War and Truce: The Korean Armistice at 70

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, signed on July 27, 1953. The armistice suspended the Korean War, which had started three years earlier in June 1950. It marked a cessation of combat between armed forces on the Korean Peninsula. However, an armistice does not mean a legal and permanent end to a war, and thus the peninsula has been technically still at war since the 1953 armistice. This has kept the two Koreas in an ambiguous political and military state.

Why was the Korean War not permanently ended in 1953 with a peace treaty? Part of the answer is rooted in the role of South Korea in settling this military conflict. A close look at who signed the Armistice Agreement and what happened after the truce gives us a hint – and also helps us better understand the political developments in and around the Korean Peninsula caused by this lasting ambiguity.

The Korean War broke out in 1950, but the peninsula had been already divided by the two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, since 1945. The two powers occupied each half of the peninsula immediately after Japan, which had colonized Korea since 1910, was defeated in the Pacific War and surrendered in 1945. The division of Korea along the 38th parallel was further consolidated in 1948 by two separate governments established in the northern and southern parts of the peninsula, with respective support from Moscow and Washington.

North Korea (formally the Democratic Republic of Korea, DPRK), founded under the leadership of Kim Il Sung, and South Korea (the Republic of Korea, ROK), founded under Syngman Rhee, shared a common goal of unifying the whole Korean Peninsula – but each wanted his own government to rule.

On June 25, 1950, the Korean War started with the Korean People’s Army (KPA) from the North crossing the 38th parallel to attack the South. It’s interesting to note, however, that both North and South Korea saw the war as an opportunity to unite the divided peninsula under their own control. On the first day of the war, President Rhee even told U.S. Ambassador John J. Muccio that “perhaps the present crisis presented the best opportunity for settling the Korean problem for once and all.”

The Korean War started as a civil war between the two Koreas. However, it quickly escalated into an international war as other countries became directly or indirectly involved, which meant the settlement of the conflict became more difficult and complicated later.

On June 25, 1950, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adopted its first resolution about the Korean War, urging the “immediate cessation of hostilities” and calling upon “the authorities in North Korea to withdraw forthwith their armed forces to the 38th parallel.” This was followed by several other resolutions expressing similar sentiments. All these resolutions recognizing North Korean aggression against the South were able to pass in the Security Council because the Soviet Union, a UNSC permanent member with veto power, was not present at the meetings. At the time, Moscow was boycotting the United Nations in protest of the Republic of China (Taiwan), not the People’s Republic of China (the PRC or China), holding a permanent seat on the council.

The UNSC resolutions provided the international legal authority for U.N. member states to restore peace on the Korean Peninsula, particularly with UNSC Resolution 84 authorizing the creation of the United Nations Command under U.S. leadership on July 7. In its own words, the U.N. Command signified “the world’s first attempt at collective security under the United Nations system.” In total, 22 U.N. member states either dispatched combat units or supplied other types of assistance to support South Korea under the U.N. flag during the war or after the armistice.

Less than a month after the war broke out, Rhee handed over operational command authority over all ROK military forces to U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of U.N. Command. In a letter to MacArthur, Rhee wrote, “I am happy to assign to you command authority over all land, sea, and air forces of the Republic of Korea during the period of the continuation of the present state of hostilities.” It may have been an inevitable decision for the South Korean leader to transfer command authority to the week-old U.N. Command, because South Korea’s armed forces had severely underperformed since the first day of the war. However, this transfer of command authority weakened the role of South Korea’s government in determining the course of the conflict, despite the tremendous sacrifice of South Korean soldiers and ordinary citizens. At this point, the conflict transformed from a civil war to a war between North Korea and the United States under a U.N. flag.

South Korea was not alone in receiving external support; North Korea was assisted by the Soviet Union and China. Most of all, the Korean War could not have been initiated by Kim Il Sung if he had failed to receive the green light from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in April 1950, after Kim’s repeated requests. Once the war began, the Soviet Union provided military assistance to Pyongyang, including covert operation of MiG-15 units in support of North Korea’s air defenses. China’s involvement in the Korean War was more direct and on a larger scale. China sent millions of its soldiers, disguised as volunteers, to support North Korea. Almost 1 million of these Chinese soldiers became casualties, either injured or killed in the conflict, or lost as missing-in-action or prisoners of war.

The direct involvement of China transformed the nature of the Korean War again, this time making it the first and only instance in history that the current two great powers, the United States and the PRC, directly fought one another. Wada Haruki, a renowned Japanese historian and author of “The Korean War: An International History,” shed light on this aspect, pointing out that “the conflict changed from being a Korean civil war to a Sino-American war on the Korean Peninsula” when the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army crossed the Yalu River in October and November 1950.

In May 1951, about half a year after China joined the fighting on the Korean Peninsula, the war reached a bloody stalemate, with neither side a clear winner. From then on, most of the battles concentrated on territory around the 38th parallel. In April 1951, President Harry S. Truman fired MacArthur, who had been against signing a ceasefire and pushed ahead with more aggressive military actions to retake the North from the communists – despite orders to the contrary from the White House. After removing one obstacle to an armistice, the Truman administration adopted the NSC 48/5 report and officially made its decision to end the war on the condition that minimum requirements were met. They sought “to avoid the extension of hostilities in Korea into a general war” with the Soviet Union and China.

Negotiations on an armistice started at Kaesong on July 10, 1951, and continued later in Panmunjom.

Truman soon encountered another obstacle. This time, it was Rhee from South Korea. When General Matthew Ridgway, who had replaced MacArthur as U.N. commander, met Rhee to persuade him to accept the armistice negotiations on July 16, the South Korean president immediately challenged the concept of a ceasefire and insisted that U.N. forces push on to the Yalu and Tumen Rivers, North Korea’s northern boundaries. Like Rhee, Kim Il Sung also opposed a military armistice in the beginning of the truce talks, but Kim changed his position under Soviet and Chinese pressure and joined the negotiations.

The election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as the 34th U.S. president signaled a change in U.S. policy toward the Korean War. During his presidential campaign in October 1952, Eisenhower pledged to end the Korean War, and he even visited Korea in December 1952, as president-elect. After his visit, Eisenhower was further determined to show his conviction to end the war. He said, “We could not stand forever on a static front and continue to accept casualties without any visible results.” He added that “small attacks on small hills would not end this war.”

Despite this change of atmosphere in Washington, Rhee was still adamant. His conditions for accepting an armistice were seen as unrealistic and unacceptable – not only by the communists but also by Washington. For instance, he insisted that North Korean forces be disarmed and all of Korea be reunited. Moreover, Rhee was extremely concerned that Washington would let PRC forces remain in Korea to finalize the armistice negotiations. He sent a letter to Eisenhower on April 9, 1953, in which he warned Eisenhower that they would ask U.N. forces to withdraw from Korea if Washington didn’t agree with South Korea’s position. With all of South Korea’s command authority already transferred to the U.N. Command, Rhee’s warning could hardly exert any influence on the progress of the war, but it demonstrated that Rhee was worried about a political compromise between Washington and Beijing that could make Korea into “another China.”

Rhee’s increasingly strong voice against the armistice alarmed the United States and led to growing distrust between the two countries. In May 1953, the U.S. Eighth Army even drafted a contingency plan codenamed “Everready” to remove Rhee from power in preparation for a hypothetical situation in which the ROK forces became hostile or not responsive to U.N. forces during negotiations or after the armistice was concluded. This situation did not become a reality, but it is more evidence that the road to finalizing the truce talks was bumpy until the very last moment. That was most dramatically shown in Rhee’s bold decision to unilaterally release 27,000 anti-communist North Korean prisoners of war in June 1953 without any permission from or notification to U.N. Command. Many South Koreans also supported this anti-armistice stance because they deemed the armistice as the path to another division of Korea.

Rhee’s brinkmanship strategy frightened U.S. leaders and facilitated the negotiations between Seoul and Washington regarding a mutual defense treaty, which Rhee had been already demanding. Rhee’s strategy to link the mutual defense treaty with his compliance to the armistice – which South Korea would not sign – ultimately worked.

With tacit agreement from South Korea, the Armistice Agreement was signed on July 27, 1953, by three parties to the Korean War – North Korea, China, and the United States – ending roughly three years of fighting on the Korean Peninsula. The agreement was concluded after 158 meetings over the course of two years, which is recorded as “the longest negotiated armistice in history.”

Another agreement soon followed: About two months later, South Korea and the United States signed a mutual defense treaty. By requiring the two parties to provide mutual aid in accordance with their respective constitutional processes if either faces an external armed attack and allowing U.S. forces to be stationed in South Korean territory, the treaty provided both rhetorical and physical guarantees of U.S. security support to South Korea after the Korean War ended.

The objective of establishing the armistice was to “insure a complete cessation of hostilities and of all actors of armed force in Korea until a final peaceful settlement is achieved,” as specified in the agreement. For a final peaceful settlement, Article IV of the armistice stipulated that a political conference at a higher level on both sides should be held “to settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, etc.” The Geneva Conference, which began on April 26, 1954, served this role and provided diplomatic space to peacefully settle the Korean War; however, both sides failed to find a compromise and no formal peace treaty was ever signed. As a result, the armistice system on the Korean Peninsula became permanent.

Seventy years have passed since the armistice was signed, fortunately with no major military conflicts occurring between the two Koreas. Although the ambiguous situation leaves the two Koreas technically still at war, some changes or at least efforts to change the current system have been made.

First, the United States began to normalize its relations with Beijing in the early 1970s and established diplomatic relations with China in 1979. With the end of the Cold War, in 1992 South Korea also formally established diplomatic relations with China. The China-South Korea joint statement at the time clearly demonstrated the changed relationship between the two former enemies, stating that bilateral diplomatic relations “will be conducive to the relaxation of tension and stability on the Korean peninsula, and also to peace and stability in Asia.” Aside from North Korea, the other three major countries involved in the Korean War have formally recognized each other for decades and engaged in continued cooperation in some areas. Thus, China’s previous status in the Korean War as a belligerent fighting against the U.N. Command has been significantly weakened.

Second, South Korea transferred its command authority (in other words, operational control or OPCON) over all ROK forces to the U.N. Command during the war. This was formalized through the “Agreed Minute” to the U.S.-ROK Mutual Defense Treaty in 1954. As stated earlier, South Korea did not sign the Armistice Agreement, and intentionally left itself out of this regime due to Rhee’s political position. Even though Rhee got what he wanted – a mutual defense treaty with the United States – in the end, these acts downgraded South Korea into a secondary party in the very war in which its territory was devastated and its own people were direct victims.

These decisions also weakened South Korea’s leverage over North Korea in the following decades whenever any possibility for peaceful reconciliation between the two countries emerged, especially until South Korean President Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) designed and implemented the Sunshine Policy. Prior to that – and in many cases since then as well – North Korea pursued direct negotiations with Washington, bypassing the South.

There was a brief moment when South Korea under President Moon Jae-in (2017-2022) made active efforts to transform the existing armistice system into a peace regime. In April 27, 2018, the two Koreas signed a historic document, the Panmunjom Declaration, after a summit between Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – the grandson of Kim Il Sung. In this declaration, Seoul and Pyongyang “agreed to declare the end of war” in 2018, the 65th anniversary of the armistice, and “actively promote the holding of trilateral meetings involving the two sides and the United States, or quadrilateral meetings involving the two sides, the United States and China with a view to replacing the Armistice Agreement with a peace agreement and establishing a permanent and solid peace regime.”

Moon’s appeasement policy toward the North also brought Kim to the negotiation table with his U.S. counterpart, not long after heightened tensions between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in 2017. At the Kim-Trump summit in Singapore in June 2018, the issue of ending the Korean War surfaced between North Korea and the United States. Kim and Trump agreed that “the United States and the DPRK will join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula,” while Trump himself also mentioned that the Korean conflict “will soon end” after the summit.

However, the failure of the subsequent Hanoi summit between Kim and Trump in 2019 put an end to this brief moment for hope on establishing a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. Although Moon continued his effort to advance an end-of-war declaration until he left office in May 2022, new administrations in Washington and Seoul have paid no interest to this issue so far. Thus, there is little prospect of making any meaningful progress in the stalled negotiations with Pyongyang in the near future.

This rare opportunity for South Korea to make a breakthrough in negotiations with the North and play a leading role in establishing a new peace regime ended abruptly. The new leadership in Seoul, President Yoon Suk-yeol, has now reverted back to form as a secondary party to the original armistice system and has done nothing with regard to an active policy toward its northern neighbor.