The Trust Territory of Korea, 1946-60

True story: for a little while in Autumn 1945, insofar as anyone had a plan for Korea, it was to turn it into a United Nations Trust Territory.

Didn't work, obviously. But it wasn't completely daft, either. Both the US and the Soviets were taking this seriously in the first few months. The Soviets wanted a weakish, friendly or neutral Korea that couldn't be used as a launch pad by any other power (viz., the US or a revived Japan). The US wanted a Korea that wasn't Communist and that wouldn't be open to Soviet domination. There was room for negotiation.

Several things derailed this OTL. One was Syngman Rhee. Rhee wanted a Korea united under Rhee. Since Rhee was a mouth-breathing anti-Communist and also just generally a son-of-a-bitch, this caused problems.

-- I say Rhee instead of Kim Il Sung because at this point -- 1945, early '46 -- Kim was pretty completely reliant on the Soviets, and would have been compelled to follow their instructions. That would change, but a bit later. In the first year postwar, the Americans had Rhee on a much longer leash, which was probably a mistake. (But his English was so good!)

Another problem was that both sides had drastically different ideas about how to structure Korean society. The Soviets were willing to contemplate a non-Communist Korea, but they wanted the structures of Japanese colonial governance destroyed, and they wanted Korean elites -- landowners and businessmen -- broken. This was partly because of ideology, but more because these groups had cooperated with the Japanese. If they were allowed to survive and prosper, they might produce a government that was too friendly to Japan or the US. The Soviets seem to have been underestimating Korean nationalism, but anyhow that was the thinking.

The Americans, of course, wanted to get capitalism up and running, so the landowners and businessmen were their natural allies. They were also in no hurry to destroy Japanese administrative structures; disarming the Japanese soldiers, then gradually replacing Japanese colonial bureacrats with Koreans, seemed more than enough.

A third problem was that the Koreans disliked the idea of becoming a UN Trust Territory. That was fine for Africans and Micronesians and such, but Korea was a real country. The Provisional Government was weak and divided, but on this issue they were pretty clear.

So it's a stretch. But not quite ASB territory, I think. The interesting thing about Korea in the immediate postwar period is how little either the US or the Soviets really cared about it. Neither power considered the penninsula that important, and OTL it sort of drifted into partition _faute de mieux_. If either side had been willing to push hard, though, things might perhaps have been different.

So let's say Washington and Moscow are able to reach agreement. [handwave] Late in 1946, Korea becomes a UN Trust Territory under the
joint administration of three powers -- the US, USSR, and China. Both Americans and Soviets commit to a staged withdrawal of troops over the next year. Elections will be held and a government installed, under the oversight of the four administering powers.

Now what?

Strangely, I don't think this makes a Korean War impossible. Korea was suffering from tremendous internal tensions. IMO a Korean Civil War would be a real possibility, with the Cold War powers inevitably drawn in. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily follow a north-south divide...

Assuming no war, though, the Trust Territory would probably last until the late 1950s or early1960s, with rapidly rising internal discontent in its final years. John Foster Dulles would be determined to install staunch anti-Communists in the administration, which is going to complicate things quite a bit -- this unified Korea will still include Kim Il Sung and plenty of Communists, after all, and it will probably be formally committed to neutrality. Chiang Kai-Shek would back this too. Taiwan would keep China's seat on its three-part administration after 1949, which would make Taiwan particularly reluctant to let Korea go...

Thoughts?

Doug M.
 
Strangely, I don't think this makes a Korean War impossible. Korea was suffering from tremendous internal tensions. IMO a Korean Civil War would be a real possibility, with the Cold War powers inevitably drawn in. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily follow a north-south divide...

Assuming no war, though, the Trust Territory would probably last until the late 1950s or early1960s, with rapidly rising internal discontent in its final years. John Foster Dulles would be determined to install staunch anti-Communists in the administration, which is going to complicate things quite a bit -- this unified Korea will still include Kim Il Sung and plenty of Communists, after all, and it will probably be formally committed to neutrality. Chiang Kai-Shek would back this too. Taiwan would keep China's seat on its three-part administration after 1949, which would make Taiwan particularly reluctant to let Korea go...

Thoughts?

Doug M.

As the US would learn again and again during decolonization, it's easy to pick up the language of democracy and Rhee was fluent. As you rightly point out, the war would not be fought geographically, at least at first. I wonder if the ferocity of partisans would make up for the relative lack of combat between large military formations. Then again, Korea had no shortage of irregular conflict in OTL.

As for China, would the ROC even survive? If there is greater detente with the USSR, would the US intervene against one of their clients (as Mao was thought to be)?
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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Monthly Donor
Interesting but also tricky....

"Another problem was that both sides had drastically different ideas about how to structure Korean society. The Soviets were willing to contemplate a non-Communist Korea, but they wanted the structures of Japanese colonial governance destroyed, and they wanted Korean elites -- landowners and businessmen -- broken. This was partly because of ideology, but more because these groups had cooperated with the Japanese. If they were allowed to survive and prosper, they might produce a government that was too friendly to Japan or the US. The Soviets seem to have been underestimating Korean nationalism, but anyhow that was the thinking.

The Americans, of course, wanted to get capitalism up and running, so the landowners and businessmen were their natural allies. They were also in no hurry to destroy Japanese administrative structures; disarming the Japanese soldiers, then gradually replacing Japanese colonial bureacrats with Koreans, seemed more than enough. "

Interesting that this worked out this way. American occupation policy in Korea, with its endorsement of pre-war elites, was well to the "right" of either its contemperaneous Japan policy or its China policy. In Japan the US pushed for vigorous reform and then reprioritized in favor of stability and economic renewal. In Korea the U.S. lacked the initial reformist push. In China, the U.S. pushed for Communist-Nationalist compromise and coalition government. At the end of the Chinese civil war on the mainland the U.S. had pushed through some land reform programs in southern China, and continued that emphasis when dealing with the ChiNats on Taiwan. In Korea, the military occupation government did not seem to want to bring the communists into government, and it did not enact land reform. Why was it so far to the "right" of its Japanese and Chinese policies? Maybe because A) It was just military run, without more liberal civilians participating to push a reform agenda, something that Americans had done more advance thinking about for China and Japan. Or maybe, B) Being up in close quarters with a Soviet occupation zone in Korea pushed all of the American conservative paranoia buttons and did not even allow any reformist impulses to be considered. In Japan, the Sovs were not on the scene and in China they left the scene.

"A third problem was that the Koreans disliked the idea of becoming a UN Trust Territory. That was fine for Africans and Micronesians and such, but Korea was a real country. The Provisional Government was weak and divided, but on this issue they were pretty clear.

So it's a stretch. But not quite ASB territory, I think. The interesting thing about Korea in the immediate postwar period is how little either the US or the Soviets really cared about it. Neither power considered the penninsula that important, and OTL it sort of drifted into partition _faute de mieux_. If either side had been willing to push hard, though, things might perhaps have been different. "

Hmm. I could see this happening if either side is willing to use Korea as a "testing ground" for the overall superpower relationship by making a few concessions to bridge the gap.

The method would have to be:

The Soviets get better political intelligence on the Korean right and substitute that for their class analysis of Korea and determine that they need not exclude that group from political participation because worst comes to worst they can count on reaching common ground on being anti-Japanese. Lots of Koreans were tainted by a collaborationist history, but if after VJ Day you talked to any Korean of any political persuasion for 5 minutes you would find them talking trash about the Japanese. So the Soviets decide the right can participate in negotiations with the UN whatever they say about trusteeship.

The POD can't be in US policy, it won't give anything up. The Americans never backed down on anything in the early Cold War.

"So let's say Washington and Moscow are able to reach agreement. [handwave] Late in 1946, Korea becomes a UN Trust Territory under the
joint administration of three powers -- the US, USSR, and China. Both Americans and Soviets commit to a staged withdrawal of troops over the next year. Elections will be held and a government installed, under the oversight of the four administering powers.

Now what?

Assuming no war, though, the Trust Territory would probably last until the late 1950s or early1960s, with rapidly rising internal discontent in its final years."

Well administration of the trusteeship would be interesting if its a three or four power arrangement sans occupation troops. Essentially the trustees, civil and military reps, would be like nagging social workers always dropping in on an unruly family. And the Koreans would witness them bicker with each other.

There would be discontent in Korea with all of that. The Koreans won't just be anti US and and anti USSR, they would probably take a a very bitter anti-UN attitude like Mao and Sukarno and Hoxha took in the early 1960s. This would not be restricted to the left, the right would be anti-UN the way that George Wallace and Curtis LeMay were in the late 60s.

If the situation in Korea, whatever its hassles, can still be regarded as a "success" in the late 40s, there may be stronger attempts to export the trusteeship model to other areas like Manchuria (as Wedemeyer proposed), Taiwan, Indochina or Palestine. None of them are likely to work, because of more capable local political resistance. Of the three, Palestine would be the least ASB. Maybe Indonesia?

The alt-Korean economy should be interesting. The Soviets looted industrial equipment initially, and will probably do it longer, unlike in OTL where they halted looting and focused on development. However, the UNRRA can provide replacement equipment in the ATL, and alot of the Korean industrial workforce will be alive and available in communities near the resources ready to work whenever extraction equipment is provided. By the 1950s, Korea will be a relatively larger player in the northeast Asian economy compared to what it was in OTL. Unless the country emerges into independence all stupid and Burma-like (TM), it can be on a par with Japan in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
There's going to be vicious and bloody competition between leftist and rightist trade unions, with the right steadily becoming more competitive as the postwar global economy improves and gives Korean business an opportunity to toss more crumbs to its street thugs.

"John Foster Dulles would be determined to install staunch anti-Communists in the administration, which is going to complicate things quite a bit -- this unified Korea will still include Kim Il Sung and plenty of Communists, after all, and it will probably be formally committed to neutrality.

Thoughts? "

Hmm, although this TL precludes a Korean war as aconventional conflict, I suppose there is a high statistical probability that Dulles would beccome SecState at some point, because he was the GOP's main foreign policy maven and odds would favor a GOP election for at least one of the three elections 1948, 1952 or 1956.

I guess one could argue that a compromise could be found along the lines of the Austrian state treaty. But U.S. policymakers after 1950 or so always seemed more rigid about communist participation in the non-European world than in Europe.

Dulles's policies may provoke a center-left coalition against the hardline anticommunists, as happened in Laos as a result of his anti-neutrality policies. It might even encompass some of the far-right who value nationalism more than anti-communism (like the guys who in OTL visited Pyongyang to work out a deal with Kim Il-Sung)

Maybe it would be stalemate until a Democrat comes into office and accepts a neutralized Korea, maybe after a failed Caribbean invasion. :)

Post trusteeship the Koreans may be what some Americans consider annoying Third Worldists a la Nasser. Loud, "unreasonable", but not anybody's lackey. They may get along somewhat well with the PRC and be an alternate diplomatic pathway to approach them.

"Chiang Kai-Shek would back this too. Taiwan would keep China's seat on its three-part administration after 1949, which would make Taiwan particularly reluctant to let Korea go..."

One butterfly of this ATL is the timing of the Chinese civil war may be changed by a matter or a few weeks to a year or so, because you won't have the Soviet Korean zone/DPRK be a secure sanctuary for the ChiComs or have the Korean communists be secure enough to send as many troops to help the ChiComs as in OTL. So there's a good chance the declaration of the PRC and the Soviet A-Bomb testing happen in different years. Ooh, in fact there may be illicit Chinese troop movements on both sides through Korea, but particularly by the ChiNats if they suddenly augment their "military representative" staff when they are in the phase of either trying to reinforce Machuria or escape Manchuria. Interesting.

One consequence of a prolonged ROC role in Korea is that the PRC is going to be prickly about Soviet trustee interactions with ROC trustees, always on the lookout for protocol violations. After the Sino-Soviet split (1960 is the date I tend to use) or the "period in which Mao thinks he can get away with more (late '56 to 60) I would expect Beijing to be violently anti-trusteeship and not mind working to support anti-trusteeship activism on the Korean right and center as well as left-wing.

"Strangely, I don't think this makes a Korean War impossible. Korea was suffering from tremendous internal tensions. IMO a Korean Civil War would be a real possibility, with the Cold War powers inevitably drawn in. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily follow a north-south divide... "

Despite everything I said above, I think that a Korean civil war is by far the most likely prospect. I was reading some stuff in a contemporary Council on Foreign Relations book which reviewed the world scene in 1947 and 1948, and they described Korea as a place with no viable centrists. They note General Hodge's effort to promote a centrist government with some moderate conservatives and moderate socialists, and his effort to give moderates a boost in a provisional legislativre body that went beyond what they earned in vote totals. The problem was that centrists either lacked a following, like moderate conservative Kim Kyu-sik, or were easy to assassinate, like moderate leftist Lyn Wooh-hyung. The trade unions were split between the far left and the far right.

Odds are over 50-50 this will blow up nationwide once enough occupation troops leave.

I suspect that the Soviet policy will be to keep any intervention behind the scenes and in the UN, but they would want to avoid visible powerplays in the 1946-1949 era. They seemed cautious in Asia in general after they left from Iran and Manchuria in 1946, probably because of that global correlation of forces doo-hickey-thingie (TM).

The U.S. would be fairly likely to find an excuse to endorse the far-right as the legit government and provide it with a Greece and Turkey style aid program. But it may not be as effective. Alternatively, there is a chance that that the U.S. will be disgusted enough with rightist intransigence that they will keep the US commitment limited (as in China). Unless the U.S. commitment is total, there's a good chance of Korea becoming all communist about the time northern China does. The internal decisionmaking of the US administration would be interesting in this scenario. The China Lobby will probably encourage participation in Korea as well as China. Missionaries may lobby for support to Christian conservatives in northern Korea.

So, I think that if there is an agreed shift from occupation to trusteeship in Korea in 1946, odds are greater than 50-50 that the there will be a civil war and greater than 50-50 that the result will be a united communist Korea.
 
Assuming there has been no other disaster in Korea by 1952 how much does this change US Politics.

Does it give Truman a chance of running for reelection?

Does it change the politics on the Republican side?
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
One thing I had not thought of -

If there is no conventional war in Korea in the early 1950s, then the Truman administration would likely continue on its trajectory of noninterference in the Chinese civil war, and Taiwan could become commie sometime between 1950 and 1952, nullifying the role of the ChiNat rep in the trusteeship.
 
If there is no conventional war in Korea in the early 1950s, then the Truman administration would likely continue on its trajectory of noninterference in the Chinese civil war, and Taiwan could become commie sometime between 1950 and 1952, nullifying the role of the ChiNat rep in the trusteeship.

No since the Cold War was in full swing by 1950 I think Truman or any other President would have gotten around to strengthning Taiwan or else be impeached.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
Geezis Xmas

I think this "or they would be impeached" business is way overused in alt-hist speculation.

Impeachment is constitutionally designed for dealing with criminal conduct, not policy failure or policy disagreement. The closest thing to its use (really abuse) for that purpose was in the Johnson administration, and it failed.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
General Mung Beans

sorry to jump down your throat on that one.

Granted the Truman administration had a policy of noninterference in the straits pre-Korea, but there would have been an extra political cost to staying out in a real invasion crisis.
 
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