From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (104 page)

The war scare of 1949–50 had major consequences for U.S. policy in Asia. In December 1949, the Truman administration approved NSC-49 advocating that the United States "block further Communist expansion in Asia." With the fall of China, Japan emerged as the most important nation in East Asia, and U.S. officials urged the negotiation of a peace treaty and an end to the occupation. Southeast Asia took on even greater importance as a source of raw materials and markets for Japan and a means to close the Western European dollar gap. Reconciliation with Communist China may have been out of reach by this time. The anger provoked by the U.S. role in the Chinese civil war could not easily have been overcome. China's brutal treatment of American diplomats provoked outrage in the United States. Speaking metaphorically, Mao had vowed to "clean the house before entertaining guests." He would likely have contemplated ties with the United States only on terms the administration could never have accepted.
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The pragmatic Acheson at times seemed open to eventual recognition of the People's Republic and often expressed hope that Mao might become an Asian Tito. But Truman despised the Chinese Communists and had little interest in accommodation. In any case, the events of 1949–50 created a domestic political climate that made suicidal any move toward reconciliation. Thus while trying to distance itself from Chiang, who had fled to Formosa, and promoting a wedge strategy
it hoped might separate China from the Soviet Union, the administration shunned even the smallest step toward the Beijing regime. By late 1950, even this cautious policy was overtaken by events.
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The crisis atmosphere of 1949–50 produced most notably NSC-68, a sweeping restatement of U.S. national security policy and one of the most significant Cold War documents. In late 1949, Truman ordered a review of military policies in response to loss of the nuclear monopoly. Long frustrated by the staunch opposition of the president and Defense Secretary Louis Johnson to increased military spending, Acheson used the study, as he later put it, to "bludgeon the mass mind of 'top government' " into spending the money necessary for adequate defenses.
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NSC-68 was drafted by Nitze, who had replaced Kennan as head of the Policy Planning Staff. A Wall Street investment banker, as intense in personality as his mentor James Forrestal, Nitze exceeded Acheson in his gloomy worldview. His study set forth an urgent statement of the national security ideology. It proclaimed the necessity of defending freedom across the world to save it at home. Written in the starkest black-and-white terms, it took a worst case view of Soviet capabilities and intentions. "Animated by a new fanatical faith," it warned, the USSR was seeking to "impose its absolute authority on the rest of the world." Soviet expansion had reached a point beyond which it must not be permitted to go. "Any substantial further extension of the area under the control of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled."
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In this context of a world divided into two hostile power blocs, a fragile balance of power, a zero-sum game in which any gain for Communism was automatically a loss for the "free world," NSC-68 outlined a dazzling array of measures—what Acheson labeled "total diplomacy"—to combat the Soviet threat.
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It proposed shoring up Western Europe's defenses, filling the dollar gap, and extending containment to East Asia. It urged expanded military and economic assistance programs, covert operations, and psychological warfare. Above all, it pressed for a huge boost in defense spending to support a massive buildup of nuclear and conventional arms. The aim was to achieve military superiority and create what Acheson called "situations of strength." The ultimate goal was to win the Cold War by detaching Eastern Europe from the Soviet bloc and forcing a
change in the Soviet government itself. To rally a sometimes apathetic public to make the necessary sacrifices, NSC-68 proposed a public education program using plain, hard-hitting language—what former undersecretary of state Robert Lovett called "Hemingway sentences"—to make the threat, in Acheson's words, "clearer than truth."
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Still refusing the sort of financial commitment Nitze proposed, Truman shelved the document in the spring of 1950. Events in Northeast Asia would soon put it back on the table.

In June, hot war broke out in Korea, a country far from the United States geographically but for years a focal point of East Asian rivalries. The product of fierce internal conflict among Koreans as well as the Cold War, the Korean "police action" lasted more than three years. It had profound global consequences, heightening Cold War tensions and producing expanded U.S. commitments in Europe and East Asia. It made possible full implementation of NSC-68, including a huge military buildup, economic mobilization, and a string of global commitments.

Much as in Germany, conflict in Korea arose from occupation zones hastily carved out at war's end. On the eve of Japan's surrender, lower-level U.S. Army officials working with
National Geographic
maps set the dividing line between American and Soviet occupation zones at the 38th parallel, conveniently leaving the capital, Seoul, and two-thirds of the population in U.S. hands. As with Germany, efforts to unify the country ran afoul of Cold War rivalries. Regimes emerged in each zone bearing the distinct imprint of the occupying power. The United States backed a conservative southern government headed by Syngman Rhee, a longtime exile, Princeton University graduate, and protégé of Woodrow Wilson. Seventy years old in 1945, Rhee was handsome, charming, and fiercely independent. His government was composed largely of wealthy landholders, some of whom had collaborated with the Japanese. In the north, the Soviets supported a leftist regime headed by the thirty-one-year-old Communist zealot Kim Il-Sung. Rhee and Kim were passionately committed to unifying Korea—on their own terms. Fighting raged across the peninsula between 1948 and 1950. Leftist guerrillas plotted to undermine Rhee, while armies from both zones waged sporadic warfare across the 38th parallel. As many as a hundred thousand Koreans were killed, thirty thousand in extended fighting on an island off the coast of South Korea.
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Cold War rivalries made full-scale hostilities possible. Already spread thin, the United States worried that Rhee's ambitions might entangle it in a war it could not afford in an area of marginal significance. The Truman administration thus withdrew its military forces from Korea in 1949. In a much publicized January 1950 speech that accurately stated U.S. policy but said much more than it should have, Acheson left South Korea out of the U.S. "defensive perimeter." At the same time, after the fall of China, the administration increasingly perceived that for reasons of domestic politics it could not afford to lose additional Asian real estate to Communism. As Japan assumed greater importance in U.S. global strategy, Korea became an important buffer against China and the Soviet Union and a market for Japanese exports.
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Professing sleeplessness in his quest to unify Korea, the indefatigable Kim doggedly pursued Stalin's go-ahead for decisive action. Rebuffed numerous times, he finally extracted a qualified commitment in April 1950. Apparently persuaded by the Truman administration's refusal to rescue Chiang, its troop withdrawals from South Korea, and perhaps the Acheson speech that the United States would not respond, Stalin approved an invasion across the 38th parallel provided that Kim press for a quick victory. Kim had also hinted that he might turn to Mao, and Stalin did not want to appear to stand in the way of extending the revolution in East Asia. A unified Korea would solidify the Soviet position in Northeast Asia and put pressure on the United States in Japan. War in Korea, Stalin may also have reasoned, would tie Beijing closely to Moscow and eliminate any chance for rapprochement with the United States. The Soviet leader did caution Kim that "if you get kicked in the teeth. I shall not lift a finger." With Stalin's conditional blessing and ostensibly responding to South Korean provocations, Kim on June 25, 1950, dispatched a hundred thousand troops, backed by tanks, artillery, and aircraft, into South Korea.
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Although caught completely off guard, the Truman administration, to the shock of Stalin and his allies, responded promptly and after little debate. United States officials mistakenly believed that Moscow had instigated the attack as part of its grand design for world domination. They vividly recalled Manchuria and Munich and the Western non-response they believed had led to World War II. If they did nothing, they reasoned, nervous European allies would lose faith in their promises and the Communists would be emboldened to further aggression. The United Nations
had been involved in creating South Korea, and U.S. officials also saw the North Korean invasion as a test for the fledgling world organization. Thus within days after the June 25 attack, the administration went to war. The president unwisely refused to seek congressional authorization for fear of setting a precedent that might bind his successors, suggesting the extent to which the Cold War had already shattered traditional attitudes on such issues. Taking advantage of Soviet absence from the Security Council, the administration secured UN backing for military action in Korea. It committed U.S. air, naval, and ground forces to the defense of embattled South Korea. In a significant move that dashed any hopes of reconciliation with China, it deployed the Seventh Fleet between Taiwan and mainland China. It stepped up aid to France for Indochina. In a broad band running from the Sea of Japan to the Gulf of Thailand, the United States extended across East Asia the containment policy already applied in Europe.
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In its first six months, the Korean War witnessed reversals of fortune seldom matched in the history of warfare. United States occupation troops hastily deployed from Japan and unready for battle could not stop the North Korean onslaught. By late summer, UN forces were isolated at Pusan on the southeast comer of Korea, very nearly being driven into the sea. At this point, UN commander General MacArthur devised a daring but perilous plan for an amphibious assault on the northwest port of Inchon to relieve pressure on the Pusan perimeter and catch overextended North Korean forces in a deadly pincer. The scheme was hazardous under the best circumstances. Tricky tides made the harbor navigable but one day a month and then only for a few hours, permitting alert defenders to predict the timing of an invasion. Perhaps to underscore his own brilliance if he succeeded, the imperious MacArthur termed the operation a 5,000-to-1 gamble and overrode the cautions of the Joint Chiefs.

A virtually unopposed landing succeeded smashingly. Now the suddenly victorious UN forces drove the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel. The United States might have stopped at this point, explored diplomatic options, even settled for the status quo ante bellum. But MacArthur's already ample ego was further swollen by a brilliant maneuver, and he was intent on rollback. Washington officials hesitated to take on "the sorcerer of Inchon." Caught up in the hubris, they too were seduced by the prospect of a major Cold War victory, especially on the eve of congressional elections. They arrogantly dismissed Chinese warnings
of intervention and rationalized that not to advance might be viewed as a sign of weakness. As UN forces plunged recklessly toward the Yalu River separating North Korea from Manchuria, MacArthur foolishly assured Truman of victory by Christmas. Hindered by ethnocentric blinders, Americans to a person could not see what later would seem so obvious.
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Chinese intervention in late November 1950 produced what MacArthur ruefully admitted was a new and different war. As Mao put it, China and Korea were "as close as the lips to the teeth," and the Chinese could not but view the advance of hostile troops to their border as a menace to their infant state and a test of their credibility.
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Mao may have felt some obligation to the Korean Communists, who had provided vital support during the Chinese civil war. He also saw intervention as a way to enhance China's status by defeating the "arrogant" United States, sustain the revolutionary momentum generated during the civil war, and legitimize the position of the party within China.
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Stalin sought to cover his own disastrous miscalculation by encouraging Chinese intervention and promising air support (which he later reneged on). The decision apparently provoked bitter debate in the Chinese Politburo, but Mao carried the day. Shortly after U.S. forces celebrated Thanksgiving near the Yalu, more than two hundred thousand Chinese troops entered the war.
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MacArthur had foolishly exposed his armies by dividing them. In bitterly cold weather under horrendous conditions, UN forces fell back in what American troops labeled Operation Bugout, a headlong, ignominious, and frightfully costly retreat in bitterly cold weather that would end well south of the 38th parallel. Chinese and North Koreans now vowed to unify Korea.

After six months of armies racing up and down the peninsula, the war in 1951 settled into a bloody stalemate. Humiliated by defeat, a defiant MacArthur pressed for all-out war against China, insisting in conventional military terms that there was no substitute for victory. Constrained by allies and the United Nations, viewing Korea and indeed East Asia as a secondary Cold War theater, and fearful of a Soviet strike into Western Europe, the administration settled for a limited war to restore the
status quo ante bellum
. When MacArthur challenged the president by taking his case to Congress, Truman, fully supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,