at the time that carter was running for office, south korea was embroiled in a political battle between student-church led populists and park chung hee, essenti

at the time that carter was running for office, south korea was embroiled in a political battle between student-church led populists and park chung hee, essentially a benevolent dictator. the populists or leftists as we might call them now were pushing hard against the normalization of relations with japan among other things. in the capital environment of that time, with south korea being poorer than north korea at a certain point, south korea was not in a position to turn its nose up to any kind of investment. this was made even more true by the post-vietnam cooling of the relationship between south korea and the united states. the only way that korea has become one of the most dynamic and successful countries in the world is because they accepted investment from japan and because they had a highly centralized form of government. if the student led leftist movement had gotten its way, they would have rejected investment from japan on principle, never allowed the chaebol to flourish through massive government deals, and south korea would today be more comparable to chad than singapore. naturally the students would stage huge protests against their own wellbeing and these were responded to with force. this caused lots of people in the united states to take a political stance against the park regime. one of the things that carter ran on was withdrawing from south korea militarily completely so as to not lend support to the brutal dictator. this was of course completely insane. when he won, he tried to go through with it, giving official mandates to withdraw. in the end the department of defense was forced to intervene and stop carter. and of course we never withdrew. imagine if nobody had stopped carter and all the idiotic people who supported him. even if the north had not immediately invaded, nobody would have invested a dime in a country in that position. might as well just donate the money to the soviet union. i think its fair to say that jimmy carter tried to destroy a country for political gain.