The United States (U.S.) faces many challenges in the Indo-Pacific, headlined by an evolving geopolitical rivalry with China stemming from notable economic, security, and human rights concerns. Yet despite perhaps the most significant strategic rebalancing since the Cold War, the U.S. remains unprepared to adequately confront this challenge as regional allies lack adequate strategic unity. Most concerning is the breakdown in trust and cooperation between Japan and South Korea, the third- and tenth-largest economies respectively, who together house tens of thousands of U.S. service personnel. Despite robust bilateral ties with the United States and mutual concern on key issues including China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclearization, a failure to sufficiently reconcile imperial Japan’s past atrocities has continued to mar relations. Thus, the Biden Administration should prioritize a just and comprehensive resolution that brings closure for the victims’ families and promotes deeper trilateral strategic cohesion between the United States, Japan, and South Korea. This opinion essay will first explore Japan and South Korea’s ongoing dispute before proposing a path towards reconciliation. This piece is meant to serve not as a detailed strategy paper but as a call to American policymakers to take action.

The clash of Communism and Capitalism was the theme of the Cold War era, during which brutal civil wars between the two ideologies arose on all major continents, many of which are often accompanied by mass atrocities. Through analyzing the geopolitical implications of the partitioning of Korea, this article examines how a political border drawn by the United States and the Soviet Union resulted in mass killings by both governments on the Korean Peninsula.