Time to Talk with North Korea

The conflict between North and South Korea has remained virtually unchanged since the end of the Korean War, despite important shifts in global and regional power alignments in the post-Cold War years. The Sino-Soviet conflict, China's strategic alignment with the United States, and the new Sino-Japanese economic axis have significantly altered strategic realities in northeast Asia. Yet the two Koreas have adapted to these changes without yielding on what each regards as its vital interests. The United States has contributed to this stalemate in Korea by maintaining an essentially immobile Korean policy for a quarter of a century. The furor in the American national security bureaucracy provoked by Jimmy Carter's 1977 plan to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea revealed the visceral opposition of Washington officials to even tactical changes in policy toward Korea. As one White House aide described the contend

Political science · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies

• The security of the Western Pacific

  Peter Polomka•Survival•1984

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