As of March 2026, Korea marked March 1 as March 1st Movement Day (Samiljeol, 3·1절), while Iran faced U.S. airstrikes. Given that, weeks earlier, key U.S. strategic assets—such as aircraft carriers—had begun gathering near Iran, analysts had already started to say that a military operation was inevitable. It was a sufficiently predictable development.
The United States, having inherited the baton of European imperialism, is still expanding. The airstrikes against Iran and the repeated, periodic attacks also carry, on one level, the meaning of a warning directed at Russia and China. In particular, as China builds cooperative networks—stretching across Europe, the Middle East, and even South America—through discreet financial support, the intent to block China’s forward movement and expansion is plainly present.
Still, because the United States faces limits in countering China through economics and technology, it is leaning on what remains its clearest advantage: military power. There is no other country in the world that wields military force so freely as the United States. Less than a century ago, the international situation was one in which Italy, Germany, and Japan—rapidly constructing industrial national economies by imitating the great powers of the era, Britain and France—competed among themselves in imperialist thinking and consciousness. That configuration has now shifted into an order with the United States at its apex.
In that sense, the United States has become a kind of military singularity, drawing in and absorbing the world’s military power. China and Russia may stir and undertake military actions, but even those moves occur under a certain degree of U.S. control. Even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in a way, activated the old Soviet-centered balance of power among Eastern Bloc states—yet here too, the United States has provided substantial support, citing opposition to the war itself and to its spread into Europe.
This may sound long-winded, but the point is simple: the present era remains a world in which the thread of past imperialism has never truly been severed. And the influence of that legacy persists. Imperial states still hold relative advantages and continue to lead the world order—still. This is clearly visible in economic realities as well. Politically, too, countries that remain unstable are, in many cases, those that experienced colonial rule in the past.
And yet Korea is a country that suffered colonialism within this imperialist current and nevertheless grew its national power to a level comparable to the former imperial core states. Not merely “one of” such countries—Korea is the only one. Admittedly, Korea has not been completely free from the danger of dictatorship, as is often the case in post-colonial societies. Dictators emerged and wreaked havoc, as in Cambodia, Brazil, and Venezuela—and as recently as two years ago, Korea had placed such a figure in the presidency.
Even so, Korea had already risen as a strong country in economic and military terms well before the Yoon Suk-yeol administration. On the basis of that capacity, it overcame the COVID-19 pandemic in a notably exemplary manner—and in the process even displayed enough “leeway” to provide medical supplies abroad. When toilet paper disappeared from shelves in American supermarkets, Korean supermarkets did not experience a comparable wave of hoarding or a widespread crisis of empty shelves.
First, the disease-response system Korea used to defend against the spread of infectious disease was a system that any country in the world should have learned from.
That remains true even now. Even now, it should be studied and adopted. Countries whose national responses to infectious diseases—and to many other illnesses—are inadequate do not seem to be improving their systems. Instead, they appear merely to hope that another global-scale epidemic will not emerge.
Second, as I addressed previously and will only mention briefly here, there is the issue of protest culture.
If people surge into the streets only in sudden outbursts of anger, it becomes difficult to sustain and carry through a consistent and elevated civic consciousness. The United States, at present, has seen Trump attempt to tighten control over American citizens under the pretext of an immigration problem. Only after an innocent American citizen was shot and killed did crowds finally pour into the streets, and it seems that this has caused some degree of hesitation and pullback.
But Trump will end the airstrikes against Iran, gain confidence from what he has done, and then turn his attention back to domestic issues and begin control over citizens once again. Policies aimed at citizen control in preparation for the midterm elections will likely be implemented soon. In that context, if American citizens respond once more with intermittent, one-off demonstrations that express anger and then dissolve, it will not succeed. They must, without question, learn Korea’s protest culture.
Third, there is the need for fundamental research into Korea’s development—economic, military, and political—constructed without imperialist elements.
Korea is one of the countries with the longest histories, and yet it is also the only country whose long history did not display imperialist aggression in the sense of invading others. Korea’s history includes being swept up by global currents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—what is often called Guhanmal (구한말, the late dynastic period)—and then becoming a Japanese colony.
Some interpret the causes of Korea’s colonization as internal corruption and incompetence, but that does not justify invasion by external forces. If it is acceptable to invade another country simply because it is politically unstable, then the human world becomes no different from the animal world. No—“the animal world,” described as survival of the fittest, still has its own kind of order. It does not destroy ecosystems to the point of collapse. If anything, the human world becomes worse than the animal world.
Korean history, rather, was oriented toward maintaining relationships among states in cultural, economic, and mutual-understanding terms. The polities that existed on the Korean Peninsula used military force to defend power, subjects, and territory, but they did not mobilize military power to invade China or Japan. And yet Japan, until the late dynastic period, was in many respects a practical colony of Korea in cultural and economic terms.
It is not necessary to deny that Korea’s current cultural, economic, and military growth has taken place within the economic spheres of the United States and Japan. No country is free from structures of dependence and cooperation. Even China is, in effect, a product cultivated by markets in Europe and the United States. Only now is it revealing its old ambitions for conquest.
In the end, the world must learn from Korea—on every front.
To build strength in military terms, it is necessary to develop weapons systems built with one’s own technology. To do that, the technology economy must be strengthened as a foundation for securing technology. Technology must be taught, and citizens must receive technological education alongside civic education.
The growth of civic consciousness in Korea rested not only on clear education about democratic society but also on practical education that supported it. It is true that Korea still has many shortcomings in investment in basic science and in fundamental philosophy about the human condition. But the United States, which was thought to have “everything,” looks like this; and China and Japan, the moment they acquire even a little power, reveal aggressive ambitions. They too are not objects that can be trusted and learned from.
If the world must learn something—anything—in any domain, the first country that must be named is “Korea,” and it is the only one.
