In August 1866, the American merchant W. B. Preston dispatched the General Sherman, a merchant ship, to a port in northern Korea demanding trade unilaterally, a private endeavor that did not officially involve the U.S. government. The entire crew died when the Hermit Kingdom had the ship set on fire. In two retaliatory campaigns during 1871, U.S. naval ships bombarded Korean forts, killing some 250 Koreans. The undeclared hostilities were settled by a treaty of commerce and amity in 1882. Yet military and diplomatic encounters failed to develop further as Korea soon became a target of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian imperialism. In 1910, it fell prey to Japanese military rule. Full-scale and enduring U.S.-Korean relations developed as a result of Japan's surrender at the close of World War II; the ensuing American military occupation of South Korea by 40,000 American personnel and servicemen (1945–1948); and the Korean War (1950–1953), which engaged about 1.6 million American servicemen. These events started a wave of Korean immigration consisting largely of some 20,000 Korean wives of U.S. servicemen and their children, who arrived in the United States from 1945 to 1965. Beginning in the 1950s, many American families adopted Korean war orphans. Also, the Immigration Act of 1965, with its family reunification provision, gave a tremendous boost to the presence of Korean Americans, who would surge from some 100,000 in 1965 to about 1.3 million at century's end.
Still, the major pillars of U.S.–South Korean relations after the Korean War were the U.S. security umbrella against external communist threats and the opening of U.S. markets to Korean exports. The Korea-gate scandal of 1976–1978, in which dozens of U.S. congressmen reputedly received bribes from lobbyists for the South Korean government, and diplomatic friction during the Jimmy Carter presidency over human rights abuses in South Korea, were just minor glitches. In fact, making the most of U.S. military, diplomatic, and economic commitments, South Koreans achieved annual economic growth of more than 9 percent for the three decades following the mid-1960s. From 1980, Korean exports to the United States underwent a structural changeover from nondurable consumer goods to consumer electronics and computers, high technology and durable goods, steel, and automobiles. Meanwhile, U.S. exports to Korea in the area of service industries and popular culture steadily grew relative to heavy industry and chemical products. Owing to South Korea's prosperity, the United States often scored trade surpluses in the 1990s; in the mid-1990s, they averaged $10 billion annually.
As of 2001, the United States had not established any formal diplomatic relationship with North Korea, a nation cut off from the noncommunist world for a half century. George W. Bush's administration practically brushed aside the Bill Clinton administration's efforts to bring North Korea to the diplomatic table to resolve any alleged threat of North Korea's development and sale of missiles and nuclear weapons.
Bibliography
Baldwin, Frank, ed. Without Parallel: The American-Korean Relationship since 1945. New York: Pantheon, 1974.
Lee, Yur-Bok, and Wayne Patterson, eds. One Hundred Years of Korean-American Relations, 1882–1982. University: University of Alabama Press, 1986.
Sutter, Robert, and Han Sungjoo. Korea-U.S. Relations in a Changing World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
