Kim Jong Un (L) and President Moon Jae-in signing the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula (Photo by Korea Summit Press Pool/Getty Images)
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With the leaders of North and South Korea agreeing to work to remove all nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula and, within the year, pursue talks with the United States to declare an official end to the Korean War, the country that created the problem in the first place is being curiously silent.
A malign and disruptive force
The Korean peninsula is divided precisely because in 1945 Stalin made a grab for it. Two days after the United States Army Air Force dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Russia declared war on Japan. Although Manchuria was Stalin’s principal objective, to occupy, or at least to plunder, Korea looked ripe for the picking too. The Japanese had annexed Korea in 1910, and in August 1945 there were large numbers of Japanese troops there as well as in China.
There were, however, no western allied troops near the Korean peninsula that month, when the Japanese surrendered. There were Russians in Vladivostock, though. And there were, of course, the Chinese. Except that there were two Chinas – that of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, the official ally of the United States and Britain, and that of Mao Tse-tung’s Communists.
The Communists were demanding that the Japanese surrender to them, while Chiang Kai-shek expected the Americans to insist they surrender only to him. Meanwhile, the US ambassador in China warned President Truman that if the Communists acquired surrendered Japanese ordnance, the country would dissolve into “fratricidal civil war”, and communist revolution.
The US State Department concluded “our forces should occupy quickly as much of the industrial areas of Korea and Manchuria as we can”. Consequently Truman ordered US forces to “occupy the Port of Dairen [formerly Port Arthur, in Manchurian China] and a port in Korea… if those ports have not at that time been taken over by Soviet forces.”
Stalin frustrated these objectives, principally by naval blockade of several Chinese ports, including Dairen, except below the 38th Parallel in Korea, the Americans beating him to it. And so the Japanese north of the 38th Parallel surrendered to the Soviets, while those to the south surrendered to the Americans, which is why the peninsula has been divided since 1945.
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