Excerpt from The Quest for an Unified Korea, Strategies for the Cultural and Inter-Agency Process: Proceedings of a Symposium Co-Hosted by the Marine Corps University and Marine Corps University Foundation, June, 2006

On 13 June of 2006, the Marine Corps University and the Marine Corps University Foundation co-hosted their first ever academic symposium dealing with the Korean Peninsula. Entitled The Quest for a Unified Korea: Strategies for the Cultural and Interagency Process, the conference brought together scholars, practitioners, and others to address several challenging and ongoing questions dealing with the Korean Peninsula. The impressive list of speakers and panelists included retired General Officers and Ambassadors from the United States and Korea who have years of experience in Korea and the region, scholars from top universities and research institutes in both the United States and Korea, and practitioners from both the military and policy communities again from both countries. A complete list of panelists and speakers is included in the back of this book.

There were many diverse perspectives presented at the symposium, and as the reader will see in the book, they were often quite compelling. If there was one thing that all conference participants agreed on, it was that the Korean Peninsula was (and is) in a state of flux. This is easily demonstrated if one simply considers that since the symposium convened during the summer of 2006, North Korea has test fired several ballistic missiles and conducted their first test of a nuclear device, South Korea has had local elections that nominally declared the lack of confidence in the populace at large for their President and his left-of-center supporters, and Washington and Seoul agreed to large-scale changes to the rok-us military alliance that will have a significant impact on the foreign policies of both nations in the region for many years to come. The content of all of the papers presented at the recent symposium was relevant to all of the issues discussed above as well as others that the reader is likely to find interesting.

There were three panels at the symposium, as well as two keynote speakers (brigadier General Russell Howard USA (ret) of the Fletcher School gave an excellent speech addressing Northeast Asian regional issues at a dinner for the panelists the night before the symposium). One of our keynote speakers, Lt. General Raymond P. Ayres, USMC (ret), presented an outstanding speech during our luncheon, and graciously also presented us with a copy of his speech.

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