Beyond the Myth: Reassessing the Security Crisis on the Korean Peninsula during the Mid-1960s

In contemporary news coverage and in the academic historiography, the Republic of Korea (ROK) is often described as the victim in most clashes between the ROK and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). However, through a detailed review of the tensions in the late 1960s, this article argues that the ROK was never entirely innocent in various security crises on the Korean Peninsula, and that a contextual analysis in historical and contemporary settings is far more useful in understanding the nature of the ROK-DPRK tensions than the clichéd denouncements of an "evil" regime.The number of clashes between the ROK and the DPRK in 1967 shot up tenfold compared to the year before. These security dilemmas created an unfavourable situation for the US government, in that they prevented the ROK from dispatching further combat troops to Vietnam. The combination of pre-emptive incursions and aggressive acts of retaliation launched by the ROK troops against the DPRK further aggravated the situation, resulting in an ever-greater divide between the perspectives of the North and the South. On the one hand, the ROK government believed that the security problem would invite more assistance from the US; on the other, for the US officials, the ROK's attacks meant that the ROK government was actually the source of trouble.Ultimately, the evidence examined in this article suggests that the crisis of 1968 can be understood as an inevitable extension of the clashes in 1967. The current paper argues that the role played by the ROK government in igniting the crisis was anything but passive and that the strategy taken by the ROK government during this brief period led to a significant deterioration of the US-ROK relationship throughout the 1970s and onward.