Prof. Kathryn Weathersby
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In October 1947 the slow march toward creating separate states in Korea began to accelerate. On the 17th, the American representative to the United Nations, Warren R. Austin, presented a draft resolution calling for UN-sponsored elections to be held by March 31 of the following year. He included the terms of the State Department’s draft of September 18, which we discussed in a previous post, but also stipulated that the US would withdraw its military forces after a provisional government was established.
As a logical consequence of this resolution, the US proposed that the Joint Soviet-American Commission in Seoul suspend its discussions. General Shtykov then announced that the Soviet delegation would withdraw permanently from the Joint Commission on the grounds that the US had blocked implementation of the Moscow agreement of December 1945. The Soviet delegation then left Seoul on October 23 and the work of the Joint Commission officially ended.
Moscow now had to find a new strategy for protecting its security buffer in Korea. The solution was to submit a proposal to the United Nations on October 29 calling for both occupying powers to simultaneously withdraw their forces from Korea. On the surface, this proposal seemed reasonable. If the UN was now going to supervise elections in Korea, it could be argued that foreign occupying forces were no longer needed. In reality, however, as we now know from Russian archives, the Soviet Union was eager for a mutual withdrawal because with American forces gone, the communists in the north would likely gain control of the entire peninsula. Thus, without having to take the risk of engaging the US militarily, the Soviet Union could gain a more reliable buffer on the Korean peninsula.
In Seoul, conservatives around Syngman Rhee, Kim Ku, and Kim Seong-su correctly perceived Moscow’s strategy. Alarmed, they began a public campaign to force the US to allow elections for a separate government in the South and delay military withdrawal. Since the US was committed to working through the United Nations in order to strengthen the new institution, General Hodge responded to their demands by announcing that the US could not set a date for elections until the UN had reached a decision on the issue.
Privately, however, Hodge worried that once the Soviet military withdrew, communist forces in the North, supplied and trained by the Soviet Union, would invade the South. He therefore urged Washington to reassess the implications of Soviet troop withdrawal. He also asked that additional civilian advisers be sent to Korea and that he be allowed to create a large constabulary army. Tragically, Washington declined his request, on the grounds that once UN representatives were in Korea the danger of an armed invasion would disappear.
At a cabinet meeting on November 7 Secretary of State Marshall explained more fully the reasoning behind this failure to act. Marshall correctly argued that the Soviet Union did not want war, and would instead try to extend its influence into unstable areas by using indirect aggression and subversion. As Korea was one such area, the Secretary of State was pessimistic about its prospects. There was “no longer any real hope of a genuinely peaceful and free democratic development in that country,” he reported.
Marshall explained that “its political life in the coming period is bound to be dominated by political immaturity, intolerance, and violence. Where such conditions prevail, the Communists are in their element. Therefore, we cannot count on native Korean forces to help us hold the line against Soviet expansion. Since the territory is not of decisive strategic importance to us, our main task is to extricate ourselves without too great a loss of prestige.”
In the next post we will examine how US thinking continued to evolve in November 1947. Since the discussions were in many ways similar to current debates over withdrawing US forces from Syria, I recommend that readers follow news reports on that important issue. In that way, we can gain a deeper understanding of the tragic events in Korea that led to its division.
[Sources: This post relies on James I. Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941-1950 (University of Hawaii Press, 1985).]
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