From July 25 to 26, hundreds of activists will gather in the Riverside Church in New York City to attend the People’s Summit for Korea, convening for plenaries, panels, and workshops relating to Korean liberation and the broader anti-imperialist struggle. On Sunday, July 27, Korean and US organizations will hold a march in Times Square marking 72 years since the Korean War Armistice and demanding an end to US military and economic domination of Korea.

Peoples Dispatch spoke to Ju-Hyun Park, a journalist, leader in the Korean diaspora organization Nodutdol, and a key organizer of the upcoming People’s Summit.

“Korea is considered in many ways the tip of the spear when it comes to US imperialism in East Asia and the Pacific,” Park outlines in an interview with Peoples Dispatch. “The US military understands very well why they’re in Korea.”

Read the full interview below:

Peoples Dispatch: What inspired the creation of the People’s Summit for Korea, and what are its core goals?

Ju-Hyun Park: We saw the need for the People’s Summit for Korea to bring together the movement in the diaspora and in the homeland together at a critical juncture in Korea’s history.

There has been a qualitative escalation in US aggression on Korea since the breakdown of the original Trump-Kim dialogue, which itself was an outgrowth of the 2018 Panmunjom Declaration. After the breakdown of the Trump-Kim negotiations, what happened was that Pyongyang’s relationship with Washington not only disintegrated, but the inter-Korean relationship also fell apart.

Communication has slowed between the two governments and in the interim period since then. Particularly under Biden, there was a very marked increase in US aggression, primarily in the form of joint military exercises with South Korea and the formation of the JAKUS, the Japan-Korea-US trilateral alliance. In 2024, there were 275 days of US war exercises on the Peninsula, and that record is expected to be broken again this year.

Another really important development was that at the start of 2024, at the end of 2023, the DPRK made the watershed decision to end its strategy of peaceful reunification, which had defined the inter-Korean relationship for the past 50 years prior.

That means that we are in new territory, and that the national liberation movement needs to take time to find its bearings once again to discuss the historical challenges that are facing us, and to understand the value of internationalism in the Korean struggle. Because it’s not only something that concerns Korean people, but it is a central issue for security and prosperity in East Asia, for nuclear security, and the prospects of humanity’s future at large.

With all this in mind, we saw the need for the summit. The goals are to bring together the various organizations and activists that are not only active in the diaspora, but also to connect them with organizations that are leading the struggle in South Korea for peace and for the pursuit of an independent political path for South Korea, which we see as necessary in order for possibility of a Pan-Korean movement once again. Since right now, South Korea is and has been acting as a completely colonial entity, acting at the behest of Washington and not in the interests of its own people.

PD: How does the current political climate, in both Korea and the US, shape the urgency of this summit?

JP: There have been some really important developments. There was a martial law attempt at the end of last year, and now that the former president in South Korea has been ousted, he is now facing prosecution.

Something very important to note is that something that is central to the independent special prosecutor’s investigation into this case at the moment concerns an incident in October last year where military drones were flown over Pyongyang. At the time, the South Korean Ministry of Defense refused to comment on whether or not they had ordered this incursion, which is an act of war. What we have learned since the coup attempt, and what we are continuing to unravel is that there were very high level officials within the Ministry of Defense, including the Minister of Defense himself, who were involved in the planning and the execution of this attack.

Read more: Was South Korea’s coup an attempt to restart the Korean War?

We know that there was a plot to essentially restart the Korean War, and that this was the objective that many of the coup plotters who were also planning this were pursuing as a way to justify a declaration of martial law. There is increasing evidence that suggests the president’s personal involvement in this as well.

We know that militarily, Seoul cannot move without Washington’s tacit approval. So I think there are many, many questions that remain and that need to be answered in terms of the US involvement and the level of US awareness of what was going on. These are things that the US media simply isn’t covering.

The former leader of what was the opposition party, now the ruling party, the Democrats, is now in office. He won by a solid 8% margin of the vote, which is high, but not quite as high as you might expect in the aftermath of a political coup where the former ruling party was also running and also walked away with a sizable portion of the vote for its own.

What this tells us is that the South Korean electorate remains deeply polarized. And the reason it’s deeply polarized is because these two ruling parties are not able to effectively deliver solutions for Korea’s future and the many challenges that Korea is facing.

These range from the ecological to the economic. There were once in a century floods in Korea this week, 19 people are dead and 9 missing.

On top of that there’s the economic situation, because South Korea has built itself up through an export driven model of capitalism that has been historically highly dependent on the US market as a source of dollars and of revenues. Now, with Trump’s tariff threats, we are seeing a lot of volatility in the market because of the uncertainty surrounding the ability of South Korea to sell goods and to realize profits. Some of the recent economic reports coming from South Korea’s government affiliated think tanks are indicating things like expected drops in export rates in eight out of 13 of the major export industries in the country.

Major financial institutions from the IMF to the World Bank to all other kinds of important sectors are estimating that GDP growth will probably be less than 1%. Depending on how these tariffs go, we could see that fall into recession territory as well. The jobs predictions are absolutely abysmal. The nature of the threats that are facing Korea are that this is going to be a 25% blanket tariff on all goods. On top of that, there are sector based tariffs that apply to all countries, which are particularly impactful for countries like Korea. That’s 25% additional tariff on automobiles, 50% on steel, 50% on aluminum.

The Trump administration is seeking even more special benefits for US corporations. They want even more of the agricultural market opened up to US agribusiness. They already did this with the 2007 Free Trade Agreement, and absolutely decimated the agricultural sector in South Korea. The levels of debt that farmers were in skyrocketed, and they essentially want to repeat that process.

We know that there’s also a lot of military interests that the Trump administration is pursuing at this time. The president has said he wants South Korea to pay USD 10 billion a year directly to the United States for the military occupation of the country, which is an absolutely absurd figure. Under the special measures agreement currently, South Korea is already supposed to pay USD 1.13 billion next year, which is already an absolutely astronomical figure.

On top of all of that, they are facing pressure to increase the defense spending to 5% of GDP, which is the same amount that’s being imposed on NATO countries as well. That would bring the South Korean defense budget from something like USD 48 billion to about USD 86 billion – tremendous for a country of this size.

This is a signal of how decrepit the system has become, that the US ruling class now needs to resort to these mafia-style tactics where they hold countries hostage, threaten them economically, and then get them to loosen their purse strings in order to flood the markets with investment, in order to keep the system that benefits them running overall, since we know that it’s hitting its ecological, social, and political limits.

PD: How will the summit link the Korean peace movement to wider struggles against US militarism and imperialism globally, in places such as Palestine, Hawai’i, or Okinawa?

JP: Korea is considered in many ways the tip of the spear when it comes to US imperialism in East Asia and the Pacific. The commander of US Forces Korea very recently said in a speech that South Korea is like a fixed aircraft carrier for the United States. He was very blunt. He actually went into all the reasoning why South Korea is so important. He described how it is the United States’ closest frontline military position to our adversaries in Beijing and in Pyongyang. He also pointed out that it’s the only foothold on the continent in East Asia that the US has, which means it’s the only place where they can field the land army, which is absolutely essential for being able to project their military force into this very vast, very populated region. The US military understands very well why they’re in Korea.

The bulk of the land forces are on the Korean Peninsula, and then the naval and aerial fleets are going to be stationed in Guam and Okinawa, throughout Japan. The headquarters of US Indo-Pacific Command, the largest unified command that the US has, is headquartered in Hawai’i, which is also occupied territory. So if Korea is the tip of the spear, that spear also has a handle that extends all the way across the ocean into US territory. There is the potential of a unified struggle across all these various sites of occupation in the region.

We all have a connection to Palestine at this point, because that is the most severe flashpoint in the world where we are seeing the barbarism of US imperialism totally unmasked. They’ve completely dispensed with all the liberal fictions and they’re just going straight for genocide, straight from medieval-style strategies of elimination. Right.

We all need to understand that what we are seeing in Gaza right now is only the beginning of what the ruling class is willing to do, the kinds of atrocities that it’s willing to commit in order to preserve the system that has kept them in power over the entire world for so long.

There was a recent study from the Atlantic Council published in May, assessing the possibility of war with China and the DPRK. And it essentially concluded that the United States cannot afford to believe that it can isolate these adversaries in separate wars, that it needs to prepare for a simultaneous war against both of these countries. And that because both of these countries are nuclear powers, that also means that the US needs to become accustomed to the idea of nuclear strikes on its own territory against its own people. This is the level that the ruling class has now reached, where they think that the possibility of human extinction is actually preferable to them losing power.

So much of that is centered in Korea, because the US ruling class recognizes China as their primary strategic threat. They see Korea as the one of the primary pivot points, along with Taiwan, in order to exercise influence and dominate the entire region.

It’s because of all these material factors that we say that as Korean people, we have to pursue internationalism and stand in solidarity with others. It’s not just about high minded values, or this kind of like liberal angle of diversity and multiculturalism, although those are all well and good, but it’s ultimately about the fact that we do share a common enemy.

If we’re going to have a common future, it’s only something we’re going to be able to achieve together. Otherwise we’re only going to face common destruction.

The People’s Summit for Korea is being convened by the US-based organizations Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, Koreans for Anti-Imperialism and Sovereignty, Korea Peace Now Grassroots Network, Koreans 4 Decolonization, Korea Policy Institute, The People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition, Anti-War Action Network, Dissenters, and the United National AntiWar Coalition. Find more information on participating organizations here.

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