The 1975 Vietnam War’s End and Its Impacts on Korean Peninsula’s Politics

Tóm tắt

This study intensively analyzes primary sources to contextualize the political events taking place in the Korean Peninsula around 1975, the institutionalization in North and South Korea and the relationships of South Korea-U.S.-Japan and North Vietnam-China-North Korea at the time when the Vietnam War came to an end. These sources are mainly the North and South Korea’s periodicals, Vietnamese government’s official documents, FRUS and Woodrow Wilson Center’s documents. The article particularly focuses on the impacts of the Vietnam War on the political situation in the Korean Peninsula.

For South Korea, the fall of Saigon was considered as a historic tragedy for a former ally in Southeast Asia. Therefore, the Vietnam issue became one of the most serious concerns of the South Korean government. Meanwhile, Vietnam’s unification was seen by North Korea as an encouragement for its unification-by-force strategy. But the meaning of the unification of Vietnam was not limited to this. Both the goverments in North and South Korea took advantage of the changing international context resulting from the Vietnam War in their own ways to strengthen their institutions and legitimacyand to consolidate the power of their leadership.

In particular, by analyzing North Vietnam-North Korea relations, which started to cool off at the conclusion of the Vietnam War, while at the same time analyzing the China factor, this study explains the reasons why leaders of North Korea gave uptheir unification-by-force policy. Instead, they sought to maintain the status quo, that is the division of the Korean Peninsula, for their own internal political interests.