Role of Britain & Japan in Korean & Gulf Wars

When the Korean War began in 1950, Great Britain's economy was rebounding but was still only in the beginning stages of recovery from five years of war-related overspending. It was also struggling to absorb the economic shock of the first stages of withdrawal from its far-flung empire. As the generally benign, but often self-righteous mistress of the British Empire, for more than 200 years Britain had enjoyed the economic cushion of trading opportunities, employment for soldiers and administrators, markets and raw materials. Somehow, Britain had to replace this largess with more straightforward trading relationships and national manufacturing.

History offers few, if any, examples of a colonizer willing to let its colonies depart in peace. Nevertheless, the process was a slow one, not clearly perceived at the start. Britain, accustomed to empire and the victorious hero of a long and isolated struggle against Nazi Germany, expected, somewhat unrealistically, to maintain its position of importance in the world. The Labour go

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d and during 1951 they reached almost $1 billion. This was three-quarters as much as all other Japanese foreign exchange receipts for the year from the whole world (Cohen, 1987, p. 439). Ironically, this new prosperity came at the price of a certain level of rearmament. Of course, Japan could not have filled U.S. procurement needs if it had not previously rebuilt its economic capacity. The economic recovery and political transformation of Japan during the U.S. occupation was the end of a long process under the paternalistic care of General Douglas MacArthur. The institutions of the defeated country, which had just endured the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the first atom bombs, were reshaped according to American democratic ideas. Japan's newly minted constitution included the famous Article 9, which limited Japan's military capacity to self- defense. Ironically, the ink on the signatures was scarcely dry before the United States began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of this restriction. Beginning with the Korean War, the United States and other western powers have developed the habit of questioning Japan's constitutionally justified refusal to contribute to Western-sponsored military actions, the Gulf War be
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Approximate Word count = 2786
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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