policy from getting depleted prematurely. By then the United States had more or less completed the withdrawal of its combat troops from South Vietnam, making South Korea’s remaining troops that much more critical for the U.S. effort to pressure North Vietnam into peace negotiations, as well as to keep South Vietnam alive with an eye to the United States’ claim that it had exited “honorably” and “responsibly” from the Vietnam War.
As Park waited for an opportunity to employ leverage through South Korea’s second and third stages of troop withdrawal in April 1972, Nixon requested that South Korea maintain its combat troops in South Vietnam to back up his pressure on North Vietnam in the coming peace talks. With most of the U.S. ground troops withdrawn by then, the KFV troops were one of the few instruments Nixon had to force North Vietnam into serious peace talks. In return for Park’s delay in troop withdrawal, Nixon promised to support military and financial assistance for the operations of KFV
troops in South Vietnam.54 Park responded positively, delayinghis troop withdrawal until the United States signed a peace agreement with North Vietnam. When the two adversaries signed the Paris peace agreement in January 1973, Park moved to complete the second and third stages of the South Korean withdrawal of ground troops within two months. Again,
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South Vietnam asked for a delay, but this time Park went ahead with his plan once he confirmed that the United States did not intend to provide any further assistance for KFV troops in South Vietnam. The time table for late withdrawal turned out to be a fruitful bargaining chip in negotiations with the United States, but only in the short run. The issue of USFK troop reduction was to return when Jimmy Carter was elected U.S. president in 1976 (see Chapter 16). However, buying time for even a short period was crucial for Park because it was long enough for him to lay the ground for his plans for puguk kangbyông (rich nation, strong army).
Legacies
The Vietnam War proved to be a profitable political venture for Park.
First, the South Korean military intervention set the stage for Park to play a more active role in international politics. In 1966, he called for a Manila Summit Conference for anticommunist countries in the region to collectively reconfirm their commitment to military victory in South Vietnam.55
The conference was held regularly through 1972. Park also joined in efforts to launch an Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC). Proposed initially in 1964, ASPAC held its first meeting in Seoul in 1966 to discuss noncommu-nist Asian countries’ common political and security interests. The organization included ten countries: South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and Laos. The United States, though not a direct participant, fully endorsed the launching of ASPAC. For a country as profoundly isolated in international arenas as South Korea had been since its independence in 1948, any role in international organizations—however minor—was perceived by society as a victory for the South Korean government in its competition with North Korea to be recognized as the sole legitimate government on the Korean Peninsula.
Second, the Vietnam War had a windfall effect on the South Korean economy by providing scarce capital with which to spur its ambitious five-year development plans. According to one estimate, the United States expended $927 million during the 1965–1970 period as financial support for South Korea in return for its troop dispatch to South Vietnam.56 Another source has estimated the total South Korean earnings from the Vietnam War to be over a billion dollars between 1965 and 1972.57 Coinciding with the normalization of relations with Japan in 1965, which brought $800
million in grants and preferential loans as reparations for Japanese colonial wrongdoings, Park’s intervention in the Vietnam War enabled South
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Korea to support financially the risky policy transition to export-led industrialization in 1964. The reparation funds and the Vietnam windfall served as seed money to start strategic industrial projects and to ameliorate the foreign exchange bottleneck, which typically worsens during the stage of economic takeoff. Apart from these grants and loans, the troop dispatch helped South Korea’s transition to export-led industrialization by increasing exports to South Vietnam by tenfold between 1964 and 1973. South Korea also reaped an indirect benefit in gaining U.S. assistance in securing foreign loans, which reached $2.7 billion by 1971.58
Third, the military intervention in South Vietnam proved to be a turning point for South Korean military capabilities. Although the Korean War had transformed the South Korean armed forces into a large modern organization of 600,000 men, it remained weak in morale and backward in equipment well into the early 1960s. U.S. military assistance, providing around 60 percent of South Korea’s total military expenditure in the 1950s, had been mostly spent on the maintenance of the armed forces rather than on their modernization. The intervention in the Vietnam War helped not only to reverse Kennedy’s plan to reduce United States military aid to South Korea, but also to increase it in three stages, the first of which came with the deployment of KFV troops in South Vietnam; the second, with the heightened North Korean military provocation and the United States’ policy of benign neglect and separate dealmaking toward those provocations during the late 1960s; and the last, as part of the efforts to win Park’s acceptance of the United States’ troop reduction from South Korea in 1971. Consequently, during the 1965–1971 period, South Korean military capabilities rose significantly, adding 170 aircraft, 190 missiles, 25 naval ships, and 630 combat vehicles with the help of the United States.59 The Vietnam War also proved to be a major morale booster for the South Korean military. The war not only became an occasion for providing over 300,000 soldiers with combat experience, but also enabled the South Korean armed forces to improve the living standards of its officers by providing proper services with proper allowances.
At the same time, the Vietnam War was not all about profits and benefits. South Korea faced a huge downside of approximately 16,000 casualties, 4,960 of whom were killed, 10,962 wounded, and 6 missing in action.
By 1992, a total of 36,926 Vietnam veterans were found to be struggling with the effects of their exposure to Agent Orange in South Vietnam, prompting successive South Korean governments to draw up plans for compensation and medical treatment.60
During the years of South Korea’s intervention in the Vietnam War, antiwar sentiments61 grew over time, but not to the level of triggering the in-
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tense partisan conflict and political instability found in the United States.
The South Korean opposition political parties made some damaging moral criticisms on the floor of the National Assembly, but they were seldom able to spread their partisan conflict to the world outside. The general public remained more or less silent on the issue, not only because the state made systematic efforts to control the mass media62 but also because most South Koreans of the 1964–1973 period harbored complex, if not ambiguous or contradictory, perspectives on the war and South Korea’s intervention, views that fell somewhere between national pride and shame, pragmatic endorsement and normative rejection, and internationalist inclinations and isolationist urges.
In contrast to the mid-1960s, when sending combat troops was judged to have enhanced South Korea’s standing in global politics, the same military intervention increasingly became a diplomatic liability for South Korea during the early 1970s by isolating it among “nonaligned” third world nations. South Korean efforts to participate in the conferences of Afro-Asian nations were turned down by the nonaligned countries on the grounds that South Korea had sent troops to South Vietnam as a proxy of the United States. The Third Summit Conference of Nonaligned Nations in 1970 dealt a particularly damaging blow to South Korea’s international standing when the conference sided with North Korea by passing a resolution for the withdrawal of USFK military troops and the dissolution of the UN Command in South Korea. Five years
later, North Korea and North Vietnam were admitted as new members to the club of nonaligned nations, whereas South Korea and the Philippines—the two participants in the U.S.-led war efforts in South Vietnam—were barred from entering the Summit Conference of Nonaligned Nations.
Another negative legacy was Park’s increasing mistrust of the United States, which seriously damaged the two countries’ relations after 1972.
As dramatic as the strengthening of alliance ties brought by the South Korean dispatch of troops in 1964 was the increase of Park’s suspicions of the United States after Nixon’s unilateral declaration of military disengagement from continental Asia in 1969. The disappointment was great because Park’s expectations had been great since 1964. In Park’s eyes, South Korea had supported U.S. war efforts in South Vietnam unswervingly despite potentially grave political and military risks to his leadership, regime, and country, but the United States repaid his loyalty with a betrayal, seemingly ready to abandon Park when larger East Asian regional power configurations and American domestic politics required it to do so.
The Vietnam War put Park and the United States on a roller-coaster ride, ending their “honeymoon” in only six years and replacing it with a
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relationship of deep distrust. To be sure, the end of the Vietnam War was bound to increase the divergence of the two countries’ national interests by eliminating the regional security rationale for a stronger United States–
South Korean alliance, but it was also true that the divergence of national interests looked bigger to Park than it actually was because he judged it from the perspective of a man who had been betrayed by what he thought to be a loyal ally. The South Korean military involvement in the Vietnam War was thus in many ways damaging as well as helpful to the cohesion of the United States–South Korean security alliance, the effect of which was to be fully played out after 1976 (see Chapter 16).
In fact, Park’s domestic political fortunes correlated directly with the degree of South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The deeper the South intervened, the more stable Park’s basis of power became, owing to strong U.S. support for his regime. The United States was then an unquestioned hegemon, enjoying strong South Korean public support for its role as the underwriter of security, the patron of economic growth, and the tutor of liberal democracy. Its strong endorsement of Park conferred on him an aura of legitimacy. Conversely, the withdrawal of military troops from South Vietnam in 1972 as part of the U.S. military disengagement removed any restraint the patron-state might have had in intervening in South Korean domestic politics against Park’s authoritarian rule. Especially after 1976, when Jimmy Carter pledged a full military withdrawal from South Korea and launched his human rights diplomacy against Park, the United States became a destabilizer of Park’s regime.
The Vietnam War reveals the complexity of the bargaining strategy a mid-sized power like South Korea can adopt vis-à-vis a great power in the context of a patron-client relationship. As the weaker side in the alliance, South Korea was not in a position to reject any U.S. request for combat troops outright. Aware of the geopolitical constraints arising from the asymmetrical power relations between the United States and South Korea, but also in need of U.S. support for his own domestic reasons, Park was predisposed to take the initiative on the issue of troop dispatch to South Vietnam. This initiative seemed to be risky politically, but it turned out to be an effective way for Park to avoid U.S. pressure and to gain bargaining leverage in negotiations with the United States on political, security, and economic issues. South Korea was a client state, but it managed to find not insignificant room for political maneuvering in its dealings with its patron.
The client state guarded its national interests and Park his regime interests by taking the initiative to court the United States rather than waiting to respond to the superpower’s pressures. The episode illustrates that a mid-
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sized power can make up for its disadvantages in power capabilities with the advantages gained when its political leadership is willing to take risks, to formulate policy with speed, to withstand domestic challenges for the advantage of foreign policy, and to organize a concerted program of actions across state ministries in building its bargaining position vis-à-vis the United States.
On the other hand, the impact of the Vietnam War on alliance relations was a variable, not a constant. When the United States had the intention to intervene massively in the Vietnam War, as it did in much of the 1960s, Park’s proactive posture toward the Vietnam War won him the reputation of a credible partner in the United States, and his strategy of leveraging the Vietnam War secured for Park a long list of political, economic, and military concessions from his stronger ally. However, when U.S. intentions dramatically altered to that of rapid military disengagement from South Vietnam and continental Asia after 1968, the same uncompromising anticommunist position came to be viewed as a liability obstructing the United States’ construction of a new order in the spirit of détente. The 1960s’
strategy of leveraging the KFV troops to win concessions similarly came to offend the U.S. Senate and, more critically, encouraged Nixon to tilt even more toward unilateralism on the issue of USFK troop reduction, thus revealing that the alliance remained fragile even a decade after jointly waging war in South Vietnam. After the Vietnam War, the alliance entered its most conflictive phase since its inception in 1954. The level of alliance cooperation was contingent on the nature of great power relations in the larger regional and global arenas, as well as on the situation of the battlefields of South Vietnam.
The Vietnam War also provided a turning point for Park’s domestic political leadership. With his troops fighting in South Vietnam, Park could persuade Johnson to increase aid and loans for South Korea’s economic development projects, to back Park’s expansionary economic policy in the mid-1960s, and to take a low profile in South Korea’s domestic politics, which de facto helped Park’s efforts to revise the constitution to allow a third presidential term in 1969. As long as the United States fought in South Vietnam, it tried not to get in the way of Park in South Korean domestic politics. All this would change when Nixon decided to seek an
“honorable exit” from the Vietnam War. With U.S. troops withdrawn from South Vietnam, U.S. political leaders could more openly and aggressively take on Park in the area of South Korean domestic politics during much of the 1970s.
c h a p t e r
f i f t e e n
Normalization of Relations
with Japan:
Toward a New Partnership
Jung-Hoon Lee
Anyone even remotely familiarwithEastAsianhistorywillattest to the unique and complex nature of South Korean–Japanese relations. The paradox of the relationship is that while the two sides remain vulnerable to recurrences of disputes over unresolved colonial legacies, they have enjoyed since the mid-1960s a symbiotic relationship. Despite sporadic anti-Japan outbursts in South Korea, Japan has for nearly four decades been South Korea’s top trading partner, second only to the United States. The 1990s and the new millennium saw expanded security cooperation between the two, yet anti-Japan protests still flared when it came to the issue of sovereignty over the two islets and assorted rocks that make up Tokdo (or Takeshima in Japanese), or to the issue of Japanese apology for colonial wrongdoings. Although the legal treatment of the 680,000 Korean residents in Japan has improved, the Japanese government’s inability to deal with the “comfort women” issue from the colonial era has raised doubts about Japan’s sincerity in dealing with its militarist past. Many of the issues that cast a shadow over the South Korean–
Japanese relationship now, from history questions and identity conflicts to political apologies to fishery and territorial rights, were as salient at the time of diplomatic normalization with Japan in 1965 as they are today. The “political” side of the South Korea–Japan relationship looks frozen while its “econom
ic” side has continuously improved into a close partnership.
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In many ways this duality of fragile political relations and robust economic cooperation between South Korea and Japan has affected the way in which Park Chung Hee is viewed for his efforts to normalize diplomatic relations with Japan in 1965. Rather than securing a “genuine” Japanese apology and repentance for colonial wrongdoings and forcing Tokyo to unambiguously recognize South Korea’s sovereignty over Tokdo, as demanded by the chaeya and opposition parties, Park chose the pragmatic approach in order to achieve economic gains as well as political stability.
Should Park be extolled for bringing about modernization by, among other things, steering South Korean–Japanese relations onto a new, cooperative path, or should he be denounced for brushing aside the public call for settling for good the history issue in favor of a quick economic gain?
Just as there is much controversy in evaluating Park’s eighteen-year rule, his role in establishing a new South Korean–Japanese relationship is also full of contrasting assessments. There is little doubt that Park broke the shackles of the past and put the bilateral relationship on a more positive and mutually beneficial course for the first time in the twentieth century.
But it is also evident that genuine reconciliation did not keep pace with the surge in broader bilateral relations.
On the question of whether Park sacrificed an opportunity for a genuine reconciliation, it is extremely difficult to answer due to the lack of hard evidence. Now, not as often asked, but perhaps the more pertinent question might be to ask whether political reconciliation was possible at all, had Park’s dealings with Japan taken a different course. Could Park have brought about a genuine reconciliation between South Korea and Japan, had he taken a more uncompromising position in dealing with the issues of the past? What would have been required of Japan to satisfy South Korea’s demand for historical rectification, and was Japan prepared to meet its requirements? Given the state of South Korean–-Japanese relations during Syngman Rhee’s rule (1948–1960), it is difficult to imagine that Park could have in any way made a difference by adopting a more anti-Japanese attitude. It is more likely that historical reconciliation remained elusive for the two countries in the mid-1960s, as it is today. Apparently, Park thought history could never be rectified. At best, South Korea had to live in the shadow of its tragic past while trying to put itself on a new track of historical development through Park’s strategy of puguk kangbyông (rich nation, strong army).
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