Why does America stand up for South Korea anyway? Is it still a good idea?
Our main geopolitical approach may be a “zombie doctrine”
Despite causing untold damage and costing the lives of millions of people, mostly civilians, the Korean War is often referred to as “The Forgotten War.” What we’ve specifically forgotten is that it never officially ended, but instead stagnated into a stalemate with a contingency of American troops still stationed at one of the most heavily-militarized borders in the world. And now that Pyongyang threatens to move onto the list of nuclear powers with the capability to strike the United States, it’s worth asking how we got here. Why is America so militarily and politically invested in the Korean Peninsula?
The short answer is that, for better or worse, the entire thrust of America’s modern foreign policy comes out of the Korean crisis — including the formation of NATO.
When thinking about the Korean War, it’s important to remember that World War II ended with a lot of unresolved geopolitical tension. Yes, the major fascist German and Japanese empires were defeated, but the victors were divided among themselves. America and the Soviet Union, both of which came out of the war stronger than before, were deeply distrustful of each other. Each saw the other as not only representing a threat to their basic ideologies, individualist and capitalist versus collectivist and communist, but as greedy to make imperial land grabs.
You could make the argument that the Cold War began in earnest on March 12, 1947, when President Truman announced a foreign policy and military strategy based around containing Soviet geopolitical expansion to Congress. This strategy would consist of a mixture of financial aid to governments struggling against Soviet influence, sweetheart trade deals, and massive amounts of military assistance. It became known, predictably enough, as the Truman Doctrine and can be summed up in his own words with: “…it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
What the Truman Doctrine did was blend (some might say conflate) American values and American interests. And it signaled a dramatic break with foreign policy of the past. As historian James T. Patterson writes, “The Truman Doctrine was a highly publicized commitment of a sort the administration had not previously undertaken. Its sweeping rhetoric, promising that the United States should aid all ‘free people’ being subjugated, set the stage for innumerable later ventures that led to globalistic commitments. It was in these ways a major step.”
Of course, all of these commitments are just empty promises unless America and her NATO allies are willing to make good on their rhetoric and actually defend foreign governments from communism. That’s exactly what happened on the Korean peninsula. During the Second World War, the USSR attacked the Japanese-occupied peninsula from the North and American troops occupied the south, each stopping at the 38th parallel. The two regions were split, each with their own separate government claiming to represent the whole of Korea. On June 25th, 1950, the North (assisted by China and the USSR) invaded the South.
In response, a United Nations contingency of troops, composed mostly of Americans, was deployed to turn back the invasion. The combat was particularly brutal, and each side saw dramatic back and forths which bloodied and devastated both countries. What began in the summer of 1950 as a successful push by the North, pinning down the South and allied UN forces and taking most of the peninsula, was dramatically reversed in September. As South Korean and UN forces pushed back, regaining and taking ground, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army came to the aid of the North — partially at the behest of Stalin. And although the Soviet Union wouldn’t intervene directly with ground troops, they did supply air cover and pilots. In fact, the war saw the first jet-to-jet air combat ever.
By the summer of 1951, the war had turned into a stalemate. Eventually an armistice, but not a peace treaty, was signed. Officially, the war never ended. By the signing of the 1954 armistice, experts estimate that total troop casualties on both sides numbered 1.2 million. It’s also estimated that 600,000 North Korean and 1 million South Korean civilians were killed.
Okay, so if the Truman Doctrine was the reason we were in such a rush to defend the government of South Korea in the first place, why are American troops still there, long after the USSR has dissolved and South Korea has economically and militarily far outpaced its neighbor to the north? One theory is that America wants to maintain hegemony in the region despite the Cold War having ended and an American presence being provocative. But as some experts argue, throwing American troops into the mix would make any conflict even more dangerous. Cato Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandow writes, “The Koreas are no longer a proxy battleground between superpowers. There was a time when U.S. withdrawal from a confrontation with a Soviet ally in Asia would have, analysts believed, signaled weakness a continent away in Europe. But the Soviets are long gone and the cause for American commitment with them. An inter-Korean war would be tragic and the body count enormous, but absent American involvement the fighting would largely be confined to the peninsula. The continued presence of U.S. forces, by contrast, virtually guarantees the spread of conflict.”
There are many theories, but what seems the case regardless is that the end of the Cold War didn’t fundamentally change American global military posturing in the dramatic way that everyone expected. We’re still the number one benefactor of military aid in the world. We still have a military that’s spread over the face of the globe in a seamless network of troops and technology. And as a 2013 Congressional Research Service report says, America continues to seek a “world-wide, continuous global military presence” in order to preserve the superiority it had at the end of the Second World War, despite being the remaining sole superpower. In other words, the Truman Doctrine has become a kind of zombie doctrine, outliving the specific historical circumstances from which it arose and staggering dangerously into the 21st century, provoking potential foes and lacking justification beyond solipsism.
