New Light on a "Forgotten War": The Diplomacy of the Korean ConflictAuthor(s): Priscilla RobertsSource: OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 14, No. 3, The Korean War (Spring, 2000), pp. 10-14Published by: Organization of American HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163358Accessed: 17/08/2010 10:06

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Priscilla Roberts

New Light on a

"Forgotten War":

The Diplomacy

of the Korean Conflict

TI he Korean War lasted for three years, leaving approximately

3,000,000 Koreans dead, wounded, or missing; 150,000 Chinese and 33,000 Americans dead; a further 220,000

Chinese and 92,000 Americans wounded; and the United States

with unprecedented permanent Asian commitments (1). Yet histo

rians have termed it the "Unknown War" and the "Forgotten War"

(2). Korea resonates far less in popular memory than either of the two

conflicts which bracket it, the much broader Second World War, with its triumphant ending, and the lengthy and still bitterly debated

Vietnam War.

Until the 1990s, historiography on the Cold War relied almost

entirely on Western documentary sources which, though sometimes

incomplete even today, provide a relatively comprehensive picture of

the Western side of the story. In recent years, materials from newly

opened archives in the former Soviet bloc and to some degree from

China have begun to illuminate several issues of the war that were

hotly argued for decades and until now have remained obscure (3). For the first time one can speak with some confidence on the

thinking, objectives, and oudook of Cold War Communist leaders.

Historiographical disputes over the Korean War have centered

upon whether the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) deliberately manipulated the outbreak of war with

the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) in order to accomplish other objectives; the degree of Soviet and Communist

Chinese foreknowledge of and involvement in DPRK plans for war;

why United States leaders chose to enter the war and then to cross

the 38th parallel; the reasons for Chinese intervention in late 1950,

and whether this might have been avoided; whether the Korean War

sabotaged a potential rapprochement between the United States and

the new People's Republic of China (PRC); and the war's longer-term

implications for the major powers involved.

The Second World War and the developing Cold War combined to produce the division of Korea. In 1945 Soviet troops, in

accordance with wartime Allied agreements, liberated the country

north of the 38th parallel from Japanese control, while United States

forces took over the territory to the south. Initially, these agreements

envisaged a united Korea but, as with Germany, events on the ground

militated against its realization. Because of burgeoning Cold War

hostility dividing the Soviet Union and the Western allies, by late

1945 relations between Korea's two occupation forces were

already antagonistic, and prospects of Korean unification quickly

became remote.

Historians generally agree that neither occupying power nor its

associated Korean leader would have accepted a settlement that

denied their side predominance in a united Korea. Each military

occupation government encouraged those political forces it found

most ideologically compatible. In the North, the Soviets backed

Kim II Sung, a young guerrilla fighter who had fought with Chinese

Communist forces against the Japanese, while in the South, the

Americans endorsed Syngman Rhee, an elderly, obstinate, and

decidedly authoritarian Korean aristocrat and independence advo

cate who had spent decades in exile.

In 1948 the United Nations (U.N.) approved the establishment of the Republic of Korea in the South, held elections in which Rhee

10 OAH Magazine of History Spring 2000

Roberts/Diplomacy

won an overwhelming majority as president, and prompdy recog

nized his government. In September 1948, with strong Soviet

encouragement, Kim refused U.N.-sponsored elections and pro

claimed the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a Soviet ally and client which the United Nations declined to recognize. Both

Korean governments shared at least one objective: the elimination

of their rival and their country's eventual reunification under their

own control (4). The question of which state was responsible for beginning the

Korean War has given rise to much historiographical and political debate. For many years the Chinese argued that South Korea, in

collaboration with the United States, invaded the North in June 1950, and that North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet policy was entirely reactive. In 1991 Bruce Cumings suggested that responsibility for the

war remained unclear, that South Korea was as eager as the North

to reunify the country, and that South Korean troops probably

initiated the actual hostilities (5). A still more conspiratorial theory

suggested that the United States deliberately provoked the Korean

War in order to win congressional and public support for the

enormous three- to four-fold increases in American defense spending

envisaged in the 1950 policy planning staff paper NSC-68. Accord

ing to this theory, U.S. officials lured North Korea and the Soviet

Union into war by publicly stating that they considered South Korea extraneous to United States security interests in Asia. Foremost

among the evidence cited to support this thesis was a 12 January 1950

speech to the National Press Club in which U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that neither Korea nor Taiwan fell within the

Asian "defensive perimeter" of vital strategic interests that the United

States would defend (6). The U.S. government had launched a major reassessment of its

defense policies, supposedly intended to match the country's vast and

growing post-Second World War military commitments to its limited

capabilities. Although Acheson suggested these countries could rely

upon the United Nations to defend them, apparently many among

the wider audience, including leaders of the Communist states,

simply assumed that the United States had completely abandoned Taiwan and South Korea (7).

On the Communist side, it appears that Kim II Sung, whose

forces in 1950 enjoyed substantial military superiority over those of the South, initiated the invasion in the hope that he could unify Korea

(8). It is also clear that the Soviet Union knew well in advance Kim's

intentions, which he advocated enthusiastically from spring 1949. In

late January 1950, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin finally endorsed Kim's

plans and promised him military and economic aid essential to the

enterprise's success, but he refused to commit Soviet troops. In all

likelihood, Communist China's supreme leader Mao Zedong had some foreknowledge of Kim's intentions, though Kim did not then seek his assistance. Apparently all three Communist leaders consid

ered the United States unlikely to intervene to defend South Korea,

interpreting Acheson's speech as confirmation that the United States

would not do so (9). This miscalculation by the Communist leaders need not imply

that the United States deliberately entrapped them into opening

hostilities. Most historians now agree that, although U.S. interven

tion in the Korean War undoubtedly brought massive long-term

enhancements of both American defense spending and military commitments around the world, U.S. officials failed to anticipate the

war's outbreak and cannot be held guilty of manipulating their

opponents into opening hostilities. Moreover, until the September

1950 Inchon landing there was a real likelihood that North Korean

forces might emerge victorious, driving United States forces from

Korea and annexing all of South Korea's territory. It was highly

improbable that American or South Korean leaders would have

risked so much deliberately. It seems clear that the outbreak of war

surprised both the United States and South Korea; the South

Koreans only possessed sufficient resources to wage a defensive war

for fifteen days (10). The question then remains: why, given American officials'

distinct distaste for the South Korean government and their previous dismissal of its strategic significance, did they almost immediately decide to intervene to restore the status quo and energetically

persuade the United Nations to endorse this stance? Certainly, broader Cold War preoccupations intersected with a fluid Asian

situation to dissuade U.S. officials from acquiescence in any North

Korean takeover. They feared that inaction would lead other United

States allies to doubt American resolve to fulfill its commitments to

them, while Communist states would learn that, faced with a hostile

army, the United States would not back its pledges with military force. U.S. leaders essentially perceived the Korean conflict as a test

of American credibility and their commitment to the strategy of

"containing" Communism, which by 1950 had become an en

trenched dogma of American foreign relations (11).

Moreover, virtually all American policy makers of this period were strongly influenced by the lessons of the 1930s. In their view,

"appeasement" of dictators simply encouraged them to escalate their

demands, whereas firm initial resistance to such aggression would

lead them to yield and withdraw. Perceiving Stalin as a second Hider and Kim merely as his puppet, American officials believed there was

no alternative to intervention in Korea (12).

In the early 1980s several American scholars suggested that the

Korean War marked a "lost chance in China," that without the

military confrontation between Communist Chinese and U.S.

troops and the revitalized American commitment to Taiwan that the

war precipitated, there existed a strong possibility of a rapprochement

between the new PRC and the United States (13). Moreover, in late

1949 and early 1950, Acheson, influenced by the emergence in 1948 of Yugoslavia's independence Titoist Communist regime, believed in

the potential of driving a "wedge" between the Soviet Union and

mainland China (14).

Subsequent scholarship, however, suggests that the prospects for

such a Sino-American understanding ranged from slim to nonexist

ent. Several historians, particularly Chinese, have noted the central

ity of Communist ideology and revolutionary fervor in contemporary

Chinese leaders' international political oudook, impelling them to

distrust the United States and favor the Soviet Union. U.S. opposi

tion to the emergence of a Communist state on the Chinese

OAH Magazine of History Spring 2000 11

Roberts/Diplomacy

U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the White House Cabinet Room. (Photograph by Yoichi Okamoto, 8 July 1965. Courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.)

mainland, and American incomprehension of the deep resentment

that a century of Western exploitation and humiliation had generated

in China's new leaders, compounded the problem (15). This is not to deny that China's intervention in Korea in late

1950, which precipitated direct combat between Chinese and

American troops, intensified and hardened existing deep-seated

Sino-American antagonisms. Two decisions contributed to this

situation: that of the United States in September 1950 to permit

U.N. forces to cross the 38th parallel, and that of

China to intervene in Korea in October 1950.

U.S. officials originally restricted their war

aims to the restoration of the "status quo," namely,

the expulsion of North Korean forces from the

South and the recovery o? all former southern

territory. Following the spectacular Inchon land

ing and recapture of Seoul, Washington and the

United Nations Command were tempted to ex

pand their aims to include the North's conquest,

the overthrow of its government, and Korea's

reunification under a southern-dominated (and

presumably Western-oriented) regime. The mo

mentum of victory was difficult to resist, generat

ing a sense of "hubris" (16).

In September and October 1950 American

officials, therefore, ignored successive Chinese

warnings that, should U.N. forces cross the 38th

parallel, Chinese forces would intervene. Allen

Whiting's classic work China Crosses the Yalu

took these messages at face value. Historians Jian

Chen and Shu Guang Zhang believe that by early October the decision was already made. However,

William Stueck argues that immediately before

Chinese intervention the situation remained fluid,

and a decision to permit only South Korean forces

to move north of the parallel might well have

persuaded the PRC to reverse its decision to join the conflict (17). Stueck contends that, even at this

late date, Mao was still uncertain whether to

intervene. The 1993 work Uncertain Partners

suggests that in autumn 1950 Stalin, eager to

prevent the extension of Western power to Russia's

land border with Korea, pressed a somewhat

reluctant Mao to enter the Korean War (18).

Historians have noted the extent to which Mao

dominated Chinese decision-making on Korea

(19). Several have posited that his thinking was

shaped by "military romanticism," a sense that

war, conflict, and battle were the measure and

proving ground for nations. Relations between

China and North Korea were close, and from the

war's beginning Mao believed Chinese interven

tion might be necessary?though he hoped the

North Korean forces would triumph completely before any outside

power could intervene (20). Chinese antagonism toward the United States further intensified in

late June 1950, when President Harry S. Truman sent the U.S. 7th Fleet

to patrol the Taiwan Strait, thereby precluding a mainland takeover of

the island. Then, when the United States committed troops to Korea

in July 1950, Mao began mobilizing units on the Chinese-Korean

frontier as the Northeast Border Defense Army (21).

12 OAH Magazine of History Spring 2000

Roberts/Diplomacy

Meanwhile, discussions on intervention began within the Chi

nese Communist Party's Central Committee. Although several

committee members disapproved of intervention, Mao overrode

their objections. While admitting that its economic price might well

be high, he argued that intervention would demonstrate that the new

China was finally "standing up" for itself in the world. Despite the

misgivings of some cadres (notably PRC Premier Zhou Enlai, and his

top general, Lin Biao, who declined to command China's Korean

forces), in late September and early October 1950 Mao succeeded in

winning over the majority of his colleagues (22). The Chinese stance benefitted Stalin, a cautious leader who was

unwilling to risk direct confrontation with the United States. In

September 1950, Stalin refused Kim's request for Soviet intervention

and recommended instead that Kim seek Chinese help. Kim quickly followed this advice, while on 1 October Stalin himself suggested that

China send "volunteers" (23). At this juncture, Mao, in messages to Stalin that may have

reflected either his genuine doubts or a calculated effort to persuade

Russia to offer China more generous military assistance, appeared at

least tentatively to decide against intervention in Korea. In response,

Stalin coaxed him to enter the war, stressing the potential dangers to

China of an American satellite Korean state on its border. Initially,

his arguments appeared unsuccessful, and on 13 October Stalin

issued provisional orders that North Korean forces and government

should abandon the Korean peninsula entirely and retreat to the

Soviet Union or China. Within a day he rescinded this order, once Mao informed him of the Chinese politburo's ultimate

decision to intervene in Korea, a choice for which he had apparently lobbied forcefully (24).

On 19 October 1950, massed units of the Northeast Border

Defense Army began to cross China's Yalu River border into North

Korea, where they quickly turned the tide of battle, forcing United

Nations troops back beyond the 38th parallel. After initial sweeping Chinese gains, U.N. forces recovered lost ground, and from late

spring 1951 the war settled into a stalemate, with each side holding

approximately the territory under its control in June 1950. Armistice

negotiations opened in July 1951, dragging on inconclusively until a

settlement was reached in July 1953. How did the Korean War affect its protagonists domestically, and

how did it alter the Cold War's international aspects? Internally,

it undoubtedly brought a hardening of attitudes within the United

States, China, and North and South Korea, reinforcing demands

for conformity and the suppression of dissent (25). Internation

ally, the Korean War represented a turning point in the extension

of the Cold War to Asia and in United States commitments to that

region, greatly enhancing American support for Taiwan, South

Korea, and the French and non-Communist elements in Indochina.

It also brought a massive and sustained enhancement of Ameri

can military spending, the much increased United States contri

bution of troops to NATO, and the proliferation of American

global strategic alliances and undertakings, effectively implement

ing NSC-68 (26).

One must doubt whether, without the Korean War, the United

States would have signed security treaties with South Korea and

Taiwan, or for that matter the ANZUS (1950) and SEATO (1953) Pacts with Australia and New Zealand and the Southeast Asian

nations respectively. The United States assumed the role of patron

to a variety of Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and eventually African client-states. In this role it effectively replaced the European colonial powers dispossessed in the Second World War's aftermath

by creating a new form of international empire, based on indirect and

informal controls rather than outright colonialism (27). In this sense

the impact of the Korean War was undoubtedly global, converting the

Cold War into a truly worldwide struggle in which both the United

States and the Soviet Union would regard all international develop- .

ments as potentially related to their all-embracing rivalry. It set the

character o? international relations for decades to come.

Endnotes 1. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 332, note 155; and

William Whitney Stueck, The Korean War: An International

History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 361. 2. Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); and Clay Blair, The

Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953 (New York: Times Books, 1987).

3. The Cold War International History Project, launched in 1991, has done much to make sources from former Communist bloc

countries readily available. For further details, see the various

issues of the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, and the project's web site, <http://cwihp.si.edu>.

4. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols. (1981;

reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Peter

Lowe, The Origins of the Korean War, 2nd ed. (New York:

Longman, 1997); James Irving Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941-1950 (Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 1985); and William Whitney Stueck, 77?e Road to Confrontation: American Policy toward

China and Korea, 1947-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).

5. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, especially

chapter 18.

6. I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952); Joyce and Gabriel

Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States

Foreign Policy, 1945-1954 (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972), 565-99; and Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, 2: 379-567.

7. James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 220

23; Gaddis, We Now Know, 72; and Stueck, Korean War, 30. 8. Stueck, Korean War, 31; and Lowe, Origins of the Korean War, 67-68.

9. Gaddis, We Now Know, 72-73; Jian Chen, China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation

OAH Magazine of History Spring 2000 13

Roberts/Diplomacy

Chinese troopscrossingtheYalu River, October 1950. NewChina News Agency.

(Sergei N.GoncharovJohnW. Lewis, and XueLitai, Uncertain Partners:Stalin, Mao,

and the Korean War [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], plate 35.)

(New York: Columbia University Press,

1994), 86-88; Stueck, Korean War, 30

36; Sergei N. Goncharov, John W.

Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Part

ners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War

(Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1993), 13547; and Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1996), 90-97.

10. Gaddis, We Now Know, 75-77; Stueck, Korean War, 69; and Lowe, Origins of

the Korean War, 77-80, 185-86.

11. Gaddis, We Now Know, 75-76; Stueck, Korean War, 4142; Stueck, Road to

Confrontation, 177-85; Rosemary

Foot, The Wrong War: American

Policy and the Dimensions of the Ko

rean Con?ict, 1950-1953(Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1985), 58-63; Lowe,

Origins of the Korean War, 186-91 ; and

Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of

Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the

Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 364-69. 12. Ernest R. May, "Lessons" of the Past: The Use and Misuse of

History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford Univer

sity Press, 1973), especially 50-86; and Stueck, Korean War, 43.

13. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-Ameri

can Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949-1950

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and Warren I.

Cohen, "Acheson, his Advisers, and China, 1949-1950," in

Uncertain Years: Chinese-American Relations, 1947-1950, ed.

Dorothy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1980), 13-52.

14. Besides the works cited in the previous note, see also Ronald

McGlothlen, Controlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and U.S.

Foreign Policy in Asia (New York: Norton, 1993), 137-62; and

Chace, Acheson, 224.

15. Articles by Warren I. Cohen, Jian Chen, John W. Garver, Michael Sheng, and Odd Arne Westad, Diplomatic History 21, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 71-115.

16. Chen, China's Road, 164-71; Foot, Wrong War, 68-87; and

Stueck, Korean War, 62-64, 87-91.

17. Stueck, Korean War, 90-91 ; Chen, China's Road, 164,169,181

82; Allen S. Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to

Enter the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1960), 106-10; and Shu Guang Zhang, Mao's Military Roman

ticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953 (Lawrence:

University Press of Kansas, 1995), 85.

18. Goncharov, et al., Uncertain Partners, 176-83.

19. Chen, China's Road, 27-29, 153-55; and Zhang, Mao's Military Romanticism, 80-82.

20. Chen, China's Road, 146-50. 21. Chen, China's Road, 135-52; and Zhang, Mao's Military

Romanticism, 55-68.

22. Chen, China's Road, 153-54, 171-75; Zhang, Mao's Military Romanticism, 79-82; and Goncharov, et al., Uncertain

Partners, 164-67.

23. Gaddis, We Now Know, 78-80; Chen, China's Road, 161-62; and Goncharov, et al., Uncertain Partners, 174-75.

24. Gaddis, We Now Know, 79-80; Chen, China's Road, x-xi;

Stueck, Korean War, 98-103; and Mastny, Cold War, 104-7.

25. Richard M. Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1978); and Chen, China's Road, 13941, 220-21.

26. See, for example, Stueck, Korean War, 4243, 348-50; and

Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 401-3, 406-26, 43345, 448

53, 488-93, 506-11.

27. John Lewis Gaddis, "The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on

the Origins of the Cold War," Diplomatic History 7, no. 3

(Summer 1983): 189-90.

Priscilla Roberts is a lecturer in history and the director of the

Centre of American Studies at the University of Hong Kong. She

has published extensively on United States diplomatic history and

is an associate editor o/The Encyclopedia of the Korean War, to

be released in June 2000 by ABC-CLIO. Her 1997 article, "The

Anglo-American Theme," published in the Summer 1997 issue

of Diplomatic History won the 1997 Arthur Miller Prize for the

best British article in American Studies.

14 OAH Magazine of History Spring 2000