American public opinion is often influenced by interest groups that are well-versed in public relations. Popular perceptions of America's role in the world have long followed a similar dynamic. In Foreign Friends, David P. Fields provides a detailed study of how Syngman Rhee attempted to shape US-Korean relations through public advocacy and congressional lobbying from the early to mid-twentieth century. Rhee's associations with American evangelical, professional, and political elites gave him an effective understanding of his host county's idealism and sense of mission in the world.
The American mission—the notion that the United States, as a privileged nation steeped in liberty, has a moral obligation to promote just causes overseas—lacks any fixed meaning or ideological principles. Thus, its praxis has changed over time to conform to shifting strategic priorities. Spreading the gospel, defeating fascism, and containing communism are all avatars of America's exceptional idealism. The mission's very malleability has made it subject to appropriation by various interest groups, foreign and domestic. Consequently, no single group has monopolized its propagation, even during distinct historical periods.
Exilic anticolonial elites, best exemplified by but not always subordinate to Syngman Rhee, made their nationalistic claims to Korean sovereignty legible to American publics through an optic of American exceptionalism. To deny freedom to Koreans, unjustly subjected to Japanese rule, would redound negatively on the United States, sapping its government and society of the moral foundations that made it a beacon of democracy. Rhee and company utilized Protestant congregations, Chautauqua lecture circuits, press publications, and political speaking engagements to co-opt influential Americans into the Korean cause. This had a cascading effect, as inducted Americans imparted Korea's plight to their own respective constituencies.
Exiled activists made a remote struggle familiar to the American imaginary, albeit by decentering Korea's particularities and drawing tenuous analogies to liberal democratic universalities. A pagan militaristic Japan was savagely oppressing a Christianizing people committed to self-determination. By denying the validity of the 1882 Korean-American Treaty, the United States consigned all such treaties of amity and peace to irrelevance. In addition, Rhee couched his anticolonial lobbying in pragmatic terms, providing arguments that presaged later rationales for America's Cold War containment doctrine. Appeasing Japan by acquiescing to its expansion only encouraged further aggression. Aggression would continually magnify until it precipitated general war, a prediction borne out by Japan's eventual attack on Pearl Harbor. Here, Fields revises received notions that Rhee's supporters were merely spoilsmen in search of positions and contracts. Wealthy, privileged, and well-born Americans were drawn to his political vision for idealistic reasons. Theodore Roosevelt's abandonment of Korea in 1905 to Japanese incorporation was unjust; it had only led to further aggression in Asia, much of it staged from the peninsula. Having done Koreans a bad turn, certain Americans felt honor bound to do them a better one.
Fields focuses his analysis on Rhee's anticolonial advocacy during two distinct waves of American idealism: the postwar Wilsonian and Washington Conference eras (1919–22) and the Pacific War (1941–45). Korean nationalists did not create these waves; they attempted to ride them to decolonization. The initial attempt ended in failure. Woodrow Wilson's commitment to secure Japanese membership in the League of Nations precluded the possibility of impelling Tokyo's exit from Korea. During the Washington Conference, US negotiators prioritized global peace through mutually agreed naval disarmament rather than the restoration of Korean sovereignty. Fields stresses Rhee's pragmatic opportunism throughout. Rhee readily abandoned Wilsonian Democrats for Europhobic Republicans, even going so far as attempting a rather ill-considered effort to secure Soviet backing against Japanese imperial ambitions in 1933. Furthermore, Korean nationalist organizations consistently manipulated the historical record by presenting Korea as the first victim of Japanese expansion, casting Taiwan's prior colonization down the memory hole. The fact that Korea entered American public discourse as Japan's first conquest was a remarkable achievement.
Rhee's lobbying during the Pacific War produced more successful, if quite unanticipated, outcomes. His continual iterations of Korea's abandonment to Japanese misrule, coupled with the possibility that it might be abandoned again to Soviet imperial designs, generated sufficient public pressure to compel State Department officials to sanction its partial occupation by US forces. For Fields, this decision was premised on symbolism rather than sound strategic sense. US diplomats yielded to extrabureaucratic conceptions of the American mission. Korean nationalists fostered these conceptions in a sympathetic public sphere. Although Fields is at times reluctant to state it outright, much of this was showmanship by a ruthless impresario. Rhee pandered to the American mission as a means to power. Upon becoming president of South Korea in 1948, his commitment to democracy was procedural rather than substantive.
This monograph is an important contribution to Korean and US foreign policy studies. Much of the literature has heretofore focused on the post-1945 period, making Fields’ work a welcome consideration of prior events. Scholars can use it to obtain a solid understanding of the sociopolitical contexts in which US-based Korean nationalists operated and circulated.
