For the past 70 years troops from the United States of America have been occupying military bases on the Korean Peninsula. They claim to be there to keep the peace.

This is not true.

They are there to maintain a state of war. The United States (US) does not want to see the 1953 Korean War Armistice converted into a Peace Settlement Agreement.

Here are the reasons why:

1. US hubris
2. US ‘exceptionalism’ - a belief that the US has a mission to transform the world.
3. A desire to maintain the US imperial hegemony.
4. A lingering resentment that the US was unable to win the Korean War outright.
5. A desire to maintain US military bases and troops in South Korea and Japan, close to their nemesis, China. The deliberate fiction of an aggressive North Korea is used as a justification for these bases because they do not wish to openly state that they want to maintain bases close to China,
6. Given a state of peace, the (so called) ‘United Nations Command’ would have no reason to exist. A termination of the United Nations Command would inevitably lead to closure of the three designated United Nations Command bases in South Korea and seven United Nations Command rear bases in Japan, all of which are occupied by the US military.
7. Peace would increase South Korean and Japanese public clamour for closure of the further eleven American military bases in South Korea and the fourteen bases in Japan.
8. Closure of the US occupied bases could result in China being able to exerting more influence on South Korea and Japan.
9. A loss of South Korea as a vassal state could deprive the US of the ability to use South Korean troops as mercenaries, as they did in the Vietnam War.
10. Encouragement from Tokyo to maintain the myth of hostile North Korea so as to justify the Japanese march to re-militarization.
11. Visceral opposition to a socialist state of any hue. If peace is declared and full sovereign rights of North Korea accepted, this may tempt other countries with preferences for a socialist system to take a stronger stand against the US hegemony.
12. Resentment that US corporations are unable to do business in North Korea.
13. Maintenance of a state of war on the Korean Peninsula creates a market for US armaments manufacturers and private corporation suppliers of services to the US military.
14. The US economy depends heavily upon profits generated by the military industrial complex.
15. The Pentagon does not want to lose the billions of dollars of annual budget funding allocated to it for the operation and maintenance of bases in South Korea and Japan.
16. Half of the billions of Pentagon budget funding goes to defence contractors supplying a multitude of services. The defence contractors do not want to lose their profitable contracts in South Korea and Japan.
17. Military officers do not want to jeopardise lucrative post-service employment prospects with armaments manufacturers and other defence contractors.
18. The corporate armaments manufacturers and defence contractors are generous donors to virtually every member of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
19. The Europeans have in the past suggested that Korea, Japan and Taiwan form a NE Asian bloc as in the EU, or perhaps ASEAN. The US is opposed to this concept and knows this is unlikely to gain any traction while a lot of diplomatic energy is being absorbed by the North Korean situation.
20. An army of writers in think tanks, specialised institutes, and the wider media earn their living by propagating the myth of an aggressive North Korea and publishing anti-North Korea propaganda. They do not want to lose their sources of income.
21. An aversion to international treaties. ''We won't do nonaggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature,'' as former Secretary of State Colin Powell reportedly declared in a media conference when asked about replacing the Korean War Armistice with a peace settlement agreement.

These twenty-one reasons totally ignore the aspirations and wellbeing of the Korean Nation of 77million persons living on the Peninsula.

For its part the Korean Nation has made its desire for peace clear in a series of agreements negotiated and jointly signed by both South and North.

These are the:

• Joint North-South Communique July 1972
• Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-Aggression, Exchanges and Cooperation December 1991
• Joint Declaration of South and North Korea on Denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula February 1992
• North South Joint Declaration June 2000
• Declaration for Development of North-South Relations and Peace and Prosperity October 2007
• Panmunjom Declaration for Peace Prosperity and Reunification of the Korean Peninsula April 2018
• Pyongyang Joint Declaration of September 2018

In these documents both North and South have repeatedly agreed:

• “South and North Korea shall recognize and respect the system of each other” (1991)
• “to independently solve the reunification issue in the spirit of “By our nation itself”” (2007)
• “to put an end to the existing armistice mechanism and build a lasting peace mechanism” (2007)
• “to cooperate closely in the process of pursuing complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” (September 2018)

Although the words in these documents formalise the heartfelt desire for peace which resides deep in the soul of the Korean Nation, they have come to nothing.

Why?

The answer to this question is not found in Korea.

The answer is found in Washington and the twenty-one reasons why the United States does not want peace in Korea.

Instead of supporting the self-centred USA’s Machiavellian NE Asia policies, natural justice decrees that the world’s nations should be supporting the Koreans to implement their jointly desired roadmap to peace as laid out in the 2018 Panmunjom and Pyongyang Declarations

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