South Korea

Abstract

WHATEVER IMAGES the United States and South Korea have held of each other in the past, both countries now need to take account of new circumstances. The old days are gone forever, and mostly for the right reasons. One of the most important of these reasons is that South Korea is the leading developing country in the world today, and American policy and many individual Americans helped to make this success possible. In part because South Korea is so successful, both countries have much to gain from continuing and strengthening the ties they have built up so far. To see why past American policy toward South Korea has to be judged a success, one need only imagine what Asia would be like today without an active postwar American commitment to the political independence and economic development of the non-Communist countries of the region. The Soviet Union would be the dominant power in the region, or locked in a struggle with China that, unlike the Sino-Soviet rivalary of the past two decades, would have spilled over into numerous conflicts-by-proxy throughout the rest of Asia. Japan, which by most methods of comparison has now passed--or is about to pass-the Soviet Union to become the second largest economy in the world, would be much less developed than it is today, and one way or another Finlandized by either the Soviets or the Chinese, or else rearmed. South Korea and Taiwan would doubtless be Communist. Even assuming they were not, they would probably have only barely begun to develop; the pathbreaking achievements that both nations have contributed to the world would not yet have taken place. The ASEAN countries, which have also grown at reasonably high rates for the past decade, would be similarly stagnant, and either Finlandized or Communist. The United States itself would be less prosperous than it is today, since an increasing