I'm often very conflicted about USA's history of military use in the last 100+ years. Imperialistic? I don't know. But what I do know is that I would rather be a South Korean than a North Korean. And post-defeat Japan has been one of the preeminent countries in the entire world.
Also look at what is happening in Europe and the Ukraine war.
After the weak and inept leadership shown by France and Germany in their response to Russia's aggression the hopes for a EU defense capability is all but finished.
Eastern European countries would rather have the US to defend them [1].
And I think more appreciation needs to be given to the US for supporting Ukraine in those early days because if Russia over-ran Kyiv it's quite possible that Belarus, Moldova, Estonia etc could have been next. US military leadership can credibly be argued to have saved Europe.
Why on earth would Russia invade its closest ally? It is alarming that we see such confident justifications of US foreign policy from people who don't know the basic facts of IR and world history.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography"
A leaked internal strategy document from Vladimir Putin’s executive office and obtained by Yahoo News lays out a detailed plan on how Russia plans to take full control over neighboring Belarus in the next decade under the pretext of a merger between the two countries. The document outlines in granular detail a creeping annexation by political, economic and military means of an independent but illiberal European nation by Russia, which is an active state of war in its bid to conquer Ukraine through overwhelming force.
“Russia’s goals with regards to Belarus are the same as with Ukraine,” Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told Yahoo News. “Only in Belarus, it relies on coercion rather than war. Its end goal is still wholesale incorporation.”
According to the document, issued in fall 2021, the end goal is the formation of a so-called Union State of Russia and Belarus by no later than 2030. Everything involved in the merger of the two countries has been considered, including the “harmonization” of Belarusian laws with those of the Russian Federation; a “coordinated foreign and defense policy” and “trade and economic cooperation … on the basis of the priority” of Russian interests; and “ensuring the predominant influence of the Russian Federation in the socio-political, trade-economic, scientific-educational and cultural-information spheres.”
And countries like Poland are seeing a unique opportunity to fill the power vacuum in order to change the government to one that isn't interested in being part of Russia's sphere of influence.
If Putin was successful in Ukraine it's not inconceivable he would have rather have invaded rather than risk it becoming pro-EU, joining NATO etc.
South Korea was a brutal dictatorship for quite some time, just because they aren't now doesn't mean the US's military intervention is to thank for that.
Multiple brutal dictatorships, which were a direct continuation of Japanese colonial control, and which massacred their own people with US support and approval.
> In the fall of 1946, the US military authorized elections to an interim legislature for southern Korea, but the results were clearly fraudulent. Even General Hodge privately wrote that right-wing "strong-arm" methods had been used to control the vote. The winners were almost all rightists, including [Syngman] Rhee supporters, even though a survey by the American military government that summer had found that 70 percent of 8,453 southern Koreans polled said they supported socialism, 7 percent communism, and only 14 percent capitalism. [...]
> Chung Koo-Hun, the observant young student of the late 1940s, said of the villagers' attitude: "The Americans simply re-employed the pro-Japanese Koreans whom the people hated." [...]
> Seventy of the 115 top Korean officials in the Seoul administration in 1947 had held office during the Japanese occupation.
> In the southern city of Taegu, people verged on starvation. When 10,000 demonstrators rallied on October 1, 1946, police opened fire, killing many. Vengeful crowds then seized and killed policeman, and the US military declared martial law. The violence spread across the provinces, peasants murdering government officials, landlords, and especially police, detested as holdovers from Japanese days. American troops joined the police in suppressing the uprisings. Together they killed uncounted hundreds of Koreans.
> American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood, spending much of 1947 in a village west of Seoul, watched as police carried young men off to jail by the truckload. A "mantle of fear" had fallen over once peaceful valleys, he wrote. The word "communist," he said, "seemed to mean 'just any young man of a village.'" On August 7, 1947, the US military government outlawed the southern communists, the Korean Worker's Party. Denied a peaceful political route, more and more leftist militants chose an armed struggle for power.
> just because they aren't now doesn't mean the US's military intervention is to thank for that.
The alternative was that the entire peninsula would be "North Korea". And then there would never be any chance of formulating a functional democratic society.
You don't know what the alternative would be. US intervention and the massive amounts of civilian deaths caused in Korea are a major reason why North Korea is so anti-West.
There is no good north korea timeline. The entire revolution that created it was for the express purpose of putting an idiot dictator in charge, one who immediately went to work on forcing the population to consider him a god king and putting his equally selfish, stupid, paranoid, and vile progeny in charge.
Unless you believe a unified korea without US intervention but still with USSR support would suddenly overthrow that repressive regime, that was never going to produce a free society.
Why would they be less authoritarian if they weren’t anti West? This sounds a lot like the argument that the only reason communist countries terrorize, murder and starve their own people is because of the evil capitalist in other countries who aren’t doing that to their people. If only we could execute all of the kulaks together there’d be no need for the NKVD, comrade!
Lest we forget, the North was propped up by the Soviets under Stalin. Do you think it is likely that they would have allowed a non-Stalinist, non-totalitarian faction to remain in charge there even if there was one with strong positions? Just look at Soviet-run purges of "improper" leftists during the Spanish Civil War.
And brutal. As empires go, the Japanese had no regard for the lives of humans who weren't ethnically Japanese. This old-world way of doing war saw some 250,000 [0] Chinese killed for aiding American pilots after their bombings of targets in Japan. [1]
Before attacking the US, they had Korea and Manchury invaded, and Russia in check. The extent of their dominance relative to their country size was really impressive, and they went for the US because they needed to feel unstoppable.
Then of coure, they were stopped. But none of the base roots of the war were removed, the emperor was allowed to stay, they made token trial of random generals who committed atrocities.
But no one was allowed to officialy question:
- the US carpet bombing entire Tokyo (for comparison we questionned Germany carpet bombing EU towns) and dropping the bombs on civilians
- the Japan's spiritual leader and basic phyolosophy. Really, imagine Hitler being excused as a mere puppet and staying as a philosophical leader after the war.
In that respect, The compromise the US took looks to me like the critical difference from Germany, where they could move on and jointly create the EU. Instead, Japan and Korea are still barking at each other over the war almost a century later.
Most roots of the war cause were removed. Entire military was destroyed so some bad systems are also destroyed: Old constitution that defines emperor as top of mils formally (rather than prime minister) so mils did some thing without cabinet's order. Gunbu Daijin Geneki Bukan sei system so mil had control for cabinet.
People think the existence of emperor (thousand years long) itself wasn't the root cause (or at least think it's better than changing everything), unlike Hitler.
You are right, in that most of the international community saw the deal as a decent one, and see Japan as a fundamentally different entity pot-war.
I'd argue it's a different story looking from inside Japan. A sizeable part of the population aren't questioning going to war in the first place, and only put the blame on the military for having attacked the US. Basically they blame the country for having been too greedy, and see the current jp/usa relationship in that light ("why do we need to import so much US beef ?" "Because we lost" is something you'd hear with only half sarcasm)
That is to me a fundamental problem that was one of the root cause of the war, and stil causes issues to this day. The lasting conclusion should have been "don't invade your neighboors", not "don't attack the US".
To be clear, I don't think Japan will ever invade Korea or China again, but their diplomatic relations are still somewhere stuck in that age on both side. And if Japan had a venue where the international community wouldn't beat the shit out of them, they'd still go for full domination.
>That is to me a fundamental problem that was one of the root cause of the war, and still causes issues to this day. The lasting conclusion should have been "don't invade your neighboors", not "don't attack the US".
I think it is fair to say that Japan was following the dominant playbook of the era. They were literally taking colonies held by other western powers, as the western powers often did.
I think that is a pretty high expectation to hold for any former or current empire. Outside of Germany, I can't think of one who drew that lasting conclusion. I don't the English, French, Dutch, or Spanish spend a lot of time regretting empire. The US only makes small noise about the conquest of the native Americans. Literally nobody cares about the USA taking Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain, or Texas and California from Mexico.
Given this context, it it pretty easy to take "don't attack the USA and loose" as the lesson. The success of the USA is global example of what happens when you don't lose existential wars.
Hawaii, where the Japanese would ultimately attack, was itself annexed by the US in 1904, roughly the same time Japan was expanding in Korea.
As Winston Churchill said, history is written by the victors
Ah yeah totally agree for national people perspective. Sino-Japan war is underrated. But also people think: we did bad things like western countries did, why don't every westerns be blamed equally for this? (this story misses some Japan specific bad things, like 731.) Still, it was terribly bad obviously.
I think there is some loss of understanding of how conquest and colonialism were the norms of the day. This is represented in who Japan was fighting
with for control of countries.
Japan took Korea from China, hence it being a Sino-Japanese war.
Japan took control of Manchuria form Russia.
They took Indochina from the French.
North Korea could simply abandon their nuclear weapons program, stop antagonising their neighbours and then the sanctions would be lifted.
Also having actually been to the country the issue isn't sanctions. It's the lack of foreign investment and restrictions on business. Many China businesses for example would love to have broader access to the North Korean market not just for exports but as a source of cheap labour. But this is not happening because North Korea is fearful of their population being 'indoctrinated'.
North Korea actually already makes millions (at least) of passable US currency. North Korea isn't impoverished because of lack of resources, but rather because the Kim regime would rather spend those resources on themselves.
Kim Jong Un isn't belligerent. The north koreans have a different playbook for foreign policy than you might be used to but its a playbook nonetheless. For their people the program is akin to something like the Apollo program in terms of national pride. Its also a dead man's switch effectively. The ruling family obviously wants to maintain their life of idyllic luxury and nuclear weapons and belligerent public addresses are a good way to make people second guess just steamrolling you over. In effect they are just playing a hand thats already dealt to continue their positioning.
Or you know they could become democratic and embrace market reforms so their people don't suffer so much oppression and poverty, but then the ruling class would have to give up its power. Then they could unite with SK. Nobody in the West is team rolling a democratic country.
