s actions in the South China Sea not through the UN Law of the Sea Convention, which the United States has not signed on to, but rather through the Indo-Pacific security framework. This allows the United States to target China’s actions while exempting its own naval operations from the oversight of “global bureaucrats” – that is, the United Nations. Furthermore, despite calling for an “open” and “free” Indo-Pacific, the United States is waging a “chip war” by pressuring its Indo-Pacific allies to impede China’s access to semiconductor chips, one of the world’s most critical high-tech resources. The Yoon administration has been contributing to the buildup and reinforcement of this “rules-based order” through its participation in the Indo-Pacific framework, global NATO, and by consolidating the US-Japan-South Korea trilateral military alliance. In May 2022, a few weeks into his term, Yoon participated virtually in the IPEF meeting. In December, the administration adopted its own Indo-Pacific Strategy, which committed to “stabilize supply chains of strategic resources” and “seek cooperation with partners with whom we share values” – that is, IPEF states. South Korea is now being recruited into the US chip war against China. In June 2022, the participation of South Korea (including Yoon’s establishment of a NATO diplomatic mission) and three other Asia-Pacific states in the NATO meeting expanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s reach from the Atlantic into the Pacific. This year, Yoon paved the way toward consolidating the US-Japan-South Korea trilateral alliance by forgoing demands that Japan take responsibility for its colonial exploitation of Korean workers. Then, during his March visit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, he resumed the controversial 2016 General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) intelligence-sharing pact, laying the groundwork for direct military coordination between South Korea and Japan. In April, US, Japanese and South Korean officials met and agreed to hold missile defense and anti-submarine exercises to counter North Korea and “promote peace and security in the Indo-Pacific region,” with special emphasis on “peace and security in the Taiwan Strait.” As a further show of commitment to the US global war strategy, in an April 19 Reuters interview, Yoon reversed his position on Ukraine and raised the possibility of sending weapons, and exacerbated the United State’ provocations in Taiwan vis-à-vis the One China principle, to the ire of Chinese officials. A pivot toward peace Activists in South Korea and abroad have been working toward peace on the peninsula, with key struggles waged along the very sites of US military installations in the Asia-Pacific region encircling China, such as the construction of the military naval base in Gangjeong village. They have also been part of long-standing transnational activism to procure a peace treaty for the Korean War. As these activists and American scholar Noam Chomsky have recently reiterated in the face of the April 26 US-South Korea nuclear-weapons deal, only a peace treaty ending the Korean War would lay the basis for denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, bring an end to the US military occupation of South Korea, and move toward peace and stability in Northeast Asia. To continue building greater exchange, dialogue and solidarity, and pivot the region toward peace, on May 16, Justice Party members of the National Assembly along with the International Strategy Center and other civil-society organizations in South Korea, the United States and Japan will be organizing an International Forum for Peace in Northeast Asia and Against a New Cold War Order. Dae-Han Song, a Korea Policy Institute Associate, is in charge of the networking team at the International Strategy Center and is a part of the No Cold War collective. Alice S Kim received her PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley and is a writer, researcher and translator living in Seoul. Her publications include “The ‘Vietnamese’ Skirt and Other Wartime Myths” in The Vietnam War in the Pacific World (UNC Press, 2022) and “Left Out: People’s Solidarity for Social Progress and the Evolution of Minjung after Authoritarianism” in South Korean Social Movements (Routledge, 2011).

By Myungkyo Hong | May 8, 2023 | Originally published in Asian Labour Review On May Day, a local union leader surnamed Yang, from the Korean Construction Workers Union (KCWU), set himself on fire outside of a court to protest the concerted prosecution against trade unionists like him for carrying out union organizing activities. A number of construction workers’ unions have been at the centre of the state repression. So far, the police has conducted more than a dozen raids since the end of last year. More than 900 unionists have been investigated and 18 organizers and leaders detained. Recently, the local prosecution had requested arrest warrants for Yang and two other construction union officials. They are under investigation for forcing construction companies to hire unionized workers and collecting union membership dues, which the prosecution describes as intimidation and extortion. Yang was due to be in court at 3 pm on May Day, but instead he chose to self-immolate in protest. He was airlifted to the hospital but passed away the next day. In a social media post shared on the morning of May Day, Yang described himself as only “carrying out union work justly and without wrongdoing.” He was disturbed by the fact that the prosecutors were now charging him with “interference and intimidation.” He wrote, “My pride cannot abide this. I should have fought doggedly and struggled tenaciously to win. Perhaps I’m taking the easy way out. I was glad to have been in this together with you. I will stand at the side of my comrades eternally.” The Unhidden Anti-Union Agenda As we condemn the attacks on trade unions, it is crucial to understand why the Yoon government – working hand in hand with the construction companies – has taken aim at the construction workers’ unions. The government under President Yoon Suk-yeol has never hidden its anti-union and anti-worker agenda. It has mounted attacks on the truckers’ strike, and tried to push through anti-worker labor policies. On February 21 this year, Yoon remarked, “At construction sites, powerful vested unions are openly committing illegal acts such as demanding bribes, forcing recruitment, and obstructing construction.” Yoon referred to construction site violence as the “Construction Worker Mafia.” He directed that “prosecutors, police, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, and the Ministry of Employment and Labor work together to crack down on systematic illegal acts such as extortion and violence at construction sites.” He has labeled labor unions as “anti-reform rigid vested interests” and has stepped up the offensive. The construction industry is subject to economic fluctuations. It is dependent on the fortunes of the real estate sector and the government’s housing construction plans. As the fifth largest in the world by revenue, Korea’s construction sector is now dealing with the deflation of the real estate bubble which has resulted in a severe downturn in construction. One way the construction companies try to overcome this crisis is by attacking stronger labor unions, which the current anti-worker government is more than willing to support. The Labor Offensive Workers employed on construction sites are irregular and on short-term contracts. Challenges abound for construction workers from various construction sites to organize themselves into strong labor unions. The temporary nature of construction sites also make it harder for workers to negotiate with employers. Yet construction workers have been organizing. The construction workers’ movement emerged in 1989 and grew enormously after the mass layoffs of workers during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. Crane and truck operators were unionized in the 2000s. Since the 2010s, the movement has rapidly expanded and significantly improved the situation of low wages and poor working conditions. From just over 70,000 members in 2015, the organizing efforts have grown the KCWU to a union of 160,000. If counted along with those in the more conservative Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), 250,000 construction workers are now in unions in South Korea. In the past, South Korean Chaebols accumulated huge profits from the construction industry based on the over-exploitation of workers. By gaining control over large construction sites, the unions have significantly increased their bargaining power. A key victory of the KCWU’s struggle was abolishing the construction “participation system” to eliminate multi-level subcontracting that undermines job security and worker solidarity. The KCWU won an amendment to the Construction Industry Basic Law that abolished the “the lowest-priced winning bid system”. This happened against the fierce opposition of construction companies vexed by the growing power of unions. In recent years, construction workers have established new unions and negotiated with construction companies over pay and conditions. The KCWU was founded in 2007, comprised of Civil Engineering Construction Regional Union, Crane Operators’ Union, Construction Machinery Union, and Electrical Workers’ Union. In addition, the National Plant Construction Workers’ Union was founded in 2007 that encompassed regional plant unions. These new unions became a force in countering the power of capital in the construction industry. From the beginning, the construction companies were not at all willing to bargain with the unions. The construction workers fought to hold negotiations several times a month. Their efforts culminated in a landmark labor agreement in 2017, more than a decade later, when the construction union went beyond regional negotiations and demanded a national collective bargaining agreement. Construction companies did not believe workers could come together as a union capable of bargaining with the companies. Even if they did, they would stop the struggle once the leadership was detained. However, construction workers who built the union knew the power of being united as a union despite the threats and intimidations. In addition, labor unions, by monitoring the construction companies, have in fact prevented corruption and irregularities in the construction industry and strengthened civil safety by preventing faulty construction. The State and Capital’s Counter-Offensive The Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and public prosecutors are now waging a ruthless counter-offensive against KCWU unionists. They have labeled the physical actions by the unions to take over construction sites as “illegal” and are detaining union organizers. The government and construction companies are attacking the KCWU on two main grounds. One is that it is illegal for the crane operators to receive a monthly bonus (i.e., a separate and additional payment for extra hours worked) from their employers. The other is that the union has control over hiring construction site workers. The monthly fee is perceived as a performance bonus for crane operators. According to court precedents, the bonus is considered a “wage” because the crane operators work longer than the prescribed hours. It is also a risk allowance for performing dangerous work. But the government ignores this ruling and attacks the bonus as an “illegal, unfair payment.” The union made it clear that it is for work performed at the request of construction companies. If the government uses this pretext to attack the union, they will stop accepting the extra payment and instead adopt “work to rule’ by not working any additional hours. Another ground for the repression stems from construction unions pushing for “closed shop.” Unions demand medium and large construction sites to require newly hired workers to join a construction union. However, until a “closed shop” agreement is reached with the construction company, union organizers demand that the companies hire union members and contest the control over the hiring. This sometimes involves physical confrontations between the unions and the companies. Labor’s All-Out Struggle The recent government and construction companies’ attacks on the KCWU should be understood in the context of growing union strength and worker power in the construction sector. Against such escalating repression, the labor movement in Korea is not backing down. Already the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), of which the KCWU is an affiliate, along with other affiliated unions, have announced a series of strike actions and rallies over the next two months. The Korean Metal Workers’ Union is the first to call for a general strike for May 31. The KCWU is aiming to mobilize 100,000 union members to go on strike in July. The KCTU is building a broad alliance of “anti-Yoon Suk-yeol” general strike for July. As the social and political crisis deepens in South Korea, this fight has rapidly emerged as a key battleground. Its processes and outcomes will undoubtedly shape the future of the labor movement and Korean society. Myungkyo Hong is an experienced student and labor movement activist. He is a former organizer at the Samsung Electronics Service Branch of the Korean Metal Workers' Union. He is currently an activist with the social movement organization Platform C. He contributes to columns about social movements for Hankyoreh, Weekly Kyunghyang, and Daily Labor News.

By Simone Chun | April 25, 2023 South Korea’s far-right President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was elected by a narrow margin of 0.7% last year, is in Washington, D.C. this week for a state visit at the invitation of President Biden. According to The New England Korea Peace Campaign, Boston Candlelight Action Committee, and Massachusetts Peace Action which are preparing to hold a protest on Friday, April 28th in Cambridge, MA during Yoon’s visit to Harvard, “Since entering office, Yoon’s right-wing administration has expanded costly and provocative US-ROK military exercises, heightened tensions with North Korea, rolled back workers’ rights, threatened to abolish the ministry of gender equality, and has taken many other actions to undermine struggles for peace and justice in South Korea”. Indeed, backed by Washington, President Yoon has pursued extreme hawkish policies directly against South Korea’s national interests. Yoon’s state visit comes at a time when South Korea is experiencing unprecedented crises on the political, economic and national security fronts as a consequence of the Biden Administration’s unrelenting pressure on South Korea to join the US anti-China bloc. Moreover, domestically, Yoon has installed a new National Security State, which experts refer to as the “republic of prosecution.” His administration is engaging in a massive political witch-hunt of his opponents, arresting key top officials of the previous Moon administration, and targeting the opposition Democratic Party and progressive political leaders. Yoon is using South Korea’s national-security laws and red-baiting rhetoric to crack down on unions and those who are working for peace and unification. For example, on January 28 of this year, Jeong Yu-JIn, Director of Education of the Gyongnam Progressive Alliance and a mother of two, was arrested on charges of being a North Korean spy, an allegation she has steadfastly denied. Having been arrested, detained, and forced to make a false confession without access to an attorney, she engaged in a 40-day hunger strike in detention, which she only ended after 300 Koreans joined her hunger strike in solidarity. Although the hunger strike severely harmed her health, she remains steadfast and is preparing for her trial, with her greatest fear being that her two children remain without the care of their mother indefinitely. Yoon’s eagerness to prove his administration’s worth as a linchpin in Washingtont's new Cold War in Asia means that there will be more repression and prosecution such as this. Washington’s backing of a repressive political regime under an extreme far-right president whose inexperience in foreign policy and disregard for political norms is ushering in a new era of domestic and international uncertainty and risk for South Korea. Washington’s policies run directly counter to the sentiments of the majority of South Koreans, who strongly support balanced foreign relations with Russia and China, meaningful reconciliation with Japan, and peace with North Korea. According to recent polls, 80% of Koreans oppose the degree to which Yoon has capitulated to Washington’s imposition of its anti-China policy on South Korea. Washington’s endorsement of Yoon and its support for his new National Security State directly contravenes the majority of South Korean public opinion. According to recent figures, the Yoon administration has an abysmal 19% public approval rating. While the purpose of Yoon’s state visit is to prove his relevance to US imperial ambitions in Asia, Washington’s increasingly heavy-handed management of its one-sided relationship with South Korea is causing it to lose the battle for the hearts and minds among the South Korean public. Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, a lecturer at Northeast University and an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors, and serves on the advisory board for CODEPINK. She can be found on Twitter at @simonechun.

The greatest threat to peace and stability in northeast Asia is the U.S. Indo-Pacific military encirclement of China. By Simone Chun | March 21, 2023 | Originally published in Truthout The U.S. military encirclement of China threatens to escalate into an Asia-Pacific war, with the Korean Peninsula at the focal point of this dangerous path. Garrisoned with nearly 30,000 combat-ready U.S. forces manning the astonishing 73 U.S. military bases dotting its tiny landmass, South Korea is the most critical frontline component of U.S. military escalation in northeast Asia. Since the Obama administration’s 2012 “pivot to Asia,” Washington has intensified tensions with Beijing, doubling down on a “full-scale multi-pronged new Cold War” through the Indo-Pacific Strategy pursued by both the Trump and Biden administrations. Sixty percent of U.S. naval capacity has been transferred to the Asia-Pacific region, and 400 out of 800 U.S. worldwide military bases and 130,000 troops are now circling China. This is a reflection of Washington’s Asia-Pacific grand strategy, which views China as the U.S.’s top security challenge and prioritizes the maintenance of U.S. regional hegemony through military force by “defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC [People’s Republic of China].” It promotes the vision of an empire with unipolar hegemonic ambitions, expanding the theater of war in northeast Asia and distributing the totality of threats facing China. Its goal is to force China’s hand by triggering and escalating a hybrid war on multiple fronts, including military, technology, economy, information and media. This strategy is based on chaining together a regional “anti-hegemonic coalition” of U.S.-armed allies encircling China from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia and Indonesia in the south. In spite of the significant state-level and public resistance in these nations toward U.S. pressure to choose between allegiance to Beijing and allegiance to Washington, this vision has been largely realized thanks to unrelenting U.S. coercion through successive administrations. Three important implications of this grand strategy, which places the Korean Peninsula at the pernicious center of intensified China-U.S. competition, merit attention: 1) the accelerated remilitarization of Japan; 2) the revitalization of extremist hardline North Korea policies in both Washington and Seoul; and 3) the intensification and expansion of belligerent wargames targeted at China and North Korea. First, Washington’s military encirclement of China strategy bolsters Japan’s military build-up program. The U.S., despite having imposed a “pacifist” constitution on Japan in the wake of WWII, has for decades aggressively pushed for Japanese rearmament as a necessary adjunct of Washington’s efforts to dominate the Asia-Pacific. Labeling Japan a “failed peace state,” Gavan McCormack points out the ironic trajectory of its transformation into “one of the world’s great military powers” as a state actively girding for war under a so-called pacifist constitution. “With US encouragement, over time Japan built formidable land, sea, and air forces, evading the constitutional proscription by calling them ‘Self-Defence’ forces (rather than Army, Navy, and so on),” McCormack writes. “Other states with good reason to know and fear Japanese militarism (Australia included) also abandoned their commitment to the idea of its permanent demilitarisation…. [Its] constitution steadily sidelined, by early 21st century Japan was one of the world’s great military powers.” Thus, Japan’s Security Policy echoes U.S. goals such as the complete denuclearization of North Korea, the stoking of tensions on Taiwan and the continued U.S. military presence in Okinawa. Home to more than 50,000 U.S. troops, Tokyo has steadily laid the groundwork for its own remilitarization program by characterizing North Korea as an existential threat, and designating Beijing’s regional activities as a danger to its homeland. According to the retired Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) Admiral Tomohisa Takei, China has been the main target for Japanese rearmament, “using North Korea’s threat as cover.” At their most recent summit in January, President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida agreed to work together to “transform Japan into a potent military power” to counterbalance China. Tokyo’s defense budget will grow 56 percent over the next five years, from $215 billion to $324 billion, raising its military spending to parity with that of NATO countries. Tokyo is also adopting a new policy of acquiring “counterstrike” capabilities against other nations as part of a recharacterized “self-defense” posture — an alarming development in a region still suffering from the historical legacy of Japan’s brutal imperial policy during WWII, and raising the fear that Japan may decide to carry out a unilateral attack against North Korea. Washington considers the remilitarization of Japan — which aspires to become the world’s third-largest military power after the U.S. and China — to be the linchpin of U.S. security interests in Asia. Second, Washington’s zero-sum stance against China obstructs its ability to craft a sensible North Korea policy. Thus far, despite Washington’s rhetoric of “seeking diplomacy and deterrence with North Korea,” and repeated claims of having “reached out to Pyongyang multiple times,” the Biden administration has not moved beyond its standing offer for talks with no preconditions. Moreover, the Biden administration’s recent appointment of a new special envoy for North Korean human rights issues shows that Washington intends to maintain its heavy handed policy of employing military threats and economic sanctions against Pyongyang. In other words, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken has stated, the United States will “maintain pressure on North Korea until Pyongyang changes course,” i.e. surrenders to U.S. terms. Even moderate experts have warned against the Biden administration’s preference for relying on “ineffective [and] ill-suited tools” such as “isolation, pressure, and deterrence,” intensifying U.S.-South Korea military exercises, and redeploying U.S. strategic assets to the Korean Peninsula. The goal of Washington’s North Korea policy, however, is not to achieve rapprochement with Pyongyang or establish peace in the Korean Peninsula, but rather to nurture and even enhance the purported “North Korean threat” as a pretext to rally South Korea and Japan behind its goal of containing China. Washington’s anti-China policy, which binds South Korea to the service of U.S. geopolitical strategic interests and keeps it in a subservient client-patron relationship with the U.S., also has the ancillary effect of empowering extremist far right factions in South Korea. These politicians exploit the North Korean threat as justification for domestic repression under South Korea’s National Security Laws — among the most draconian in the world — empowering them to leverage red-baiting and worse against any critics or perceived threats to their grip on power. Case in point: South Korea’s far right president, Yoon Suk-yeol, who was elected by a razor-thin margin of 0.7 percent barely eight months ago, is already leaving his mark, having established a “republic of prosecution” that pursues the politics of fear and prosecution domestically on the one hand, and subordinates South Korea’s sovereignty to Washington’s interests on the other. The “most disliked leader in the world” garnered a disapproval rating of 70 percent in a recent Morning Consulting survey, and faces massive and sustained public demand for his immediate resignation. It is noteworthy that in spite of Washington’s stated foreign policy goal of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights, the U.S. remains silent on Yoon’s “atavistic reversion” of vitally democratic South Korea into a newly repressive national security state. According to K.J. Noh, “South Korea’s essential role as the closest and largest military force projection platform against China, its role in a ‘JAKUS’ (Japan-South Korea-U.S. military alliance), its cooperation with NATO, its stated plans to join a Quad-plus, and its assumption of a submissive position toward U.S. decoupling and economic enclosure against China make it far too valuable to criticize or undermine regardless of its excesses.” Indeed, Yoon has tirelessly pressed ahead with dangerous hawkish foreign policies. Against the absolute majority of Korean public opinion (over 65 percent) who prefer neutrality and a “balanced policy,” Yoon has unwaveringly committed to stand with the U.S. in its hegemonic strategic rivalry with China. During the 2022 Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, Yoon unveiled Korea’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which is effectively cribbed from Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy designed to contain China. Moreover, Yoon has repeatedly advocated not only the redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea, but has also declared his intention to arm South Korea with nuclear weapons, significantly raising the danger of a regional nuclear arms race. Third, Washington’s stance against China fuels belligerent ongoing wargames targeted at China and North Korea on the Korean Peninsula. The U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises — the world’s largest bilateral peacetime military drills — involve live fire drills, carrier battle group and submarine maneuvers and strategic nuclear bombing raids by aircraft. They have also explicitly included the rehearsed attack and occupation of North Korea as well as the “decapitation” of its leadership: a “plan for regime collapse and occupation.” Since the 2022 Biden-Yoon summit when Yoon agreed to the repositioning U.S. strategic nuclear-capable assets closer to the Korean Peninsula, South Korea has conducted near-monthly joint military exercises with U.S. forces. Under the GSOMIA (General Security of Military Information Agreement), which aims to create a “three eyes” intelligence-sharing grouping against China, these exercises also include joint maneuvers with the Japanese military. Coupled with the deployment of U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries in South Korea, these drills form a crucial aspect of regional U.S. war preparations. Leveraging South Korea and Japan to collect and share military intelligence as military subcontractors is a principal component of U.S.-led military action. In the case of South Korea, the reduction of sovereign military assets to virtual pawns in a U.S.-led conflict goes even further, with Washington explicitly accorded the authority to take full control of the South Korean military in the event of any war. The frequency and intensity of regional U.S.-led joint exercises have increased exponentially in the past year, ramping up tensions. In June 2022, the U.S. and South Korean militaries, for the first time in more than four years, held a three-day joint naval exercise involving U.S. strategic nuclear assets with the stated purpose of “reinforcing allies” against “North Korea’s mounting weapons ambitions.” Two months later, South Korea and Japan participated in the U.S.-led RIMPAC — the “grandest of all war games” — with the nominal goal of countering “North Korea’s evolving missile threats.” In spite of U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s claim that Washington does not “seek a new Cold War, an Asian NATO, or a region split into hostile blocs,” the U.S. is promoting NATO’s Asia-Pacific expansion to close the military circle around China, as demonstrated by its drive to extend NATO’s influence to Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. South Korea is fast becoming an important part of NATO’s Asia-Pacific expansion, as attested by Yoon’s attendance at the 2022 NATO meeting in Spain, in which China was singled out as a state that “challenge[s] our interests, security, and values and seek[s] to undermine the rules-based international order.” South Korea also became the first Asian country to join NATO’s Cyber Defense Group, a move that critics argue is laying the groundwork for war in Asia. Moreover, the scope and scale of U.S. regional military exercises will increase by a factor of 20 for the first six months of 2023 alone. The resumption of U.S.-South Korean joint live-fire exercises will be augmented by the addition of new and highly provocative “nuclear table-top drills,” which simulate region-wide nuclear conflict under the guise of deterring a North Korean nuclear attack. The proliferation of these U.S.-led military exercises in the Korean Peninsula and the Asia-Pacific region reveal Washington’s mounting resolve to drag South Korea into conflicts beyond the Korean Peninsula for the simple reason that South Korea, which has remained a U.S. garrison state since the Korean War, hosts the most lethal U.S. military footprint proximate to Beijing, including the world’s newest and largest U.S. military base in Pyeongtaek. U.S. officials have been quite blunt about South Korea’s subordinate role in Washington’s imperial quest. Gen. Robert Abrams, U.S. Forces Korea commander from 2018 to 2021, stated in 2021 that in addition to “threats from North Korea,” South Korea must join the U.S. in developing “new operational war plans” to counter China’s military influence in the region. Accordingly, former U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper predicted in 2022 that South Korea would inevitably “intervene with the United States in the Taiwan Strait should a conflict break out between Taiwan and China.” There is little doubt that under the far right Yoon administration, U.S. pressure on South Korea to serve in a vanguard role as a pawn against China will increase. Washington’s resolve to push its exorbitant imperial privilege by any means necessary is forcing South Korea down a risky and self-destructive path that promises little benefit for the Korean nation itself. What is happening now is the U.S. empire’s response to its most significant challenge to date, and represents an evolution of its militaristic posture in order to prevent its demise. As Tim Beal points out: For American hegemony the struggle is existential, and without hegemony the United States will be much diminished and poorer; it will have to live within its means rather than drawing sustenance from its empire. Hegemonic power has various dimensions — political, military, ideational, economic and financial. The US is being challenged, indeed is faltering, in each of these in various ways and to differing degrees. First and foremost, in intensifying its offensive against Beijing, Washington has shifted both risk and burden to allies that form its “vanguard against China,” enabling the U.S. to dictate decisions and procure imperial benefits while distributing the costs to vassal states. In order to justify its burgeoning military regional presence and intensified control over South Korea, Japan and Taiwan to bolster its posture against China, the U.S. needs to keep regional tension high. Despite the U.S. position that it is “open to talks” with North Korea, continued sanctions (including those targeting the civilian and medical sector), expansion of the U.S. military presence in the region, intensification of multinational military drills, and continued political rhetoric from Washington ensure that tensions with the north remain elevated. This benefits both Washington and the extremist regime in Seoul, and ensures South Korea’s perpetual relegation to the status of a U.S. neocolonial state. The greatest threat to peace and stability in northeast Asia is the U.S. Indo-Pacific military encirclement of China, which by design serves to escalate tensions and create a dangerous cycle of provocation and response. Washington’s hegemonic quest — the highest manifestation of 21st-century imperialism — is the antithesis of peace in the Korean Peninsula, the Asia-Pacific region, and beyond. When one factors in the Pentagon’s openly aggressive National Defense Strategy, which sanctions the use of nuclear weapons against non-adversaries, the intensified U.S. focus on maintaining hegemony and regional dominance at all costs takes on an even more ominous character, suggesting that the Korean Peninsula has the potential to serve as the flashpoint for a conflict of much wider scale and scope. Hawkish U.S. policies have consistently failed to garner public support in South Korea. According to a series of polls conducted in 2021, 61 percent of South Koreans support relaxing sanctions against the north and 79 percent support peace with Pyongyang, with an additional 71 percent supporting a formal end-of-war declaration between the two Koreas. These sentiments persist even among Yoon supporters, a majority of whom support an inter-Korean peace treaty, breaking with his rhetoric of a tougher stance toward North Korea. The South Korean Democratic and Progressive Parties, as well as major civil and labor organizations, support military deescalation with the North and maintenance of neutrality in the Washington-Beijing competition. Democratic Party Chairman Lee Jae-myung has repeatedly warned against South Korea becoming a “pawn in the plans of other states,” pledging his party to the principles of independence and sovereignty. A few years from now, after the Biden and Yoon administrations have ended, North Korea will likely not have been denuclearized and South Korea may emerge as the nuclear front line in the U.S. rivalry with China and Russia, setting the stage for the Korean Peninsula to serve as the main battleground in a new Cold War. If Biden has a genuine interest in achieving lasting regional security, he should pursue a broader vision in which nations can coexist. According to the latest poll, a significant majority of Americans support tension-reducing policies with North Korea and China, and 7 in 10 Americans are supportive of a summit between Biden and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Over half of those polled support a full-fledged peace agreement to finally end the 73-year-old Korean War — an unresolved conflict that has left nearly 5 million casualties and forcibly separated 10 million Korean families on either side of the 38th parallel, including more than 100,000 Korean Americans. Instead of narrowly focusing on the threat of China and exploiting the North Korean threat as a cover for a militaristic and volatile anti-China policy, the Biden administration should recognize that peace in the Korean Peninsula is not only obtainable, but can lay the groundwork for a broader and more stable regional order based on coexistence. Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission. Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, a lecturer at Northeast University and an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors, and serves on the advisory board for CODEPINK. She can be found on Twitter at @simonechun.