Overcoming old views on Korea-US ties

By Kyung Moon Hwang

Not surprisingly, last week’s meeting between Presidents Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump in Washington DC received a lot more interest in South Korea than in the US. Also not surprisingly, yet another instance of Trump’s shameful behavior suddenly grabbed all the attention, minimizing further the American public’s awareness of the South Korean leader’s visit.

What was surprising, however, was that Moon still fawned over his deplorable counterpart while repeating age-old mantras about South Korea’s historical bond with the US. President Moon’s past statements suggest that, like probably the majority of South Korean adults now, he understands the complexity of America’s role in Korean history. But there he was in Washington, tellingly the first foreign capital he visited after taking office, delivering the cliché about the “blood alliance” that the two countries forged in the Korean War and maintained thereafter through common interests and ideals.

Park Geun-hye would not have put it differently, nor indeed Park Chung-hee. For a progressive who has emphasized South Korea’s autonomy from the US, Moon Jae-in sounded remarkably similar to his predecessors.

This was the case even as Trump blurted out, probably off-script, that he insists on renegotiating the free trade agreement between the two countries. (Perhaps this explains why Moon inserted a subtle dig at the US government’s failure to protect Otto Warmbier, the young American who died from his sham incarceration in North Korea.) On the whole, however, both presidents’ statements following their official summit meeting restated the generalities of ironing out differences over trade, getting tough with North Korea over its nuclear program, and further strengthening the rock-solid ROK-US relationship.

Much of this can be explained away as simply diplomatic speak. But on the other hand, President Moon appears to have gotten carried away with nostalgia, triggered by powerful impressions about the US implanted into most South Koreans of his generation. He also has a familial connection to this mythology, which he was eager to highlight to his American hosts.

As we know, Moon was born near Busan in early 1953, just a couple of years after his parents joined thousands of other civilians fleeing the Chinese advance into the coastal city of Heungnam in late December of 1950, six months following the start of the Korean War. They were among approximately 15,000 refugees allowed to board an American transport ship in what came to be known as the Hungnam Evacuation or the “Christmas miracle,” which provided safe passage to Busan, the temporary capital of South Korea at the time. (The recent hit film “Ode to My Father” opens with a stirring dramatization of this event.)

This is one of several moments in America’s intervention in the Korean War, such as the Incheon Landing of September 1950, that shaped the Korean faith in America’s salvational role, a picture further promoted by both South Koreans and Americans during the Cold War. With the liberalization accompanying democratization, however, Koreans came to learn that this neat image of the US is wildly simplistic.

A more complicated and realistic understanding of America’s involvement in Korea acknowledges that it did not begin with the Korean War, contrary to what almost all Americans also believe, but rather in the mid-19th century. From then to the period immediately following liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, when the anti-communist US military occupation of southern Korea set the stage for horrific brutalities just before the Korean War, much of this earlier history was not pleasant. Furthermore, the US forces depicted as heroes for rescuing desperate North Koreans in late 1950 subsequently went on to carpet-bomb North Korea indiscriminately, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

In a terrible irony, these bitter memories allowed the Kim dynasty to fabricate stories about itself in order to cement its grip on the North Korean population. In a tragic way, then, the US military involvement on the Korean peninsula contributed significantly to solidifying the same North Korean regime that everyone now condemns, a regime that can easily point to past American actions as justification for developing its nuclear program.

The other irony is that this more reasonable historical understanding directly arose from the same forces of the democratic opening that produced a more forthright view of South Korean state violence from the Korean War era. These atrocities began with the killing of tens of thousands of civilians on Jeju Island in 1948 and 1949 and culminated in the countless thousands of innocents executed by President Syngman Rhee’s regime, cultivated and trained by the United States, right after the start of the Korean War.

Finally, the numerous family members of the victims, as well as a few survivors, of these massacres had to wait decades, under South Korean dictatorships backed by the United States, in order to gain redress for their suffering.

So it is understandable if many, if not most, South Koreans do not buy into the ready-made images of American benevolence and the ROK-US alliance. Of course, there is much to be said for the positive aspects of America’s historical impact, which might be considered more important in the end. But hopefully, regardless of where one falls in the spectrum of opinions about this topic, everyone can recognize that it was not as simple as what these ceremonial summit meetings suggest.

Kyung Moon Hwang is a professor at the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of "A History of Korea-An Episodic Narrative" (Second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Contact khwang3@gmail.com.