The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [49]
As it was, the assertions of U.S. power and authority-secretly against South Korea's nuclear weapons program, and very openly against North Korea's barbaric actions in the Joint Security Areademonstrated that despite its failure in Indochina, the United States continued to be a potent force on the Korean peninsula. Washington did not, however, heed Ambassador Sneider's call to establish a more durable partnership with the ROK. Instead, U.S. policy in the period to come intensified the discord between Washington and Seoul.
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THE CARTER CHILL
merica's reaction against military commitments abroad in the _ wake of the Vietnam disaster found its voice in its first postVietnam president, Jimmy Carter. As early as January 1975, in the first days of his candidacy for president, Carter advocated the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea, which after the pullout from Vietnam were the only remaining U.S. military deployment on the mainland of Asia and a tripwire that guaranteed immediate U.S. involvement in case of a North Korean attack. After the little-known former governor of Georgia surprisingly won the nomination of his party and then the presidential election, he ordered that his idea be put into practice despite the absence of serious consideration within the government, despite the opposition of South Korea, which was alarmed, and Japan, which was gravely concerned. He also made little effort to negotiate with China and the Soviet Union, the other major powers involved, or with North Korea, to facilitate the American withdrawal.
For two and a half years, as opposition mounted both inside and outside his administration, Carter stubbornly fought to sustain his plan with the same dogged persistence he deployed in successfully pursuing the Camp David agreements on the Middle East and the Panama Canal Treaty. In the end, he was forced to give it up, even though in theory he had the power to order the troops home from Korea with the stroke of his pen as commander-in-chief of U.S. armed forces.
Carter's ill-fated withdrawal effort is a case study in the hidden limitations on presidential power in the American system. It is also a study in unintended consequences, which in this case included the fatal weakening of a South Korean president and the inoculation of the U.S. body politic for years to come against further attempts to withdraw forces from Korea.
Nobody, including Carter himself, seems to know precisely how and when he developed his unyielding determination that American forces should be withdrawn from Korea. "The origin of my position is not clear to me," the former president wrote me while I was preparing this book. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's White House national security adviser and his closest collaborator on the troop withdrawal plan, called its origin "a mystery not yet unraveled." Cyrus Vance and Harold Brown, who grappled with the proposal and its author as secretary of state and secretary of defense, respectively, were equally uninformed about the roots of Carter's resolve, as were many others I interviewed from the Carter campaign staff and administration. Apparently nobody had the temerity to ask Carter at the time how and why he had concluded that U.S. troops were no longer needed.
Even before his policy began to run into trouble, Carter was reluctant to discuss its substance or consider alternatives; he knew what he wanted to do, and his mind was made up. During the transition period between his election and his inauguration as president, he turned down an offer of a CIA briefing on Korea, and he rarely attended any of the National Security Council discussions of Korea in the course of his administration. In Keeping Faith, Carter's lengthy memoir of his presidency, he devoted much space to foreign affairs but never mentioned the withdrawal issue.
CARTER'S WITHDRAWAL: ORIGINS AND IMPLEMENTATION
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