U.S.-North Korean Bilateral Relations and South Korean Security

Abstract

Millennial fever gripped everyone as the days counted down to the year 2000. How much more so for the Korean people: for them, the twentieth century was not a good one. After nearly a half-century of brutal imperial occupation by Japan, the country was divided after the Pacific War ended, wracked by a vicious civil war, and then returned to its contentious antebellum condition of national division and military confrontation. Many Koreans thought that this century of troubles would come to an end after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, which appeared to remove the ideological polarities and bloc politics that characterized the Cold War, perhaps clearing the way for a long-awaited reunification. But as the century came to a close and we got a decade-long perspective on 1989, unification had barely come closer and cold war was barely further away than it was a decade ago. But there has been modest improvement on both counts, because of several important diplomatic initiatives and the changes that a major humanitarian crisis have forced on North Korea. Indeed Korea, for all its problems, may be a place where a humanitarian crisis and a democratic transition in the Republic of Korea can be the prelude to settling this long-lasting, seemingly interminable civil conflict as well.