Keep in mind that we are talking about one country, Korea, which was artificially divided into two halves, North Korea and South Korea. Therefore, the war that ultimately broke out between North Korea and South Korea was actually nothing more than a civil war, one in which the North was trying to reunite the country under communist rule and in which the South was trying to retain its independence.
That civil war was never any of the U.S. government’s business. But also keep in mind that by the time the Korean War broke out, the federal government had been converted from a limited-government republic to what is called a national-security state, a type of governmental structure that is inherent to totalitarian regimes. It consists of an enormous and permanent military-intelligence establishment.
The reason that U.S. officials gave for converting the federal government to a national-security state was that there was supposedly a worldwide communist conspiracy supposedly based in Moscow, Russia that was supposedly hell-bent on conquering the United States and the rest of the world. To prevent America from going Red, U.S. officials said, it was necessary for the federal government to acquire the same governmental structure as the Reds. That’s how America ended up with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, the same type of governmental structure as in the Soviet Union.
Once the U.S. national-security state came into existence, Pentagon and CIA officials maintained that it was also necessary for the U.S. government (1) to adopt many of the dark-side policies of the communists and (2) to adopt an activist policy of foreign interventionism entailing the use of such dark-side policies.
That’s how America ended up with coups, assassinations, torture, secret surveillance, sanctions, embargoes, regime-change operations, installation and support of brutal dictators, destruction of democratic regimes, and partnerships with corrupt pro-U.S. dictators and criminal organizations.
It’s also how the U.S. government ended up waging a Cold War against its World War II partner and ally (and Hitler’s enemy), the Soviet Union, and several hot wars, including against North Korea and, later, North Vietnam.
Thus, when North Korea invaded South Korea, the Pentagon and the CIA never viewed the conflict as a civil war. Instead, they were convinced that the invasion was an overt act in the alleged worldwide communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow and coming to get us.
That was when President Harry Truman, who was principally responsible for the rise of the U.S. national-security state, sent in U.S. troops to oppose the North Korean invasion. But there is a critically important factor to consider: Not only was the conflict none of the U.S. government’s business, the U.S. intervention into the Korean conflict was illegal under our form of government.
The U.S. Constitution is the document that the American people used to call the federal government into existence. It is also the higher law that the American people use to control the actions of federal officials. The Constitution requires a congressional declaration of war as a prerequisite to waging war. That’s the way the Framers and our American ancestors wanted it. They didn’t want the president or the army making that decision.
But in the Korean War, the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA did make that decision. The intervention was illegal from the get-go. It was during that illegal intervention that U.S. officials made it clear that they were hell-bent not only on killing as many North Korean Reds as possible, especially through massive carpet-bombing of the country, but also on achieving regime change, i.e., the ouster of the communist regime in North Korea and replacing it with a pro-U.S. regime.
When the war got suspended, U.S. troops did not come home. They were kept in South Korea (1) to serve as a tripwire that would guarantee U.S. embroilment if the war ever resumed, and (2) to serve as regime-changers should the opportunity arise. Even when the Cold War ended in 1989, the troops remained. They are still there to to this day. But keep in mind that their presence in South Korea has always been based on the original illegality. To this day, Congress has never declared war on North Korea.
If the U.S. government had never committed that illegal act in the first place — that is, if it hadn’t intervened in the Korean War, it is a virtual certainty that North Korea would never have acquired nuclear weapons. That’s because the only reason it acquired nukes in the first place was to deter a U.S. regime-change operation against North Korea, especially one involving a U.S. invasion of the country. Since a nuking of South Korea would obviously interfere with a potential reunification of the country and even might radiate much of North Korea, North Korea would have had no incentive to acquire nuclear weapons but for the U.S. government’s illegal intervention and presence in South Korea.
North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is just another example of the long-term perverse consequences of national-security statism and its policy of foreign interventionism and what these things have done to our nation and the world.
This article was published by The Future of Freedom Foundation.
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