The Korean War
While the Vietnam War was an imperialist effort meant to manipulate the internal policies of North Vietnam and its decisions in the great geopolitical storm of the 20th century, the Korean War, though still motivated by expansionism, was a lot less vicious. North and South Korea were pre-existing states, albeit states constructed by the Soviet and American pursuit of increased international influence, that were immersed in a status of pensive peace. North Korea shattered that peace, and the West came to the aid of its potential victim. Though still an unfortunate story marred by bloodshed, war crimes, and expanded misery, the Korean War was waged by the United States with far less dark intent than the Vietnam War. For this reason, it's important to compare these two conflicts and see the difference in their histories, course, and broader effect on the Cold War. I've already written an article describing the Vietnam War, so I'm now producing this text to summarize the Korean War.
During World War 2, Japan came to the aid of Germany and Italy. This alliance, which was extremely strange due to Hitler's hatred of Asian people and other non-white groups, was rooted in ideological similarities between Hitler, Mussolini, and Japanese emperor Hirohito. All 3 believed in fascist principles: Totalitarianism, ultranationalism, expansionism, imperialism, militarism, etc. For this reason, when the US and Soviet Union joined WW2 on the side of Allied nations like Britain, France, China, and Poland, they had to engage in a three-pronged conflict against Nazi Germany in Europe, Fascist Italy along the Mediterranean Coast, and Japan in Asia and Oceania. On September 8, 1943, Italy withdrew from the war, followed by Germany on May 7, 1945. Just 3 months before that, from February 4 to 11, 1945, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin met at a coastal town in Soviet Ukraine titled Yalta. At the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed that after the war, Europe would be divided between a western half meant to be rebuilt by the US and an eastern half meant to be rebuilt by the USSR. Roosevelt and Churchill also agreed to recognize a Soviet puppet state in Mongolia and to give Moscow control over various Russian territories lost to Japan in the Treaty of Portsmouth, which Theodore Roosevelt had helped write back in 1905.
On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered, ending World War 2. With this, the agreements made at the Yalta Conference went into effect, and the districts of the world ripped apart by the fascist warmongering of tacky dictatorships desperately trying to replicate ancient empires were to be regenerated by Moscow and Washington DC. The Korean Peninsula, the subject of division that provoked the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan into war back in 1904 and 1905, was now the center of another geopolitical debate. Who would rebuild this curious little strip of land siphoned off of the Russian Far East and Manchuria? Would it be the United States or the Soviet Union? In the autumn of 1945, a compromise was reached. The US State Department decided to split Korea in half along a perfectly straight line, declaring the south an American satellite and the north a Soviet satellite. From that period onward, the two governments began creating new agencies to govern their respective portions of the Korean Peninsula. On August 15, 1948, the Republic of Korea, known to most as South Korea, was founded and on September 9, 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, known to most as North Korea, was founded.
Because of their sharp differences in ideology and geopolitical alignment, North and South Korea were immediately at odds. While little risk of war existed at first, the leaders of these respective nations, Syngman Rhee in South Korea's case and Kim Il-sung in the north's case, despised one another and pumped their populations with propaganda communicating the cartoonish evils of their opponent. Kim Il-sung, for instance, often accused South Korea and its Western allies of infecting North Koreans with contagious diseases and planting hazardous germs within their country. In the spring of 1950, Kim grew tired of waiting for his power to grow and for South Korea to fall under his dominion. He contacted Stalin and requested authorization to invade his southern neighbor. Stalin approved and gave permission for exactly such a decision. Thus, on June 25, 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea, sparking the Korean War. News of the attack invaded the headlines of all the newspapers of all the world, generating awareness surrounding South Korea's dire situation. Americans and the American government, in particular, were worried, fearing that North Korea's invasion was part of a broader plot by the Soviet Union and Maoist China to bring the whole world under Marxist dominion.
In order to salvage South Korean independence, American and UN troops were deployed to the peninsula on June 27, 1950. Instantly, the Korean War devolved into a disaster for the capitalist world. Because the North Korean invasion came as a total surprise to South Korea and the world at large, no one was really prepared to resist Kim Il-sung's attacks. Furthermore, North Korea emphasized military spending and training much more than South Korea did, and so possessed a stronger coalition of armed forces much more equipped to fight in this war. American intervention, while certainly a relief to the terrified South Korean populace, hardly helped. The Korean Peninsula gets very hot in the summer, and the summer of 1950 was one of the warmest on record. For American soldiers, especially those from cold states like Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Wisconsin, the summer became so insufferable that many of them drank water from rice fields, which were literally fertilized with human feces. By the end of August 1950, it became obvious to Stalin, Kim, and US President Harry S. Truman that the war was going terribly for the West. A change of plan was necessary.
Prior to this, the goal of the UN-US war effort was merely to expel North Korean invaders from the south. But because that had gone so horribly, at the end of the summer of 1950, the main war goal was switched toward toppling Kim Il-sung's government as a whole and placing it under American-South Korean control. On September 21, 1950, this phase of the war began when American and United Nations forces entered the Korean Peninsula through the Inch'on Landing and stormed across the border into North Korea. As predicted, this was much more effective. By mid-October, Western forces had almost completely abolished the North Korean government. Kim Il-sung and his family, including future-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, had even fled to China for their own safety, paralleling events from Kim's own childhood, when he and his parents left for China to escape Japanese colonization. Before long, South Korean, American, and UN troops were approaching the Yalu River, which served as the border between China and what was left of North Korea's territory. Mao Zedong, who had led China ever since a pro-Soviet coup in 1949, feared an imminent American invasion of his nation.
On October 19, 1950, Mao, who had originally been neutral in the conflict, sent Chinese troops to the Korean Peninsula in order to repel the American soldiers. This was a terrifying development, as it meant that more and more countries were getting involved in what was originally a conflict between two small neighbors, with only one eliciting international support. It seemed that a world war could be imminent. Most Americans, Chinese, Soviets, and Koreans were understandably horrified, worrying that their final months had commenced. President Truman began desperately working to reassure Mao that nothing would happen to China and that peace would be restored as soon as either North Korea left South Korea alone or simply ceased to control the territory granted to it in 1945. Douglas MacArthur, the general leading American forces fighting in the Korean War, was much more hawkish. As he admitted in private once, he was actively trying to egg on an international war in which the forces of Soviet and Chinese Marxism would be crushed forever.
At the beginning of 1951, MacArthur, who was living in Japan at the time, spoke to Truman and applied for permission to bomb China and use reinforcements from Taiwan to help defeat Mao and Kim. These actions would, of course, be highly inflammatory. Bombing China would only confirm Mao's paranoia about a Western plot to topple his government. Additionally, when Mao took over in 1948 and 1949, the remaining opposition forces fled to Taiwan, an island off the coast of China that was one of the final Japanese colonies still under Tokyo's control and which had been Chinese territory since the 1680s before that. While in Taiwan, these opposition forces continued governing the Republic of China in exile, maintaining a predecessor state that controlled China between 1912 and 1949. For this reason, the American use of Taiwanese reinforcements would infuriate Mao and only add more strain to the already-tenuous state of international relations. Both of these powers - the ability to bomb China and to use Taiwanese troops - were denied to MacArthur, a fact he publicly vented about his anger toward. On February 12, 1951, a Republican Congressman named Joseph Martin gave a speech defending MacArthur, arguing that these powers should have been given to him.
Just over a month later, on March 20, 1951, a gracious MacArthur wrote a letter to Martin in which he expressed his approval of the February speech. Martin leaked the letter to the press. Truman became so upset with MacArthur for his insistence on attacking China and using Taiwan that on April 11, 1951, he fired the general. The decision was extremely unpopular at the time, causing many people to label Truman as soft on communism. But it proved necessary in the long term. Mao, Stalin, and Kim felt much less distressed following the dismissal of MacArthur and began to believe diplomatic recovery was possible. For this reason, a ceasefire began to be negotiated on July 10, 1951. The war was beginning to come to a close. However, the ceasefire discussions were extremely slow and divided, dragging out into late 1951 and all of 1952. The country was getting tired of the war, a fact that worsened what remained of Truman's already-low approval ratings. Even before the war, Truman's reputation was damaged by his inability to live up to FDR's charisma and accomplishments, but the Korean War turned a sour reputation into one of the most despised presidencies in US history, at least until now.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican nominee for president in the 1952 election, was already in a good position in the race. He was a successful WW2 general who had been chosen by FDR himself to lead the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France on D-Day. Furthermore, his vice presidential nominee, future-President Richard Nixon, had responded to allegations of corruption with a speech in which he outlined his entire financial portfolio, exposing that he was relatively poor for a politician and making him more sympathetic in the public eye. Truman's unpopularity, worsened by the Korean War, also helped him. On Election Day, Eisenhower easily defeated Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson, winning almost every state in the Union. On January 20, 1953, Eisenhower was inaugurated, replacing Truman as president. One of his first priorities as president was to end the Korean War. Throughout the winter and spring of 1953, Eisenhower began threatening to nuke China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, scaring the enemy countries into finishing up the ceasefire. What they came up with was the Korean Armistice Agreement. This document expanded South Korea's territory and allowed those held prisoner by either side to join whichever belligerent nation they desired. On July 27, 1953, the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, ending the Korean War.
The Korean War is a fascinating tale from the early history of the Cold War. The Cold War was a dreary period in the story of the United States. A nation that was once fighting British imperialists to obtain its independence and was waging a war based on principles like democracy, individual liberty, regional self-determination, and demilitarization was chained to the sins of imperialism and then plunged into the same depths as the Soviet Union. As the Soviet Union gobbled up the Baltic states, set up puppet states in Eastern Europe and Korea, backed a shell government in North Vietnam, and toppled critical governments in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the United States adopted the same tactics. European and Asian countries were pressured into aligning with Washington DC, London, Seoul, and Taipei, Eisenhower instituted coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba, Lyndon B. Johnson sparked the Vietnam War, Nixon toppled the government of Chile, and Ronald Reagan invaded both Grenada and Libya. Soviet coups were flung against American coups, as American coups were thrown at Soviet coups. Imperialism fought imperialism. But the Korean War stands as an isolated story in which the US was easily the force for good. It genuinely existed as the beacon of independence it claimed to be for the entire Cold War.
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