Ultimately if the United Nations was truly a body intent on global peace then they would have recognised the potential of uniting the divided Koreas but instead they remained a puppet organisation of the USA. Ergo, the USA must shoulder a large proportion of the responsibility for the increasing divide in Korea to this day but the United Nations are not without blame as they allowed one nation to dictate their actions, counter intuitively to that for which they supposedly stand. Indeed by siding with the US and South Korea the United Nations created an image of morality upon the South and thus further alienated the North. One must bear in mind that the UN consisted even at this point of numerous member states who were thus all now opposing North Korea and viewing them as the opposition of a world peace organisation. It is therefore perhaps slightly understandable that North Korea developed as it did, betrayed by the UN and therefore all powerful nations barring Russia, it had little choice but to follow Stalin’s example. The UN have since denied allowing the US to fight under the title of Unified Command and as recently as 2013 UN Secretary and South Korean native Ban Ki-Moon made a desperate appeal to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for a Korean unification but one may argue that it is too little too late. Ultimately, by breaking neutrality and siding with the USA the United Nations ensured the continuation and worsening of an ideological divide in Korea for many decades to come.
As much to blame as the UN and US are as groups, let us not forget the importance of a select few individuals in international affairs; perhaps the situation in Korea was all the work of, to quote the proverb used by General Meyer following the atrocities in Abu Grahib prison, ‘just a few bad apples’.When one imagines controversial figures in the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur most certainly comes to mind. Alexander Bevin summarises the words of numerous scholars effectively when he notes that “MacArthur, U.S. Commander in the Far East, wanted all-out war with Communist China and possibly the Soviet Union.” MacArthur was certainly aggressive, patriotic and a firm believer in the rather American notion that communists are all evil. Unlike the UN in Korea, MacArthur is frequently blamed for worsening the division in Korea and indeed David Halberstam notes that “the only orders Douglas MacArthur had ever followed, it is believed, were his own” and that, ignorant of Washington’s orders to not antagonise China, he wished to “drive to the Yalu and unify all of Korea” but only under US rule, not native. As William Manchester states, MacArthur was ‘a thundering paradox of a man’,sometimes brilliant and sometimes blissfully ignorant. Following the success of his proposed Inchon landings MacArthur’s already inflated ego had increased tenfold and it was largely his decision to push troops into North Korea for total victory, thus bringing neighbouring China into the war, that prevented any chance of a united Korea, hence its current situation.
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