Eye on Korea: An Insider Account of Korean-American Relations (review)

This book has much in common with William H. Gleysteen's Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), not only in its subject but also in its political approach. Describing South Korea's political metamorphosis from Park Chung Hee's Yushin system to Chun Doo Hwan's military junta, both books concentrate on how the United States reacted to these tumultuous events. The motives of the South Korean actors are investigated only in passing; little is said about why Kim Jae Kyu assassinated the president or why Chun arrested General Chung Sung Hwa in December 1979.

Similarly, Young shares Gleysteen's aversion to Jimmy Carter's policy toward Korea. Both authors seem to regard Carter's decision to withdraw U.S. ground forces from South Korea primarily as a manifestation of the president's alleged naive idealism, though it might have been more productive to place the decision into the context of Sino-American relations. After all, President Richard Nixon, hardly a naive crusader for human rights, also withdrew a U.S. division from South Korea in the first phase of Chinese-American rapprochement, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, another hard-bitten realist and the chief architect of post-1978 Sino-U.S. reconciliation, supported Carter's troop withdrawal plan until the very end. Partly because of the authors' somewhat narrow perspective, they also fail to note that North Korea, the supposed beneficiary of the troop withdrawal policy, was far less emboldened by Carter's steps than one might assume. Hungarian archival documents reveal that North Korean leaders felt increasingly cornered by Carter's diplomatic maneuvers, such as his "cross-recognition" plan and his efforts to achieve Sino-American and Sino-Japanese reconciliation.

Apart from these limitations, Young's book is an excellent source on U.S.-South Korean relations. Whereas Gleysteen, a former U.S. ambassador to Seoul, focused his attention on the actions and inner debates of the U.S. State Department, Young, an assistant military attaché at the same embassy, provides the reader with rare insights into the perceptions, motives, and objectives of the top brass in U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) and the Defense Department and also describes the occasional disagreements between the State and Defense Departments. Thanks to his position and his fluency in Korean, Young maintained closer formal and informal contacts with South Korean military officers than did most of his superiors. Young's familiarity with the mindset of South Korean officers in general, and that of Chun Doo Hwan in particular, enables him to understand why Gleysteen's arguments and protests failed to impress, let alone deter, Chun.

Young, to his credit, acknowledges that the U.S. government "made several errors in dealing with the events of 1979-80" (p. 169). In his view, these errors include the insufficient attention paid to intelligence reports on tension within the South Korean army; an excessive and partly unwarranted preoccupation with the supposed North Korean threat; a failure to establish contacts with the military moderates; and an unwillingness to disassociate the United States openly from Chun's two successive coups. Young demonstrates that Korean democratization during these years was definitely lower on the Defense Department's priority list than issues of direct military significance. In this respect, Young concludes, the United States was indirectly responsible for the forceful reestablishment of authoritarian rule in South Korea. On the other hand, he goes to great lengths to refute allegations that the U.S. government foresaw, or even instigated, Park's assassination, Chun's takeover, and the massacre in Kwangju.

In light of the well-documented U.S. involvement in coups in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere, one might find it somewhat difficult to take such claims of innocence at face value. Nevertheless, Young's depiction of the techniques used by Park and Chun to control, manipulate, and outwit U.S. civilian and military representatives is convincing enough to show the real...