By Brian Becker When South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung traveled to Washington to meet U.S. President George W. Bush in early March, there was great anticipation and anxiety in both South and North Korea as to how the new administration would handle the visit. The Korean peninsula, after all, is perhaps the most militarized part of the globe. Forty-eight years after the end of the Korean War, there are still 42,000 U.S. troops in the south, armed with the latest weapons of mass destruction. They command an even bigger South Korean military force.
Tensions remain razor sharp and the danger of a new war is never far off in Korea.
At Panmunjom, where a conference hall straddles the border, the soldiers stand literally face to face. It was widely understood that Bush's treatment of the South Korean president would signal less about U.S.-South Korean relations and more about the new Republican president's orientation toward the DPRK, or North Korea. A summit between the presidents of the United States and South Korea, regardless of the personalities involved, is not simply a meeting of two heads of state of sovereign countries. The relationship is really between an imperialist master and a dependent puppet regime. Not only do U.S. troops occupy South Korea, but its economy has been taken over.