Using extensive documentation, this book examines how President Jimmy Carter's troop withdrawal and human rights policies—conceived in abstraction from East Asian realities—contributed to the demise of Korean President Park Chung Hee. The author suggests that some lessons are relevant beyond Korea, for example, in our treatment of human rights problems in China today.

Using extensive documentation, this book examines how President Jimmy Carter's troop withdrawal and human rights policies—conceived in abstraction from East Asian realities—contributed to the demise of Korean President Park Chung Hee. The author suggests that some lessons are relevant beyond Korea, for example, in our treatment of human rights problems in China today.

This is the first book-length work in English dealing with the crucial and troubled relationship between Korea and the United States. Leading scholars in the field examine the various historical, political, cultural, and psychological aspects of Korean-American relations in the context of American global and East Asian relationships, especially with Japan.

In 1961 South Korea was mired in poverty. By 1979 it had a powerful industrial economy and a vibrant civil society in the making, which would lead to a democratic breakthrough eight years later. The transformation took place during the years of Park Chung Hee's presidency. Park seized power in a coup in 1961 and ruled as a virtual dictator until his assassination in October 1979. He is credited with modernizing South Korea, but at a huge political and social cost. South Korea's political landscape under Park defies easy categorization. The state was predatory yet technocratic, reform-minded yet quick to crack down on dissidents in the name of political order. The nation was balanced uneasily between opposition forces calling for democratic reforms and the Park government's obsession with economic growth. The chaebol (a powerful conglomerate of multinationals based in South Korea) received massive government support to pioneer new growth industries, even as a nationwide campaign of economic shock therapy-interest hikes, devaluation, and wage cuts-met strong public resistance and caused considerable hardship. This landmark volume examines South Korea's era of development as a study in the complex politics of modernization. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources in both English and Korean, these essays recover and contextualize many of the ambiguities in South Korea's trajectory from poverty to a sustainable high rate of economic growth.

Soon after the American Revolution, ?certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material realities. Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.

A comprehensive look at the role of history, economics, security, threat perception, and domestic politics in the South Korea-United States alliance.

One Alliance, Two Lenses examines U.S.-Korea relations in a short but dramatic period (1992–2003) that witnessed the end of the Cold War, South Korea's full democratization, inter-Korean engagement, two nuclear crises, and the start of the U.S. war on terror. These events have led to a new era of challenges and opportunities for U.S.-South Korea (ROK) relations. Based on analysis of newly collected data from major American and Korean newspapers, this book argues that the two allies have developed different lenses through which they view their relationship. Shin argues that U.S.-ROK relations, linked to the issue of national identity for Koreans, are largely treated as a matter of policy for Americans—a difference stemming from each nation's relative power and role in the international system. Offering rich empirical data and analysis of a critically important bilateral relationship, Shin also presents policy suggestions to improve a relationship, which—after 50 years—has come under more sustained and serious criticism than ever before.