Korea Divided

Abstract

Korea has had an unhappy political history during the twentieth century. It came under strong Japanese influence after Japan’s war with China in 1894–5, and became a Japanese protectorate after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5. In 1910, Korea was formally annexed by Japan. At the Cairo Conference in 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), ‘mindful of the enslavement of the people of Koreah’, declared their determination that ‘in due course’ Korea should become free and independent. Syngman Rhee, who was to become the first President of South Korea in 1948, always resented the words ‘in due course’. At the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences in 1945, the question of Soviet participation in the war against Japan was discussed, and it was decided that the Soviet Union would accept the Japanese surrender north of the 38th parallel and the United States south of it. When the Council of Foreign Ministers met in Moscow in December 1945, it was agreed that a provisional democratic government should be set up in Korea and that a joint US-Soviet Commission should consult with ‘Korean democratic parties and social organizations’ with a view to working out a four-power trusteeship under Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Roosevelt is reported to have told Stalin that trusteeship would be necessary in Korea ‘for about twenty-five years’, but Stalin replied that the period could be much shorter, ‘probably no more than five years’. In the event, the Moscow agreement provided for trusteeship ‘for a period up to five years’.¹

A young officer …, Colonel Dean Rusk, found a convenient administrative dividing line along the 38th parallel.

Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation, 1969, p. 449