satellites to find and retaliate against terrorists. Instead, the United States should bring most of its overseas land- based forces home and reorient its foreign policy to stress leadership through example and diplomacy. Nowhere is this more true than on the Korean peninsula. American military intervention in Korea dates back to 1945. Most of our commitments in Korea were made before current government leaders were even born. The passage of time, economic development, and the collapse of communism have rendered most of them utterly anachronistic. Yet they remain unchanged, constituting one of our greatest breeding grounds for blowback.
SOUTH KOREA:
LEGACY OF THE COLD WAR
There were many differences between the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe and the United States’ satellites in East Asia, most importantly in the area of economic organization. In Europe, Stalin imposed on all seven of his “people’s democracies” (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania but not Yugoslavia, which was not created by the Red Army) a uniform pattern involving the collectivization of agriculture and an extreme centralization of economic decision making. The USSR demanded that all of these countries industrialize at the fastest possible pace, with absolute priority given to heavy industry. In the period from 1947 to 1952, the Soviet Union imposed its own economic methods uncritically and without taking any cultural or other differences into account. It was a process in some ways similar to the one the International Monetary Fund imposed on the smaller, more open economies of East Asia during and after the financial crisis of 1997—and with similar results.
In contrast with the Soviet Union, the United States was much less doctrinaire about economic arrangements in its satellites during the Cold War. In Japan and South Korea, its two main dependencies in East Asia, it insisted on the institution of private property and opposed any steps toward the nationalization of industry, but it tolerated land reform, state guidance of the economy, protectionism, mercantilism, and the cartelization of industry as long as these methods produced economic growth and blunted the appeal of communism. The United States used aid and preferred access to its vast market to bring these countries into its political orbit and keep them there. It disguised what it was doing—ultimately fooling only its own people—with euphemisms like “exportled growth” and “the separation of politics and economics.” The result was that over the years places like South Korea were able to export their way to personal incomes averaging over $10,000 per capita, a process that the Western business press invariably characterized as “miraculous.” It was not a process made available to the Latin American dependencies of the United States, because they were not of equal strategic importance in the Cold War.
When it came to the political and military dimensions of satellite creation and maintenance, the Soviet Union and the United States pursued similar policies and for similar reasons. They controlled their dependencies through single-party dictatorships (in Japan’s case a one-party “democracy”) that either the Red Army or the U.S. Army installed in power and then supported throughout the Cold War against any and all popular efforts to introduce truly democratic regimes. Although rebellions against our military presence in Japan were endemic from 1952 until after the end of the Vietnam War, we helped maintain (often through CIA funds channeled to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party) a single-party regime from 1949 to 1993, a record for stable satellite government (although identical in length to that of the government of East Germany from 1945 to 1989). During this period Japan was led by the same types of “shameless mediocrities” that the French international relations theorist Raymond Aron once said the Soviet Union relied on to govern Eastern Europe.1
Democracy finally began to appear in South Korea only in 1987, over four decades after the country came into being, largely because the military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, had attracted the Olympic Games for the following year and so had trapped himself into behaving in a civilized manner before a global audience when Koreans began to protest his rule. Much as in 1989, when the Russians did not intervene militarily to stop the East Germans from tearing down the Berlin Wall, the United States in 1987 did not encourage its Korean military allies to use force, as it had done in the past. One reason was that American officials still had in mind the traumatic outcome of the Iranian revolution—when their down-the-line support of the Shah’s repressive rule had only accelerated the coming to power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an implacably anti-American regime. Just the previous year, in February 1986, they thought they saw similar events unfolding in the Philippines as a popular movement swept away another U.S.-supported but corrupt and incompetent dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. In that case, the United States did not support the repression of the rebels, and the results proved relatively satisfying when Corazon Aquino, the widow of an assassinated Marcos opponent, and a group of middle-class reformers came to power, backed by military men with strong ties to the United States. Thus, the American government again showed restraint in the Korean situation, and the student demonstrators with their middle-class backers, seizing the chance, brought into being what is today the only democracy in East Asia, other than the Philippines, that rests on popular political action from below.
The end of World War II had proved no more a “liberation day” for Korea than for Czechoslovakia or other nations of Eastern Europe. The Japanese had occupied, colonized, and exploited Korea since 1905, just as the Nazis, following the 1938 Munich Agreement, had divided, occupied, and ravished Czechoslovakia. Both countries now underwent transformations into colonies of the victors of World War II. At about the same time in February 1948 when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was carrying out a coup d’etat in Prague, right-wing forces in the southern half of divided Korea, then under the control of the United States, were slaughtering at least thirty thousand dissident peasants on the island of Cheju. Although the Czech events are much better known (and led to the creation of NATO the following year), the killings in Korea were of essentially the same character as those in Czechoslovakia. The Cheju massacre was part of a process by which our puppet regime in South Korea, a government every bit as unpopular as Klement Gottwald’s Stalinist government in Czechoslovakia, consolidated power. Gottwald, president of Czechoslovakia from 1948 until his death in 1953, and Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea from 1948 to 1960, were, in fact, similar figures: neither could have come to power without the aid of his superpower patron and both were prototypes of the faceless bureaucrats the Soviets and the Americans would use for the next forty years to govern their “captive nations” (a term the Eisenhower administration came to apply to the Soviet Union’s satellites).
Between Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, and the installation of Syngman Rhee (who claimed to be a former Princeton student of Woodrow Wilson’s) as president of the Republic of Korea in the southern half of that peninsula on August 15, 1948, the Koreans themselves tried desperately to create a postcolonial government of their own, just as the Czechs struggled to create a democratic government under President Edvard Benes up to February 25, 1948. They were ultimately undone by superpower rivalries. Fearing that the United States was setting up Japan as its chief client in postwar Asia, the Soviets held on to Korea above the 38th parallel as a bulwark against Japanese influence. There, they promoted and endorsed a Communist government made up of former guerrilla fighters against the Japanese.
The Americans were more ambiguous about what they were doing. General John Hodge and his U.S. Army veterans of the Battle of Okinawa were the legal successors to the Japanese in South Korea. Only in 1948 did they hand over power to Rhee, and even then they retained operational authority over the South Korean armed forces and national police for another year. Preoccupied with the security of Japan and indifferent to Korea’s status, Hodge ended up thwarting the efforts of patriots such as Kim Ku to reconcile with the North Koreans. Instead, he moved to support Syngman Rhee, who himself was supported by and who staffed his new government with numerous former collaborators with the Japanese whose main credential was their firm and reliable anticommunism. The forces under Hodge’s command then trained and supervised Rhee’s armed forces in the suppression of any and all dissenters—invariably labeled “Communists”—and waited to see whether Rhee could consolidate his power.
Following the departure of the Japanese, the people of Cheju, a remote island off the extreme southern coast of Korea, governed themselves through patriotic “people’s committees” that were socialist but not Communist in
