SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 counterpunch.org
How many citizens have ever asked
themselves what the United States is doing in Korea in the first place?
In
November of 1945, two months after the surrender of Japan, Army Chief of Staff
General George Marshall spoke to President Truman and the chief figures of his
cabinet about his fears of a “the tragic consequences of a divided China” as
Chinese Nationalist forces and Communists resumed their struggle for power and
Soviet forces seized control of large areas of Manchuria. The resumption of
Soviet power in Manchuria Marshall emphasized would result “in the
defeat or loss of the major purpose of our war with Japan (emphasis
added).
What
could the general have meant by such a statement? What WAS the
“major purpose” of the Pacific war? Most Americans are taught that the foremost
reason the United States went to war with Japan was the attack on Pearl Harbor.
But the reality was that the U.S. and Japan had been on a collision course
since the 1920s and by 1940, in the midst of the global depression, were locked
in a mortal struggle over who would ultimately benefit most from the markets
and resources of Greater China and East Asia. Japan’s Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere was steadily closing the “Open Door” to American
penetration of and access to the profitable riches of Asia at the critical
moment. As Japan militarily took control of East Asia the U.S. moved the
Pacific Fleet to Hawaii in striking distance of Japan, imposed economic
sanctions, embargoed steel and oil and in August 1941 issued an overt ultimatum
to quit China and Vietnam “or else.” Seeing the latter as the threat it was
Japan undertook what to Tokyo was the pre-emptive strike at Hawaii. The real
reason the U.S. opposed the Japanese in Asia is never discussed and is a
forbidden subject in the establishment media as are the real motives of
American foreign policy writ large.
The U.S. had long envisioned
profitable management of client regimes throughout greater East Asia. After
Japanese surrender the U.S. wished to occupy as many of the numerous industrial
plants Japan had built in East Asia the most important of which were in
Manchuria and Korea. Washington was also keenly anxious to preempt Soviet
occupation of these territories. That is one major reason Truman decided to use
the Atomic Bomb on a nation already reduced to cinders. It was also intended to
induce Tokyo’s formal surrender only to the U.S. and not also to the Soviet
Union since that would have enabled Soviet co-occupation of Japan itself and
led to similar problems as were occurring in occupied Germany.
Politicians never use the term any
more but the Open Door Policy remains the bedrock guiding strategy of American
foreign policy writ large. Applicable to the entire planet the policy was
enunciated specifically about the “great China market” (actually greater East
Asia) but has evolved to encompass the planet. Simply stated it asserts that
American finance and corporations should have untrammeled right of entry into
the marketplaces of all nations and territories and access to their resources
and cheaper labor power on American terms, sometimes diplomatically, often by
armed violence. Consider the frame of reference of Edward Said who questioned
in 2003 “if the principal product of Iraq were broccoli would the United States
be in Iraq?” The U.S. has intervened militarily and covertly in so many nations
it is impossible to recount them all but in every case the American military is
protecting some investments of value to American corporations, or a strategic
position or both.
Formulated in response to Japan’s
war with China of 1894 that resulted in Japanese control of key Chinese and
Korean territory and resources, the policy was announced in 1899 to forestall
the establishment of autarkic “spheres of influence” across other areas of China
and coastal Asia. Anxiety abounded among American business classes that beside
Japan Russia was encroaching in Manchuria, that Britain would capitalize on its
control of Hong Kong and Shanghai to enlarge its sphere, and that rapidly
emergent Germany would also gain concessions, all circumstances potentially
combining to close the door to the detriment of American desires to exploit
China. Further south the French and Dutch were busy conquering territories
later known as Vietnam and Indonesia.
Benign
as they appeared the centrality of the Open Door notes cannot be overstated.
The policy eventually extended the American “frontier” to the entire world. As
enunciated its liberal language also asserted that such rights should also
apply to all other nations. Yet as American financial and industrial dominance
intensified in the early 19thCentury
it soon became apparent to the U.S.’s rivals that Washington and Wall Street
held most of the advantages and the policy would enable the U.S. effectively to
outcompete them in the scramble for East Asia.
But the outbreak of World War I in
1914 soon eliminated most European empires as great powers. The prime
beneficiaries of that self-inflicted calamity were the U.S. and Japan, and,
some may say, ultimately the Soviet Union. The future of China and its environs
was thereafter to be contested between the U.S., Japan, the USSR and the
Chinese themselves.
In 1799 the American Museum of the
China Trade was established by Boston sea captains calling themselves the East
India Marine Society and is well visited today in Salem, Massachusetts. The
members regularly undertook the dangerous journey around both Cape Horn and the
Cape of Good Hope to profit themselves and their investors by opening
commercial relations with a then powerful and integrated China which had not
yet succumbed to the British predation that would undermine and fatally weaken
that nation’s independence until the mid-Twentieth Century. Thus American
interest in and, ultimately, obsession with China began more than two centuries
ago.
By
the mid-1840s the London based East India Company had wrested control of what
is now modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and then set its sights upon
China. The principal weapon involved was a peculiar agricultural commodity
native to India that ultimately served to undermine Chinese sovereignty as
surely as the cannon the company unleashed upon China’s ports. Unwilling to
open their commercial doors to what in their own version of an open door the
British called “free trade,” the Brits simply battered those portals down in a
series of “Opium Wars” that progressively enfeebled China’s central authority
and led inexorably to the addiction of millions of Chinese, all to the great
profit of London’s elites. Greater East Asia would soon succumb also to the
incursion of the French, Germans, Russians, Japanese, even the Italians, and
ultimately the Americans. The Age of Imperialism had commenced and soon Japan,
Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines would be targets as well. The
seeds of the 20th Century’s Asian
Wars were being sown.
Lagging behind much of Europe in
industrializing and stifled by the Civil War the United States, like Japan and
Germany, was a latecomer to the great game of imperialism but by the turn of
the 20th Century the U.S. was poised to make its move toward what most of its
elites believed was America’s fated destiny.
In
1853-54 President Millard Fillmore dispatched naval Commodore Mathew Perry to
Japan with the mission to “open” that nation to American commerce and to serve
as a staging area for further penetration of the continent itself. The Japanese
had resisted relations with the West (as did Korea and Vietnam). When the
Japanese refused Perry’s demands he demonstrated the power of American cannon,
an event that shattered the complacency local daimyos had about their
ability to resist western incursions. Under duress from a technologically and
militarily more advanced society Japanese leaders undertook the total
transformation of Japanese society, leading Japan to “modernize” along western
lines in every respect to overnight became a formidable military power poised
to compete with Europeans and Americans on their own terms in the “scramble” to
occupy and exploit East Asia. When Japan occupied much of that very territory
after 1932 the Pacific War became inevitable.
Immediately after the Civil War the
U.S. Navy maintained a sustained presence throughout the Pacific Ocean
especially in Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam where it undertook numerous armed
interventions. This Asiatic Squadron’s mission was, as historian William
Appleman Williams wrote, “to ensure law and order and ensure economic
access…while preventing European powers…from obtaining privileges that would
exclude Americans.”
By
the 1890s ruling opinion demanded outlets beyond the landed frontier, to the
Pacific and on to the Great China Market. Since native regimes would resist the
rapacity of American penetration, as would imperial rivals, the strategy to
expand markets would also require military exploits. The leading ideological
exponent of the military approach was Alfred Thayer Mahan of the U.S. Navy
whose work The Influence of Sea Power
Upon History had enormous influence upon political elites
like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge. Mahan coupled his analysis
of the economic and social crisis facing the U.S. to the anxieties of the
business elites about their inability to sell their growing surpluses of
industrial production and called upon political leaders to leap beyond the
landed frontier to the oceans and establish “colonies” as markets for the
surplus and bases from which to protect and administer them. This, in turn,
would require the expansion of naval power, a proposition the emerging steel
and ship building trusts and their Washington confederates, especially
Roosevelt, leapt to initiate. Mahan’s gaze fell upon China whose population he
considered “sheep without a shepherd.” Seeing the vast land as “inefficient” he
contended that its people were not entitled to control their own country, and
even proposed that its capital Peking (Beijing) be moved southward out of
Russian influence to become “the core around which to develop a new
China.” American efforts to that end would be pursued right up to
1949.
Responding to the international
dissection of their country Chinese nationalists rose against all foreigners in
what became known as the “Boxer Rebellion,” during which the U.S. and others
dispatched troops to crush the insurrection. Casting themselves as unselfish
the Open Door policymakers cared little about what the Chinese thought but were
concerned only to stake the American claim and ensure that other imperial
competitors could not close the door. Meanwhile its imperial competitors
understood that the U.S. was now the most powerful industrial nation, able to
out produce and undercut their own rivalry and therefore to close the door and
doom themselves “to an inferior position.” Left purely to economic
circumstances the outcome would ensure American predominance. But none of East
Asia’s imperial plunderers, especially the Japanese, were willing to accept
that. Nor, most importantly, were the Chinese themselves.
In response to the the weakness of
the imperial Manchu throne to counter western and Japanese predation Sun
Yat-Sen and the Kuomintang, or Chinese nationalists, overthrew the monarchy and
declared China a republic. But China was highly fractured and the Kuomintang
soon splintered. After World War I the Chinese communist Party began to grow in
influence and power and after World War II would engage in a civil war won by
the communists. In the immediate aftermath of WWII General Marshall was
dispatched to China to broker a government composed of both communists and
nationalists but this was a fool’s errand even though simultaneously he and
others had received a promise from Stalin that the Soviets would not aid the
Chinese communists. They had fought the Japanese as the Nationalists had not
and popular support and the tide of history carried them to victory in 1949.
Having sacrificed more than 150,000 American lives in mortal combat with Japan
for control of China Washington was about to lose China to the Chinese. Of
course they were the wrong Chinese from the perspective of America’s ruling
elites, especially the Republicans who immediately charged the Truman
Administration with the loss of China. Truman refused to recognize the new
communist government and supported the regime of Chiang Kai-Shek (Jiang Jieshi)
who had retreated to the island of Formosa, today Taiwan.
Perceiving the hostility of the
United States and fearing inevitable armed attempts to overthrow communist
power in China the new leaders of that nation prepared its defenses. They would
soon require them in Korea.
The
Soviet Union entered the war in Asia in its last phase. Russia had plenty of
reason to war with Japan since Tokyo’s government had delivered that nation a
humiliating defeat in 1904-1905 and annexed Russian territory in the Far East.
So it was the Red Army that delivered the death blows to Japan on the mainland
of Asia as an allyof the United States. American troops played
no land combat role in China or Korea. Hoping for amicable relations with the
U.S. given the agreements he had reached with President Franklin Roosevelt at
Yalta Stalin agreed to a co-occupation of Korea under the auspices of a United
Nations mandate to work out an agreement to reunify the tiny nation. Korea had
existed as a unified and cohesive country, with its own unique language and
culture, despite being almost enveloped by China’s land mass, for more than a
millennium.
By 1910 however, Korea had been
conquered and occupied as a Japanese slave colony Theodore Roosevelt actually
endorsed Japanese rule as a means of “civilizing” Korea. The Japanese sought to
annex Korea entirely as they later would in Manchuria. During the period of
Japanese rule (1910-1945) a resistance movement grew eventually led by Kim
Il-Sung, who had fled to Moscow and turned to Soviet communism, much as Ho Chi
Minh had done in disgust at Woodrow Wilson’s dismissal of the nationalist
aspirations of colonized Asians. The resistance in Korea won widespread support
among Koreans. Most were deeply nationalistic partisans, not committed
communists but, as in the case of Vietnam, turned their loyalties toward those
leaders who resisted Japanese dictatorship and not those who collaborated with
their subjugators. The Japanese found willing Koreans to serve as armed police
to suppress their fellow Koreans. As events unfolded from 1945-1950 the forces
of Kim remained largely in the north in the Soviet zone, though his movement
also had widespread support in the south where numerous armed rebellions broke
out against the southern regime sponsored by Washington and their right-wing
South Korean clients.
As
early as 1945 the American commander in the U.S. zone, General John Hodge,
“declared war” on communists whom he identified with all hostile nationalists
tied to Kim Il-Sung or not. Americans employed Japanese trained armed police
who violently repressed those who resisted this extreme affront. The UN had
called for a plebiscite throughout the peninsula but the north refused to
participate primarily because the elections in the south were forcibly
controlled by American occupation forces and their southern minions and voting
was limited to landowners and taxpayers thereby eliminating most ordinary
peasants and factory workers, the very people who would have voted for reunification
under Kim (shades of Vietnam). Shortly after the government of Syngman Rhee was
inaugurated as a result of this provocative and incendiary election a major
revolt broke out on the southern island of Jeju. The response by the new
extremely right-wing government, was swift and exterminative. Approximately
30,000 South Koreans were slaughtered.The Jeju massacre, as it came to be
known, and numerous similar atrocious purges, were among the principal
motivations that led Kim Il-Sung to attempt to unify Korea by force and remove
the American client government in the south. In June 1950 Kim’s forces crossed
the 38th parallel, the artificial
border decided in Washington and agreed by the Soviets thus precipitating the
three-year long Korean War that resulted in the deaths of three million Koreans
and nearly 50,000 Americans
But Rhee’s government had been
attempting to cross the border itself and on the very day that the war began
South Korean forces also attacked the north. Which incursion was first is still
debated. At first the North Koreans swept in and almost unified the peninsula
on their terms. The American press demonized to the northern Koreans seeking to
reunify what had for at least a millennium an integrated, single nation as
“hordes” and “barbarians” illegally invading a separate and independent nation.
Then calling upon the UN to authorize a military response by forces largely
composed of American troops Truman intervened in this incipient civil war and
thereby initiated a large scale and utterly cataclysmic one.
The
northern forces overwhelmed both the Republic of Korea troops and the limited
number of American soldiers already in the south. The UN Supreme Commander,
Douglas MacArthur rapidly introduced numerous combat ready troops and air power
and routed the northerners and drove them back across the border. Though the UN
mandate limited the military response to repelling the North Koreans MacArthur
ignored orders and drove toward the Chinese border, believing that the
communists would not react. But China’s foreign minister, Zhou En-Lai, warned
in no uncertain terms that China would not allow American troops anywhere near
China and on June Chinese troops crossed the border. Eventually numbering
almost a million these forces inflicted what the U.S. Secretary of State, Dean
Acheson, described as the “worst defeat since Bull Run.” Actually the rout was
the worst defeat in American history for American forces by foreign troops. The
legendary 1st Marine Division was
sent reeling but insisted they were “advancing to the rear.”
In
truth the Chinese, under ordinary military circumstances could have driven the
UN Army off the peninsula entirely but the atomic bomb had changed the nature
of large scale land war. Both Truman and MacArthur and, later, President Eisenhower,
threatened the use of the Bomb and that resulted in Chinese withdrawal to
roughly the original border. What followed was an armistice (merely a
ceasefire: a technical state of war still exists) that remains in effect today
although numerous infractions of its terms have been committed by both the U.S.
and the Koreans on both sides. The one of most relevance to the crisis ongoing
today is the U.S. repudiation of Paragraph 13(d) which obliged both sides not to
introduce new weapons on the peninsula. In 1956 Eisenhower, with full support
of the National Security Council, unilaterally abrogated Paragraph 13(d). By
1958 short range nuclear capable missiles were deployed in South Korea.
No threat worthy of nukes emanated
from North Korea. Nor was it capable of launching another cross border attack.
At least 20 % of the north’s population had been killed. All of its cities and
towns were destroyed; its crops inundated and ruined in 1953when the American
Air Force destroyed the dams along the Yalu River (a violation of the Geneva
Convention. Nazis had been tried for exactly that war crime). North Korea was
never weaker than during this period.
The message Washington wished to
send was directed at both China and the Soviet Union, which had just launched
Sputnik, effectively demonstrating its capacity to launch Inter-Continental
Ballistic Missiles that intense Cold War propaganda continued to claim were
intended to pose an existential threat to the national security of the United
States though Soviet ICBMs were developed in response and as a deterrent to the
overwhelming air superiority and threat of the U.S.’s nuclear armed fleet of
B-52 bombers, the Strategic Air Command.
The message broadcast unmistakably
stipulated that America’s foot was still in the door where Washington intended
it to stay and which stance it intended to defend by any means necessary. There
it remains today. For their part responding in grave alarm to this deadly game
of atomic chess the Chinese, and later North Korea, initiated the processes by
which both would acquire nuclear weapons of their own.
Which leads us finally to today’s
crisis.
A Gallup poll issued last week
showed that a majority of Americans, 58%, favor war with Korea if a peaceful
resolution fails. The figure climbs to 82% among Republicans. This is madness
of the first order. A peaceful resolution is more than possible if the American
public wakes up to realities (of the present and past) and demands such an
outcome. Diplomacy actually stopped North Korea’s earlier efforts to build
nukes and then in each case the U.S. violated the terms. It can happen again
but the United States government will not do what is necessary owing to the
longstanding commitment to the Open Door. Just this week Defense Secretary and
former Marine Corps General James Mattis proposed the use of tactical nuclear
weapons with his South Korean counterparts though his pronouncements to the
American public insist that diplomacy is the first choice. An attack on Korea
will be unimaginably cataclysmic and has every potential to threaten China and
Russia and enflame nuclear apocalypse. Either we accept a nuclear armed North
Korea, and that means also in all probability a nuclear armed Japan, and
perhaps even South Korea, with all the increased and acute jeopardy that
entails, or we accede to a catastrophic, destabilizing and potentially all out
cataclysm, or the American public somehow awakens from its fantasies of
exceptionalism, and realizes that the essence of U.S. foreign policy has always
been aggressive and exploitive in contradiction to our claims. Eisenhower’s
warning about the “Military-Industrial Complex” has become a cliche but he was
dead serious. The most powerful, and decisive branch of the American ruling
class is that faction and it has held sway since 1945. Unless the public
comprehends that this reality has brought us to the brink of global
catastrophe, and then demands a fundamental reordering of our national
priorities we face a future fraught with extreme jeopardy.
The
latest heir to the North Korean throne, Kim Jong-Un, like all despots, wishes
above all to remain in power. The North Koreans are not jihadists intent on
martyrdom. It is perfectly clear to any rational observer that North Korean
nukes are intended as a deterrent to Washington’s nukes, which, history
demonstrates, is based on obvious reality. They are not a means to suicide. At
the same time if Kim believes his avowed enemy will try to overthrow his rule
he will unleash what we now know is a formidable arsenal of conventional weapons
on the southern capital of Seoul, where more than 20 million people live
including about 200,000 Americans, civilians and military personnel. A
conventional attack alone will result in millions of deaths and injuries and
will destroy the 5th largest economy
on the planet, in which American capital has been heavily invested, both in the
military-industrial complex and, since the 1950s the creation of the modern
Korean industrial and financial system (Think Hyundai auto and steel, Samsung.
Where did their capital originate? Why did American capital abandon what is now
the Rust Belt for better financial and profit climes in Asia?). Such a war will
involve millions of refugees, many streaming into China and Russia, both of
which share borders with Korea. But since we also know that the northern regime
has nuclear weapons which will be launched at American bases and Japan, we
ought to be screaming from the rooftops that an American attack will unleash
those nukes, potentially on all sides, and the ensuing desolation may rapidly
devolve into a nightmarish day of reckoning for the entire human species.
Korea remains divided today because
the armistice that ended warfare in 1953 was enacted because of China’s
intervention and because the U.S. could not wage total war on China because
that would have set off World War III and very possibly nuclear war with the
Soviet Union. Absent those facts and overwhelming American firepower would have
crushed North Korea. Under no circumstances, however, would China or Russia, have
allowed this outcome then or now. Nor will they sit passively and allow a
colossal inferno and nuclear radiation to envelop much of northeast coastal
Asia today though if that commences then catastrophe follows. To be frank, an
American attack on North Korea, even with conventional weapons, will
immediately turn nuclear on the North Korean side. South Korea, Japan and
American bases within range will be targeted and the American response will
also be nuclear. I doubt that any bookie would take bets that China and Russia
will remain passive and neutral.
For more than a century China has
resisted and fought against foreign domination and intervention, as have most
of the nations of Asia. China is now a superpower and despite calling itself
communist it is a formidable capitalist competitor with the West and Japan.
When American policy strategists finally had to concede that China had indeed
been lost to American financial and commercial dominance in the early 1950s
they immediately turned their attention to the remainder of East Asia. Thus the
calamity visited upon Vietnam: Thus massacres and purges in Cambodia, Laos,
Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, East Timor. If China itself closed the
open door then American ruling class strategy resolved to keep it open
throughout the rest of Asia. That is why the Obama Administration (with much
influence from Hillary Clinton) conceived the military “pivot to Asia”
paralleled by the Trans Pacific Partnership, which aimed at corporate supremacy
over governmental regulations, both foreign and domestic, and now on hold in
the Trump administration
The U.S. will always be able to
trade with any other nation if it accepts that this cannot be on rigidly
American terms. That policy is dead in Asia. While Washington has sought global
dominance since the end of WWII, it has never achieved it and never will. The
attempt will bring on nuclear catastrophe. I am always telling my students that
the very existence of nuclear weapons in the current framework of the world’s
international relations is like leaving a loaded handgun in a childcare center.
Sooner or Later! But some students answer: A child care center has responsible
adults who will ensure the threat is removed! Listening to the overt threats
emanating from Trump himself, Secretary Mattis, UN ambassador Haley, National
Security Adviser General McMaster, and Senator Lindsay Graham leaves one
reeling with profound apprehension and incredulity about the sanity of such
“leaders.”
All signs indicate that global
warming and climate change will in the near future bring increasing human-made
disasters that have every potential to increase refugees, political ruptures
and more potential for war. The only sane response is an all-out effort
at global cooperation to minimize this worldwide threat and a repudiation of
the geo-politics of the past. Trump’s speech to the United Nations this week
repudiates the very founding basis of that institution.
The only rational and sane policy as
a foundation for de-escalation is for diplomatic talks to begin among North
Korea, South Korea, China, Russia and the U.S with a firm commitment from
Washington to sign a formal peace treaty and to withdraw its troops and
armaments from South Korea in exchange for the disassembly of North Korea’s
nuclear program. China especially, also Russia would oversee the north’s
nuclear disarmament. South Korea is well armed itself and does not need the
U.S. to protect it and neither China nor Russia wants another war on the Korean
peninsula. Nor, most importantly, do most Koreans. The U.S. has been there
since 1945 to keep its foot in the door to Asia and safeguard what it has long
seen as its entitlement to profit, not to protect democracy. The Open Door
Policy on American terms can never be achieved. China, like it or not, will be
the dominant power in East Asia and most of the other nations of Asia are
coming round to accept this because the alternative is a losing proposition.
The U.S. and China can find grounds for further mutually advantageous and
amicable political and economic relations but these will have to be on
reciprocal and honest grounds. The U.S. can also continue mutual relations with
all the other nations of Asia but not on terms dictated by Washington and the
major banks and corporations. The best start is for Washington to take its foot
out of the door in Korea before it is too late but only a determined and
truthfully informed public can make this happen.
