When the guns finally fell silent across the Korean Peninsula on July 27, 1953, about two million people were dead, many more wounded, and countless dislocated and separated from their families. Ironically, all this occurred in a three-year "police action". Now, 50 years later, North Korea and the United States of America are "drifting towards war," as former U. S. Secretary of Defence William Perry was quoted in the Washington Post recently.

The looming of another war in Korea, however, contrasts sharply with the lack of memory of the war for the Americans in a brave new world of "pre-emption".

For the U. S. A., the war was the first in which it did not prevail. Compared with its total victory in World Wars I and II and clear failure in the Vietnam War, Korea falls in more ambiguous and inconvenient middle ground. It is something that defies the typical "all or nothing" mentality of Jacksonianism.

Named after President Andrew Jackson, Jacksonianism represents an America of small-town pioneers turning their back on Europe and is the philosophical root of America’s isolationism when it was weak. In U. S. diplomatic history, it has easily turned to crusading interventionism when it has been strong. In real policy-making, Jacksonianism purports that if a war is worth fighting, it has to be won and, if it is not won, it has to be abandoned. Anything in between is incomprehensible and therefore immoral.

In real life, however, the Korean War is indeed forgotten, except by its veterans. The Korean War Memorial in Washington, DC, was not built until 1995, 13 years after the Vietnam War Memorial was dedicated in 1982 and 42 years after the ending of the Korean War in 1953.

This gross neglect and ignorance of the war and its consequences can hardly be justified given the high
U. S. death toll—39,000 in three years, as compared with 59,000 in the 11-year Vietnam War (1964-75). Moreover, the Korean War was never officially declared "over". What all the belligerents did in 1953 was to sign a truce to end fighting, but not a peace agreement. A total of 37,000 U. S. troops still remain in Korea to date.

It remains to be debated to what extent the memory eclipse of the war relates to the current U. S. policy on Korea, or lack of a policy according to William Perry. The policy of President George W. Bush’s team, however, seems to be best described as "hostile neglect", deliberate or not.

One characteristic of the Bush policy on Korea is its drifting nature. Although both Iraq and North Korea had been defined as members of the so-called "axis of evil", the Bush Administration chose to leave the smouldering crisis in Korea largely unattended while preoccupying itself with Iraq. Thus, from the engagement policy of Bill Clinton’s administration to Bush’s refusal to support former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung’s "Sunshine Policy", from listing North Korea as part of the axis of evil to putting it again on the Pentagon’s nuclear hit list, from the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emption to a demonstrative Iraq war, the current U. S. administration has yet to make any genuine diplomatic effort to defuse the ongoing crisis in Korea.

Such neglect may eventually lead to an over-reaction in the era of pre-emption. Paradoxically, America also neglected Korea before the outbreak of the Korean War by excluding Korea from its East Asian defence parameter. This may have given the impression of a less committed U. S. A. in the Far East, leading to the full-scale attack on the South by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in June 1950. This time, however, U. S. pre-emption may well be accompanied by "nuclear first use", as the Bush Administration won in May Congressional endorsement to begin research on a new generation of small-yield nuclear warheads.

The Pentagon’s latest war plan (No. 5,030) disclosed by the U. S. News and World Reports indicates a series of provocative tactics to destabilise, demoralise and disrupt North Korea’s economic, political and military infrastructure. It becomes increasingly clear—and worrisome, according to Perry and other analysts—that the Bush team will not accept anything short of regime change in North Korea. In this respect, the Korean War is not forgotten. Its outcome in 1953 has never been accepted as final. Now it is time to score a real military touchdown, plus an extra point for a regime-change kick. Regardless of how much the conflict is remembered, the world was never the same after the war in Korea. The Cold War became a globalised system by extending it from Europe to Asia. Indeed, Korea became the "fault line" between East and West, communism and democracies, command economies and capitalist ones, and maritime and continental powers. For the United States of America, Asian communists—be they Chinese, Vietnamese or North Koreans—were perhaps the worst commies. They were both "coloured" ("yellow" meaning worse than their European white comrades) and "colourless" (meaning they were not Asians but part of the international communist conspiracy). They needed to be contained, rolled back, and/or divided.