Following the Axis surrender, Korea’s fate, like that of Central Europe, was still to be worked out. Officially, the victorious Allies were committed to a free, united, and independent Korea. Then, in the war’s last week, Stalin’s Red Army penetrated far into the country’s northern half. American diplomats, their inboxes overflowing, shifted their focus from what should be done to what could be achieved most easily. In Washington, late one night, they met with their Soviet counterparts and, tracing lines on a map from National Geographic magazine, consented to the peninsula’s “temporary” division along the 38th parallel. The people who lived there were not consulted.
Madeleine Albright in Fascism