Word: seoul
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Horns blaring raucously, swarms of cars and taxis swirl madly around the South Gate, an old entryway into the raffish, jostling metropolis of Seoul, South Korea. Throngs of Korean, American, European and Japanese businessmen pile into cabarets and assorted pleasure domes. Then, just before midnight, the pleasure seekers rush home to beat the midnight curfew, and the lights start winking out. A few miles away, villagers desert quiet country lanes for tile-or thatch-roofed cottages. And a few miles beyond that, perhaps an hour's drive from the teeming capital and its 6.5 million people, U.S. and South...
Even so, since the fall of Saigon, American officials have gone out of their way to reassure Seoul that the U.S. will stand by its 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty with South Korea. Last week, addressing the Japan Society in New York, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pointedly asserted that the U.S. was "resolved to maintain the peace and security of the Korean peninsula." Added Kissinger: "This is of crucial importance to Japan and to all of Asia...
...Seoul also relies on the presence of nearly 40,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea as a symbol of Washington's intention to honor its 1953 defense treaty with Seoul. The treaty pledges that if South Korea is attacked, the U.S. will come to its aid "in accordance with its [U.S.] constitutional processes." Nonetheless, in the wake of the Communist victories in Indochina, Seoul is nervous about American reliability. "We hope the U.S. will demonstrate by deeds its firm determination not to commit the same failures in the Korean peninsula as it did in the Indochina peninsula," said...
Most U.S. experts believe that while Seoul's fears of an imminent attack may have some justification, they are nonetheless exaggerated. Indeed U.S. officials believe that Peking has recently been cautioning North Korea's Kim not to attack South Korea. They feel that China does not want a diminished U.S. presence in South Korea, since that would remove a valuable counterforce to Soviet influence in East Asia. Moreover, the argument goes, both Moscow and Peking fear that a new Korean war in which U.S. troops were involved would lead to a serious deterioration in their relations with Washington...
...critics who talk about the lack of freedom here would be the same ones who, if we were overrun, would say: 'Those stupid Koreans, they couldn't prepare themselves to stand up against the North.' " In an important but limited sense, the Premier is correct. Seoul's most important weapon against the North is the passionate anti-Communism that unites South Korea's 33.5 million people. But there is probably a limit to the repression that South Koreans will endure, even in the name of national security...