Drawing on multi-archival research in Korean, Russian and English, this book looks at the complexity and changes in Stalin's policy toward Korea for answers about the division of Korea in 1945 and the failure of reunification between 1945 and 1948. Lee argues that the trusteeship decision is key to the division's origins and permanency.

The Yalta Conference is best known for planning the division of Germany after Nazi surrender, but by drawing the Soviet Union into the Pacific theater of World War II, it also laid the groundwork for the partition of the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel. Cold War tensions were high when the communist North invaded the capitalist South in 1950, setting off the Korean War, which ended in a stalemate and an unchanged border. This intriguing volume explains this lesser-known portion of World War II and Cold War history, from the Soviet influence on Japan's surrender in World War II to the creation of the two Korean countries we know today, while exploring how these circumstances brought us to the current strained political landscape.

When the major powers sent troops to the Korean peninsula in June of 1950, it supposedly marked the start of one of the last century's bloodiest conflicts. In volume 1, Allan Millett, however, reveals that the Korean War actually began with partisan clashes two years earlier and had roots in the political history of Korea under Japanese rule, 1910-1945. In volume 2, he shifts his focus to the twelve-month period from North Korea's invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, through the end of June 1951 -- the most active phase of the internationalized "Korean War."

History of Korea after 1945: Korea, the divided country after World War II Understanding Korean history after the partition Get the book today and get a compact knowledge of Korean history!

In 236 pages of detailed analysis, Korea - The 38th Parallel North presents fascinating insight from a North Korean perspective of the geopolitical events and U.S./U.S.S.R. domestic considerations following World War II that led to the division of Korea, thus setting the stage for the Korean War. Contents (with a partial listing of chapter subsections): Chapter 1 - "In Due Course" Political Strategies of Belligerent Parties, The Cairo Declaration and its Shadow. Chapter 2 - The Scramble of the Big Powers for Korea Roosevelt - Proposer of Trusteeship, Talks between Hopkins and Stalin, Avarice of Chiang Kai-shek, Secret Bargain Between the U.S. and Japan, The Proposal for Joint Occupation by the Four Big Powers. Chapter 3 - Child of the US-Soviet Conflict and Compromise U.S.-Soviet Diplomatic Campaign, First Official Record of 38th Parallel, US-Soviet Compromise. Chapter 4 - The "Cold War" Freezes the 38th Parallel as a Line of Political Division Disruption of the USSR-U.S. Joint Commission, Korean Question and the United Nations, Tragic Demarcation Along 38th Parallel. The book provides a very interesting perspective of how "the other side" thought during that tumultuous time between WWII and the Korean War

In post-cold War thinking, North Korea was expected to collapse and be absorbed into a single Korean state by the democratic regime in South Korea. Fifteen years later, this has not happened, and June 2000 saw a summit making the warmest inter-Korean relations yet. Over that time period, the two Korean states found instead new mechanisms and methods for interacting with each other on the level of de facto if not yet completely de jure sovereign states and have begun to overcome some of the shadows cast by the partition and violent war that befell the peninsula following World War II. This book examines the origins, dynamics, and impacts of these multi-level relations between North and South Korea, situating them variously as two incomplete nation-states, as a single national entity, and within a larger international environment. The Contributors demonstrate how inter-Korean relations have fostered new forms of conflict management and reconciliation on the peninsula.

Prolonging North Korea's life may actually increase the costs and the dangers of its inevitable demise.

The division of Korea in August 1945 was one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the twentieth century. Despite the enormous impact this split has had on international relations from the Cold War to the present, comparatively little has been done to explain the decision. In Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea, author David P. Fields argues that the division resulted not from a snap decision made by US military officers at the end of World War II but from a forty-year lobbying campaign spearheaded by Korean nationalist Syngman Rhee. Educated in an American missionary school in Seoul, Rhee understood the importance of exceptionalism in American society. Alleging that the US turned its back on the most rapidly Christianizing nation in the world when it acquiesced to Japan's annexation of Korea in 1905, Rhee constructed a coalition of American supporters to pressure policymakers to right these historical wrongs by supporting Korea's independence. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Rhee and his Korean supporters reasoned that the American abandonment of Korea had given the Japanese a foothold in Asia, tarnishing the US claim to leadership in the opinion of millions of Asians. By transforming Korea into a moralist tale of the failures of American foreign policy in Asia, Rhee and his camp turned the country into a test case of American exceptionalism in the postwar era. Division was not the outcome they sought, but their lobbying was a crucial yet overlooked piece that contributed to this final resolution. Through its systematic use of the personal papers and diary of Syngman Rhee, as well as its serious examination of American exceptionalism, Foreign Friends synthesizes religious, intellectual, and diplomatic history to offer a new interpretation of US-Korean relations.

In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive