Trilateral partnership committed, vigilant 70 years after Korean War armistice

FORUM Staff

The longest negotiated armistice in history remains intact 70 years after the Korean War ceasefire as Japan, South Korea and the United States vow to deter North Korea from renewing armed hostilities and stand up to the rogue state if it does.

The allied nations’ top generals were meeting in Hawaii in mid-July 2023 when North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) launched a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), its first test-firing in about three months after a spate of missile trials in 2023 and 2022, the Yonhap News Agency reported. “The three chiefs of defense condemn the DPRK’s provocative actions, which highlight the importance of the trilateral commitment in the face of a blatant DPRK threat,” Republic of Korea (ROK) Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Kim Seung-kyum and his Japanese and U.S. counterparts, Gen. Yoshihide Yoshida and Gen. Mark Milley, respectively, stated in a news release, Yonhap said.

Speaking in Tokyo two days later, Milley said the ICBM launch “clearly demonstrates an intent to develop a capability to strike the continental United States,” The Associated Press reported.

Technically, North Korea and South Korea have remained at war since the armistice on July 27, 1953, ended intense fighting. North Korean troops had breached the 38th Parallel, the nations’ pre-war border, intending to expand its communist regime throughout the Korean Peninsula. The South fought back with a unification vision of democracy. The People’s Republic of China and Russia sided with North Korea while the United Nations, the U.S. and almost two dozen other nations — collectively called the U.N. Command — supported South Korea during the war or after the armistice. The two sides battled to a standstill in May 1951 and ceasefire negotiations began that July, but the carnage continued for more than two years until military leaders signed the armistice.

The war killed about 2 million Koreans, 600,000 Chinese, 37,000 Americans and 3,000 other nationals in the U.N. forces, Encyclopedia Britannica reported, with more than half the fatalities being civilians. About 10% of the Peninsula’s population — North and South Korea — died in the war, Foreign Affairs magazine reported. North and South Korea remain divided by the Military Demarcation Line within the 4-kilometer-wide Demilitarized Zone, a 241-kilometer buffer between the two nations authorized by the armistice, which the U.N. Command called the world’s longest-lasting.

Responding to the North’s recent nuclear threats and missile firings, which violate U.N. Security Council sanctions, the trilateral security coalition — Japan, South Korea and the U.S. — in April 2023 stated it welcomed dialogue to end the standoff but promised a strong international response to any potential North Korean nuclear test. The nations’ militaries vowed to hold regular anti-submarine and missile defense exercises in response to North Korea’s affronts, and to encourage peace, stability and rules-based order on the peninsula and throughout the Indo-Pacific. The coalition also repeated its demand for denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, according to a summary of its April session, and the U.S. reiterated its ironclad commitment to defend Japan and South Korea with all its defensive capabilities — including nuclear weapons.

“Today, the Korean Peninsula remains a site of high geopolitical tension,” Foreign Affairs reported in late June 2023. “North Korea is governed by a dictator who brutally represses his citizens and regularly threatens his neighbors with nuclear weapons. But the carnage of the Korean War is now a distant memory. … For all its flaws, the armistice was a success.”

Calls for a permanent end to the Korean War remain unfulfilled. When the armistice was signed seven decades ago, then-U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower reflected on its ambiguous nature. “We have won an armistice on a single battleground — not peace in the world,” he said, according to the U.S. National Archives. “We may not now relax our guard nor cease our quest.”