Korea? It's Always Really Been About China!
Screenshot 2017-09-23 at 10.05.52 AM
By Paul Atwood, www.counterpunch.org
September 23rd, 2017
Above Photo: by Joe Hunt | CC BY 2.0
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.
