The War That Never Ended

TWO-THIRDS OF A CENTURY after the Korean War, most Americans do not know what happened in that conflict or how it impacts the Korean Peninsula even today.

In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. The U.N. intervened, and in the three years that followed the U.S. Air Force dropped more tonnage of bombs on North Korea than were used in the entire Pacific theater during World War II, including more than 30,000 tons of napalm. The U.S. destroyed 80 percent of the North’s infrastructure and 50 percent of its cities. The capital city of Pyongyang was wiped off the map.

“Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,” said Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War. Historians believe that between 70 and 80 percent of the deaths were civilians.

Nearly 40,000 U.S. soldiers died and more than 100,000 were wounded in what has been a “forgotten war” in the United States. North Koreans, however, have never forgotten the war that resulted in millions of casualties in their country. For 65 years, they have lived under that war’s vivid memory and evolved into one of the most militarized states in the world.

The root causes of the problem

Technically, the Korean War never ended. The armistice treaty signed in 1953 reinstated the government of South Korea, suspended open hostilities, created the Demilitarized Zone, and allowed for the release of prisoners of war, but it was not a permanent peace treaty between nations. No peace treaty has ever been signed. “We have won an armistice on a single battleground—not peace in the world. We may not now relax our guard nor cease our quest,” said President Dwight Eisenhower.

Because of the almost-total devastation of their country in the war, many North Koreans today still have strong anti-American views—and a deep fear of such destruction happening again. The country has built 15,000 underground defense facilities, including the 21-mile Pyongyang subway system that serves as a bomb shelter capable of holding 2 million people. Seventy percent of the North Korean military is deployed along the DMZ. During the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur considered the use of nuclear bombs over North Korea several times. In 1954, MacArthur confessed that he had a plan in place to use nuclear weapons in North Korea, before he was fired by President Truman.

During the global nuclear arms race between 1947 and 1991, North Korea did not possess nuclear weapons. However, the U.S. stationed tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea between 1958 and 1991. For more than 60 years, the U.S. and South Korea have held annual joint military exercises, some of the largest military exercises in the world. These exercises involve strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The U.S. and South Korea see these as defensive measures necessary in the absence of a peace treaty. North Korea fears these are preparations for a nuclear attack.

In the 1960s, North Korea’s economy grew rapidly, with assistance from the Soviet Union, and the country maintained economic parity with South Korea for more than a decade. In the 1980s, South Korea’s economy grew exponentially, while the North stagnated and went backward. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea lost its key trading partner and Soviet economic assistance. Such external factors, combined with inefficient economic policies and natural disasters, plunged North Korea into a severe economic crisis, which led to famine. An estimated 600,000 to 3 million people died of starvation in North Korea between 1994 and 2000. While South Korea normalized relations with former opponents China and Russia, North Korea never achieved similar recognition from the U.S. or Japan. North Korea’s diplomatic isolation deepened.

For the leaders of North Korea, its nuclear program serves multiple purposes. It guarantees the survival of the Kim regime by providing advanced weapons capability against the U.S. and South Korea’s superior conventional weapons. The nuclear program allows North Korea to convert its rich natural uranium resources into energy. It symbolizes an important Korean value—self-reliance (juche)—and legitimates the regime. Finally, it is a powerful bargaining chip for negotiations with Washington.

All these factors may not “justify” North Korea’s nuclear program, but they do help explain the country’s mindset, its existential fear over national survival. The nuclear crisis will not be resolved without addressing the root causes of the problem: ending the Korean War and the decades-long stalemate with a peace treaty.

Three decades of failed negotiations

When the U.S. acquired intelligence on North Korea’s nuclear program in the early 1990s, the two countries started negotiations. Hawkish officials in the U.S.—believing that the North would soon collapse, as had other communist states—were not enthusiastic about the negotiations or others that followed, and they soon broke down.

When North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1994, a crisis ensued and talks were put on hold, but negotiations resumed after former President Carter met with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. The Clinton administration reached an agreement with Pyongyang in October 1994, in which both sides pledged to diplomatic normalization and a peace treaty. In November of that year, however, the Republicans swept the U.S. mid-term elections and obstructed the implementation of the deal.

A similar pattern occurred in 1998. North Korea had begun testing long-range missiles, and the Clinton administration reopened negotiations, in collaboration with the newly elected liberal president of South Korea, Kim Dae Jung, with an aim to engage North Korea in denuclearization. Pyongyang halted missile tests and Clinton lifted sanctions against North Korea. Momentum toward peace was upended with the election of George W. Bush in 2000.

Another nuclear crisis began when the Bush administration accused Pyongyang of developing highly enriched uranium. Bush stopped oil shipments to North Korea, the only part of the 1994 agreement the U.S. had implemented. In response, North Korea restarted its plutonium program. Between 2003 and 2008, South Korea and China urged normalized relations between Washington and Pyongyang. As part of the Six Party Talks (which included Japan and Russia), North Korea provided documentation on its nuclear program to the U.S. and televised the destruction of the cooling tower at the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. The U.S. removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and lifted some sanctions. Negotiations broke down, however, when the Bush administration requested a far-reaching verification plan for special inspection and Pyongyang refused. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, had a stroke, and the regime shifted its focus to domestic issues, including the process of leadership succession.

President Obama attempted to restart negotiations with North Korea. But Kim Jong Un, son of the former president, was focused on consolidating his power as a new leader, and North Korea began aggressively testing nuclear weapons and missiles. Two conservative presidents in South Korea refused to engage in negotiations with Pyongyang.

In sum, for the better part of three decades, various factors—from domestic political changes within the countries to difficulties in policy coordination within the U.S. and between the U.S. and South Korea—prevented the kind of long-term, consistent diplomatic efforts that are needed to resolve such complicated international issues.

Kim Jong Un is now more confident in the consolidation of his political power, and he has declared that North Korea has completed its nuclear and missile development. President Trump’s top-down approach, ignoring diplomatic protocol and the careful preparations that usually precede high-level meetings—as well as South Korean President Moon Jae In’s mediation diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang—made the Singapore meeting possible. But negotiations could falter again if the United States demands that Pyongyang denuclearize first without seriously addressing an end to the Korean War with a peace treaty. The U.S. should set a realistic goal for denuclearization and simultaneously pursue a peace treaty.

All or nothing?

Washington and Pyongyang view the current standoff through very different lenses. North Korea considers its national security to be at stake. The country sees its choices for survival as either by nuclear deterrence or by exchanging its nuclear program for diplomatic normalization and a peace treaty with the U.S.

Hawks in the U.S., however, view the U.S. as a global police force that must punish North Korea’s international crimes. The U.S. has either refused to negotiate with Pyongyang or has set conditions unacceptable to North Korea, such as demanding special inspection rights with unlimited access or that North Korea completely denuclearize itself first, as a precondition to negotiations, without any guarantee of its survival.

In some cases, absolutist impulses in U.S. Christianity have fueled such an approach. Some conservatives identify the North Korean regime as “pure evil.” They believe this evil will collapse under its own weight. In this view, a few more sanctions and a tighter squeeze will lead to regime change. However, North Korea survived its worst period in the 1990s, and there’s no sign of imminent collapse. In fact, military confrontation and added sanctions against North Korea have helped the regime consolidate its power and served as an obstacle to reforms. “All or nothing” approaches and ratcheting up sanctions in the hopes of bringing North Korea to its knees have undermined, rather than bolstered, efforts to resolve the crisis.

China and Vietnam provide, perhaps, better models. When the U.S. started its diplomatic negotiation process with China in the early 1970s, China had developed nuclear weapons and was under the dictatorship of Mao Zedong, who had started the Cultural Revolution that killed millions of people. After diplomatic normalization, China started serious economic reforms and substantial social changes. Similarly, in the 1990s, after the U.S. normalized relations with Vietnam—20 years after the Vietnam War—the country achieved rapid economic growth and has become one of the most pro-American countries in Southeast Asia.

It’s time for a peace treaty

So how should the world, and how should Christians, deal with North Korea, with its nuclear programs, its authoritarian regime, and its terrible human rights abuses? Soviet dissident and novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” It is dangerous to assume “we” are pure good and “they” are pure evil.

As Christians, we are called to be peacemakers. Regardless of all the issues related to North Korea, there is no reason to continue the 65-year-long Korean War.

Christian churches in South Korea reflect the same political and theological tensions and differences found in U.S. churches. Many conservative and evangelical churches are skeptical about doing anything with North Korea. They rightly are critical of the North’s human rights abuses, the lack of freedom under the dictatorship, and the country’s nuclear development. Liberal and progressive churches in the South are highly focused on reconciling the two societies and building a strong peace. Despite such differences, more than 80 percent of South Koreans support a peace treaty with Pyongyang, even if they don’t fully trust Kim Jong Un.

Considering the historical background, it is not difficult to understand why North Korea feels it cannot give up its nuclear weapons without some trustworthy guarantee of peace and regime survival. The worst nightmare for the North Korean leadership is the regime-toppling path the U.S. took with Iraq and Libya. But there is no reason why North Korea cannot follow the path of China and Vietnam, if we successfully exchange a real peace treaty for North Korea’s nuclear program and start to socialize North Korea into global society.