Sung-Yoon Lee: U.S. Misses History Lessons on Korea
[Sung-Yoon Lee is adjunct assistant professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and associate in research at the Korea Institute, Harvard University.]
...Between the last decade of the 19th century and the Korean War, patchily remembered in America as the "Forgotten War" despite the loss of 54,246 American lives, there were four other wars in Korea and its vicinity. The US was involved in only the fourth, the Pacific War (1941-1945). But taken together, these earlier conflicts reinforce the lesson of the Korean War; that a power vacuum in Korea is an invitation to aggression....
Whereas an uneasy but de facto peace has held in Korea over the past 57 years since the 1953 armistice, in the 56 years leading up to 1950 the Korean Peninsula was engulfed in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the First Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), and the Pacific War (1941-45). In each of these, Japan was the principal actor, the revisionist power driven by desire to change the geopolitical setting in its favor.
By defeating China in 1895, Japan won Taiwan as its first colony and pushed Korea out of the traditional Chinese tributary system, effectively ending the centuries-old Chinese world order. By defeating Russia in 1905, Japan won international recognition of its "paramount political, military and economic interests in Korea", as enshrined in the Treaty of Portsmouth. By 1937, Japan was in full control of its Korean colony and ready to utilize the Korean Peninsula as a supply base and military platform for invading China....
Read entire article at Asia Times
...Between the last decade of the 19th century and the Korean War, patchily remembered in America as the "Forgotten War" despite the loss of 54,246 American lives, there were four other wars in Korea and its vicinity. The US was involved in only the fourth, the Pacific War (1941-1945). But taken together, these earlier conflicts reinforce the lesson of the Korean War; that a power vacuum in Korea is an invitation to aggression....
Whereas an uneasy but de facto peace has held in Korea over the past 57 years since the 1953 armistice, in the 56 years leading up to 1950 the Korean Peninsula was engulfed in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the First Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), and the Pacific War (1941-45). In each of these, Japan was the principal actor, the revisionist power driven by desire to change the geopolitical setting in its favor.
By defeating China in 1895, Japan won Taiwan as its first colony and pushed Korea out of the traditional Chinese tributary system, effectively ending the centuries-old Chinese world order. By defeating Russia in 1905, Japan won international recognition of its "paramount political, military and economic interests in Korea", as enshrined in the Treaty of Portsmouth. By 1937, Japan was in full control of its Korean colony and ready to utilize the Korean Peninsula as a supply base and military platform for invading China....