Why the Pentagon Hates Peace in Korea.

• Author: Mesler, Bill

You might have missed the significance if you live in the United States, but South Korean President Kim Dae Jungs summit meeting with North Korean President Kim Jong Il in mid-June was heralded around the world as the historic beginning of the end of the Cold War in Asia. For a half century, the two countries have engaged in one of the globe's tensest military standoffs.

For a half century, the two countries have engaged in one of the globe's tensest military standoffs. Their mutual border--a no-man's land of mines, booby traps, and entrenchments with two huge armies on either side of the "demilitarized zone"--had just last year been labeled by President Clinton as "the most dangerous spot in the world." In the days prior to the June summit, former South Korean President Kim Yung Sam revealed in an interview with Agence France-Presse that he had to personally plead with President Clinton not to launch an air strike against North Korea in 1994, a move he says would have ignited "a second Korean war."

Yet when current President Kim Dae Jung returned from his three-day, televised love fest in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, he was able to announce that, for the first time since World War II, there was no longer any danger of a war between the two Koreas. After Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il held hands and sang "our wish is unification," the rapprochement has been so rapid that recent polls show the South Korean public now holding a 90 percent favorable rating of North Korea. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori likened the changes to the "collapse of the Berlin Wall," a comparison heard frequently in Asia.

So why aren't policymakers in the United States celebrating?

Sure, there have been the requisite public congratulations issued to the South Koreans. But while the rest of the world marvels at recent events, U.S. officials fret.

"The threat of war is still there," comments one unenthusiastic State Department official, who asked not to be identified by name. "In terms of [the North Koreans'] military capability, they still have over a million troops ready to go."

The legacy-obsessed State Department, which has bent over backwards to produce a peace treaty--any peace treaty--in the Middle East, has done next to nothing to support the peace process taking place in East Asia.

"The Americans are behaving in a truly surly manner," says Chalmers Johnson, former head of the University of California-Berkeley political science and Chinese studies...