Building a Beacon

On June 19, 1949, President Harry S. Truman asked Congress to approve a three-year $180 million aid package for the Republic of Korea (ROK), predicting that it soon would “stand as a beacon to the people of northern Asia” in rejecting “the Communist propaganda with which they are besieged.” Despite these words, many historians have argued that Truman's desire to abandon the ROK invited North Korea's attack in June 1950. Gregg Brazinsky presents evidence in his Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of Democracy that shows this view is mistaken. “Even before the Korean War broke out,” he writes, “Americans recognized that divided Korea might play a role in the developing world that was akin to the role that divided Germany played in Europe” (p. 2). But Brazinsky's primary purpose is to explain how “South Korea was transformed from the indigent, despotic nation that existed at the time of the Korean War to the wealthy democratic one that emerged by the early 1990s and of what role the United States played in its transformation” (p. 4). An enormous commitment of U.S. resources and energy, he concludes, made South Korea one of the few places where postwar American nation building achieved success

China · Communism · Democracy · Economic history · Mainland China · Political science · Political status of Taiwan · Politics · World War II · History · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies · Law