The unending truce: Ian McGibbon notes the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice.

• Date: 01 July 2023
• Author: McGibbon, Ian

On 27 July it will be 70 years since the armistice that brought fighting to a halt on the Korean peninsula. Signed by representatives of the United Nations Command, on one side, and the Chinese People's Volunteers and the North Korean government and army, on the other, it ended hostilities in a war that had ravaged Korea for more than three years. In that time, three attempts to reunify the peninsula by force--North Korean, UN and Chinese--had been thwarted; several million lives had been lost, mostly civilian; the world had teetered on the brink of atomic warfare; and much of Korea had been devastated as the struggle swept from one end of the peninsula to the other before settling in a stalemate roughly where it had begun. The 4-kilometre wide demilitarised zone that separated the two Koreas under the armistice terms left them with much the same amount of territory as before the war; based on military realities on the ground, it was a de facto boundary more defensible than the 38 th Parallel, the pre-war dividing line.

For many in the West there was frustration over the unsatisfactory outcome, so...