The end of America’s other Longest War: The search for a Korea peace treaty

After America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, some in Washington are turning their attention to another long-standing conflict, reports Donald Kirk from the US capital

North Korean troops wearing gas masks and bright red suits parade during a celebration of the nation’s 73rd anniversary this week (AP)

America’s “longest war” is far from over. In fact, if you listen to America’s leftist critics, it’s been going on for more than seven decades.

That’s the Korean War, not America’s plunge into Afghanistan 20 years ago after terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people.

A forceful, energetic band of progressive American politicians and activists would have the world believe US forces are still at war in Korea though no shots are being fired. The logic behind this trope: the document the US, China and North Korea signed in July 1953 at the “truce village” of Panmunjom was not a peace treaty but an armistice that South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, refused to endorse for fear it would sanctify division of the peninsula.

Proponents of the “Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act” say the US and North Korea have been “technically” at war ever since. Introduced into the US Congress by California representative Brad Sherman in May, it is now facing committee hearings. The bill would mandate pursuit of “a binding peace agreement constituting a formal end to the Korean War”. Sherman has the enthusiastic backing of a number of other members of Congress, all Democrats who support the South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s fervent bid to jump-start stalled talks with the North.

Not surprisingly, the drive to draw the US into a peace treaty with the North has gained momentum as activists see US withdrawal from Afghanistan as a powerful argument for ending what they say is a far longer “endless war” for Korea. In the aftermath of the Afghan debacle, the movement has traction, rising to a policy-influencing force. “Korea Peace Now” is the slogan for the campaign in which activists are haunting congressional offices, pleading for votes for a bill that would, if enacted, require the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to submit a “roadmap for achieving a permanent peace agreement”.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un walks with children during a celebration of the nation’s 73rd anniversary (AP)

Citing Donald Trump’s summits with Mr Kim, the bill’s advocates are looking for bipartisan conservative support. Considering the intensity of the campaign for the bill, it has a fair chance of making it through the lower house, that is the House of Representatives, where the Democrats hold a majority, before going to the Senate. Within “180 days” after passage of the bill, the secretary of state would have to come up with “an accounting” of all he is doing to negotiate “a formal and final end to the state of war between North Korea, South Korea and the US”. The bill also mandates talks with the North on setting up liaison offices in Washington and Pyongyang and for lifting a ban, renewed for another year, on US citizens visiting North Korea.

That last provision is a bow to two Korean-American members of congress, Andy Kim of New Jersey and Grace Meng of New York, co-sponsors of the bill along with another California congressman, Ro Khanna. “Compelling humanitarian considerations,” it says, should qualify US citizens to go to North Korea for “funerals, burials, or other religious and family commemorations”.

But what would be the point of a deal to which North Korea would only agree if the US closes its bases in the South and America’s 28,500 troops go home? “We’ve had 68 years of peace, guaranteed primarily” by the alliance with South Korea, says David Straub, a former senior US diplomat in Seoul. A peace treaty with North Korea, he believes, would “result in the North Koreans escalating their demands that the US leave South Korea”.

Sherman, however, declares that the Korean peninsula remains in a “continued state of war” even as quiet reigns on both sides of the demilitarised zone that has divided North from South since the signing of the truce.

The only projectiles fired from South to North in recent years have been balloons bearing leaflets insulting Kim and his regime. The leaflets, until Moon rammed through legislation banning them, harped on about North Korea’s appalling human rights record, a topic North Korea abhors and the bill ignores.

North Korea has an arsenal of missiles capable of hitting anywhere in South Korea as well as several thousand artillery pieces within range of Seoul but has never gone beyond test-firing any of them. The bill is silent on the failure of Kim to dismantle his nuclear weapons despite the pledge he and Trump made in Singapore in June 2018 to work for “denuclearisation”.

US President Donald Trump steps into the northern side of the military demarcation line that divides North and South Korea in 2019 (AFP via Getty Images)

Rather, the bill notes in passing that the North’s “nuclear- and ballistic-missile-related activities … pose a threat to international peace and security”. Never mind that the International Atomic Energy Agency reports that the North’s reactor at its Yongbyon nuclear complex is again humming, adding to a stockpile of about 60 warheads.

None of which is an issue for Women Cross DMZ, whose name dates from a mission six years ago by 30 women, including Gloria Steinem, first to Pyongyang and then to Seoul. Ending “this longest US war,” writes Christine Ahn, the group’s founder, “can help reverse America’s long march of militarisation, remove the risk of a potentially catastrophic nuclear war and neutralise the great power competition between the US and China.”

Such talk “ignores Pyongyang’s determination to remain a nuclear power”, says Evans Revere, like Straub a former senior diplomat in Seoul. “It also seems based on the belief that declaring peace and signing a peace treaty with the Pyongyang regime will somehow magically resolve all of the core security concerns on the Korean Peninsula. Magical thinking and naive policy proposals are not going to solve the North Korea problem” – much less end America’s “longest war”.