Korea, U.S. Military Involvement in

Korea, U.S. Military Involvement in. U.S. military involvement began almost from the outset as the United States sought in the mid‐nineteenth century to establish commercial and diplomatic relations with the so‐called “Hermit Kingdom.” After a number of Korean attacks on American merchant ships trying to penetrate the peninsula, a U.S. naval squadron of launched an unsuccessful punitive assault near Seoul (1871). China soon gained control of Korea and opened it to other countries, beginning in 1882 with the United States. In the Sino‐Japanese War (1894–95) and the Russo‐Japanese War (1904–05), Tokyo increasingly took over Korea, which became part of the Japanese empire, 1905–45.

With the defeat of Japan in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union shared a trusteeship over the Korean peninsula, the Red Army occupying the area north of the 38th parallel and the U.S. Army under Gen. John R. Hodge the South. That division, meant to have been temporary, became permanent with the hardening of the Cold War.

In 1948, after Moscow rejected a United Nations plan for free elections throughout Korea, elections in the South led to the Republic of Korea; a former exile from the United States, Syngman Rhee, served as president (1948–60). In response, Moscow created the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the North, headed by Communist leader Kim Il Sung (1948–94).

Although the Republic of Korea initially received some U.S. assistance, the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised President Harry S. Truman that the United States had little strategic interest in maintaining American troops and bases there. In June 1949, the troops were withdrawn; Soviet troops also withdrew that year. In January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson publicly defined the U.S. defense perimeter as including Japan and Taiwan but not Korea. Six months later, after a series of border clashes, Soviet‐backed North Korean forces invaded and conquered much of the South. The Truman administration reevaluated its position and led a UN‐authorized military coalition to repel the Communist aggression.

The Korean War (1950–53), in which the U.S. military suffered 196,000 casualties, including 54,000 dead, in a war against North Korea and ultimately also “volunteers” from the People's Republic of China, ended in a truce signed in Panmunjom by military representatives from the United States and North Korea but not South Korea. Rhee's resistance was softened, however, by guarantees of increased military assistance, continued U.S. troops, and a mutual security treaty with the United States.

As a symbolic bastion of containment policy during the Cold War, Korea remained an area of major U.S. military commitment and periodic incidents, particularly along the fortified demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South. Under Gen. Park Chung Hee (president, 1961–79), South Korea sent troops to fight alongside U.S. forces in South Vietnam. In 1968, North Korea curtailed U.S. seaborne electronic intelligence gathering off its coast by capturing the USS Pueblo and its crew. In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration's Asian self‐defense policy led to the removal of one U.S. division from Korea, but an attempt by the Carter administration to reduce U.S. forces there was thwarted. When Park's successor, Gen. Chun Doo Hwan, used the South Korean Army to crush a May 1980 insurrection in Kwangju, there were allegations of U.S. complicity.

The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989–90 rendered Communist North Korea increasingly isolated and impoverished, while the South Korean government flourished with the resumption of popularly elected government in 1987. The North Korean nuclear program, which may have included nuclear weapons, led to a major international crisis in 1994, when Pyongyang initially rejected UN monitoring. The Clinton administration threatened an economic blockade and there was speculation about possible U.S. air strikes. However, the crisis was defused with the help of former President Jimmy Carter. The United States and the two Koreas began talks, which continued in the late 1990s despite the death of Kim Il Sung (1994) and periodic North Korean incidents such as the shooting down (1994) of a U.S. Army helicopter that had strayed into the DMZ, and the foiled attempt (1996) to stage commando raids from a submarine off South Korea. With North Korea facing economic collapse that might lead to military action, the United States retained some 36,000 military personnel in Korea, its third‐largest permanent overseas contingent in the 1990s.
[See also Civil–Military Relations: Military Governments and Occupation; Cold War: Causes; Cold War: External Course; Cold War: Changing Interpretations; Korean War.]

Bibliography

E. Grant Meade , American Military Government in Korea, 1951.
Robert K. Sawyer , Military Advisers in Korea: KMAG in War and Peace, 1962.
Ralph N. Clough , Embattled Korea, 1987.
Edward A. Olsen , U.S. Policy and the Two Koreas, 1988.
Bruce Cumings , The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols., 1990.
Doug Bandow and Ted Galen Carpenter, eds., The U.S.‐South Korean Alliance: Time for a Change, 1992.
William Stueck , The Korean War: An International History, 1995.

John Whiteclay Chambers II