Korean War: Was U.S. Military Intervention in Korea in 1950 Justified?

History in Dispute, 2000

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek met at the Cairo Conference in Egypt from 22 to 26 November 1943 to discuss peace terms to be imposed on Japan at the end of World War II. One of their important decisions was to grant independence to Korea, which had been occupied by Japan since 1905. Following the surrender of the Japanese, Korea emerged in 1946 divided at the thirty-eighth Parallel into a Soviet-controlled north and U.S.-controlled south. The division was meant to be temporary, but by 1948, after no agreement was reached on unification and general elections, the two Koreas declared their separate status as independent republics.

On 25 June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea, capturing the capital, Seoul, within three days. President Harry S Truman announced that the United States would resist the North Korean aggression, and the United States received support in the United Nations (UN) to put together an international (mostly American) military force to repel North Korean forces. On 15 September 1950 UN forces under the command of General Douglas Mac-Arthur made a surprise landing at Inchon, recapturing Seoul on 25 September. American-led forces pushed into North Korea, taking the capital of Pyongyang on 19 October, and kept advancing north, forcing the retreating North Koreans all the way to the Yalu River, which separates Korea from China. U.S. policymakers believed that China would stay out of the war, and Truman issued veiled warnings that the United States might use nuclear weapons if China intervened. On 26 November, however, Chinese forces crossed the Yalu and forced UN soldiers to retreat southward. By 24 December the Chinese forces reclaimed all of North Korea and began crossing the Thirty-eighth Parallel into South Korea, capturing Seoul on 4 January 1951. UN forces regrouped and fought back, recapturing Seoul on 14 March. Truman, impatient with MacArthur’s public calls for a war on China, dismissed the general on 11 April. MacArthur’s successor, General Matthew B. Ridgway, led UN forces north across the Thirty-eighth Parallel, and on 13 June captured Pyongyang again.

On 23 June the Soviet Union called for a cease-fire. Over the next two years, however, on-again, off-again talks between the two sides were accompanied by constant skirmishing along the Thirty-eighth Parallel, with UN and North Korean forces pushing each other back and forth. During the election campaign of fall 1952, Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower vowed to end the war, and upon assuming office in January 1953, set out to do so. He increased the military pressure on the Chinese by announcing that the United States was placing nuclear weapons in Okinawa; increased U.S. air power on the Korean peninsula; and removed the Seventh Fleet from the Formosa Straits, where it had served as a barrier preventing Taiwanese Nationalist forces from attacking the Chinese mainland. At the same time, Eisenhower pressured Syngman Rhee, the South Korean leader, to soften his demands for an immediate reunification of Korea. On 27 July 1953 an agreement was signed putting an end to the fighting. The Korean War claimed two million lives, including 54,246 Americans.

Viewpoint: Yes. Military intervention in Korea was necessary because it demonstrated that the United States would resist communist aggression

Controversy surrounds President Harry S Truman’s decision to commit U.S. resources to the defense of South Korea following an attack by communist North Korea in June 1950. Many analyses hold Truman’s order to be inconsistent with American strategic policy on the basis of a statement made by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in January 1950 that appeared to establish a U.S. defensive perimeter that excluded South Korea. Scholars have argued that the bloodshed and expense of the Korean conflict (1950–1953) were both unnecessary from a strategic perspective and unjustified according to public statements of the administration itself.

Acheson’s statement notwithstanding, U.S. intervention on the Korean peninsula was not only justified, but essential. The strategic position of the peninsula was of vital importance to U.S. security policy from any rational perspective. Its proximity to Japan cannot be ignored. Indeed, the history of northeast Asia has often been determined by who controlled this strategic peninsula. Shortly after its emergence as a world power in the late nineteenth century, Japan colonized Korea both to safeguard its own shores and create a foundation for the extension of its influence in Asia, particularly into Manchuria.

The strategic relevance of Korea was not lost on the Truman administration as World War II drew to a close in the Pacific. Although Franklin D. Roosevelt had made loose agreements to allow an extension of Soviet influence into China, the new president was far less enthusiastic about cooperation with the Soviet Union in general, to say nothing of conceding particular strategic advantages to it in the immediate postwar world. When the spectacular successes of the Red Army against the Japanese in Manchuria appeared to suggest that Soviet troops might also take control of Korea, Truman hastily dispatched a diplomatic mission to secure the division of the peninsula at the Thirty-eighth Parallel. Shortly thereafter, the Allied administration of the defeated Japanese empire, almost certainly not on purely its own initiative, risked direct confrontation with Moscow when General Douglas MacArthur categorically refused to allow the Soviet Union to share in the occupation of Japan (they wanted Hokkaido) and threatened to jail the Soviet delegation in Tokyo if the Red Army landed in the Home Islands uninvited. There can be no logical reason why this same administration would seriously intend to abandon a strategic position to the communist world only a few years after having gone to great pains to secure it and, further, retreat in the face of communist military pressure only a year after it forced Soviet premier Joseph Stalin to end his blockade of West Berlin.

Ideology also played a serious role in Truman’s decision to defend South Korea. Just as was the case with West Berlin, America could not lead the noncommunist world by caving in to demonstrations of strength from the opposition. Indeed, allowing South Korea to fall was an even riskier proposition than giving in to the Soviets in Berlin, because the communist attack was ostensibly the sole initiative of North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung. Although new evidence suggests that Moscow and Beijing played roles in Kim’s decision to attack the South, the fact of the matter is that before the “unofficial” entry of China into the conflict in November 1950, the entire communist offensive was carried out by North Korean troops. For the United States to stand idly by while one of the weakest communist powers conquered a small and otherwise defenseless country was not an acceptable option for an administration that had defined its main foreign-policy doctrine by its resolve to resist communist expansion on a global scale. How far, indeed, would American prestige have fallen if Kim’s repressive regime had been allowed to rule all of Korea!

The ideological approach found further resonance in developing international standards of behavior. It is important to remember that the defense of South Korea was not merely a unilateral American initiative. The North Korean attack received formal censure from the international community, and a United Nations (UN) resolution approved defensive military action. In addition to the United States, more than a dozen nations sent contingents to fight against the advancing communist forces. In addition to the obvious strategic considerations, Washington was operating under the aegis of a mandate from the international community, which rejected aggressive war in principle. Interestingly enough, the Soviet Union could easily have deprived the United States of that moral justification by ending its boycott of the institution (over the refusal to allow the communist Chinese to exercise China’s rights in the UN) and using its Security Council vote to veto the resolution calling for the defense of South Korea.

Another critical justification for U.S. involvement in Korea was that intervention was in many ways the linchpin in the evolution of Truman’s strategic anticommunist design. Confronted with a Soviet Union that had begun to promote its own aggrandizement even before World War II had ended, Truman had little choice but to resist Soviet attempts to push the limits of what Roosevelt had conceded through wartime diplomacy. Increasingly, this stance took on a military character as the West perceived a Soviet hand in favor of the postwar communist insurrection in Greece, saw the tenuous democracies of postwar Eastern Europe blotted out by violent and extralegal means sponsored by Moscow, and had its diplomatically unassailable occupation rights in West Berlin challenged by the Soviet military.

As these developments unfolded, however, real U.S. military power actually declined immediately after the war because of domestic political pressure for demobilization and reductions in the defense budget. The deceiving perception that the world was now in the hands of the Western allies dramatically undercut the ability of the United States to resist increasingly bold assertions of communist influence. Even the Marshall Plan (1947), the administration program of economic assistance for the postwar recovery of Europe, remained a controversial domestic political issue until the balance of American politicians were convinced that West European communist parties had serious potential for success in times of economic hardship and political instability.

Moving from economic aid to increased military expenditures was a much more difficult sell, especially in light of the relatively difficult U.S. domestic economic situation immediately after the end of the war. Truman’s championing of Greek and Turkish efforts to resist communist expansion and his successful challenge to the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, incredibly enough, did not result in the kind of military buildup that one might expect. Indeed, the defense budget for fiscal year 1950, immediately before the United States became involved in Korea, stood at $13 billion, just 30 percent more than the dangerously low amount spent annually on the military before World War II, when the U.S. Army was the eighteenth largest in the world, ranking just after the Bulgarians.

If America was to continue its role as a superpower and present a credible military challenge to Soviet expansionism, its defense budget had to be increased. Tepid responses to more subtle moves from the communist world could only be improved upon if these provocations became blatant and direct military threats. Whether Acheson cleverly left South Korea out of the defensive perimeter to dupe the communists into believing that the North could conquer the rest of the peninsula with impunity or they came to that mistaken conclusion on their own, the attack unified the United States in favor of both the war and the steady military buildup that accompanied it. Even though the Eisenhower administration sought to end the war quickly and then reduce conventional expenditures in favor of the financially cheaper doctrine of massive retaliation, U.S. armed forces were for the rest of the Cold War substantially stronger than they were in the early postwar years.

On a broader geopolitical level Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea was beneficial to the U.S. global position. While the international community showed quite forcefully that it was unwilling to countenance naked aggression, the resolve, quantity, and quality of U.S. military deployment to Korea demonstrated that the United States was firmly committed to the defense of its allies and strategic interests. This reaction was particularly important because the communist invasion of South Korea was the first true test of that commitment. It came slightly more than a year after the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a defensive alliance dependent on U.S. military power, and at a time when proponents of European integration were already beginning to look toward an alternative. Such projects as the European Defense Community, a West European defensive alliance designed to exclude the United States, were already on the drawing board. The use of U.S. military power in Korea showed many European politicians that Washington could be relied upon to defend their countries against aggression. This belief, together with the realization that Western Europe could spend far less on defense and devote more resources to recovery from World War II and for further economic development if it were protected by U.S. forces, led to the demise of early plans for an independent European defense; only recently have such notions been revived.

The cohesion that resulted from continued U.S. military and strategic leadership of the West was augmented by other positive benefits of the commitment to Korea. In Asia the principle of U.S. commitment to Seoul led to precisely the same kind of American-led collective security alliance that involvement on the peninsula had fortified in Europe. The South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), formed in September 1954, combined under U.S. strategic leadership countries as far flung as the Philippines and Pakistan. Commitment to South Korean security also convinced Japan of the reliability of the United States as a protector so much that it abjured major defense spending until after 1976, recovered and prospered economically in the postwar era, and, despite some furtive overtures in the détente era, remained antagonistic toward the Soviet Union and its Russian successor state. In the Third World, furthermore, noncommunist and anti-Soviet governments and political movements came to believe in the 1950s and later, albeit with mixed prescience, that they could rely on Washington to support them. The fires of the Korean battlefields welded the structures of containment firmly in place.

–PAUL DU QUENOY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Although support of South Korea prevented a communist takeover, U.S. intervention in Korea was outside the boundaries of strategic containment policy and led to the support of a tyrannical regime

The assertion that the Korean War (1950-1953) was a “wrong war” for the United States has tended to be the province of the intellectual and political Left. Old-line domestic leftists such as journalist I. F. Stone dismissed it as exporting to Asia an aggressive Cold War against an essentially passive, if not peace-loving, Soviet Union. British and Continental commentators wrote the war off as another example of U.S. fecklessness, combining febrile anticommunism with an unsophisticated approach to geopolitics that equated the Korean peninsula with the Fulda Gap (a major potential invasion route for the Soviets if they were to attack Europe). In the post-Vietnam years a school of historians, best represented by Bruce Cumings, denounced U.S. action in Korea as unwarranted intervention on the wrong side of a civil conflict, in support of a murderous tyrant, Syngman Rhee, whose provocations essentially initiated the war in the first place.

The end of the Cold War and the corresponding revelations from former Soviet archives have done much to discredit the first two lines of criticism. Evidence is clear that while the timing of the North Korean attack might have been influenced by the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from South Korea in the spring of 1950, the attack itself had been planned independently of any American behavior. Far from being a response to provocation or a North Korean leap through a window of opportunity, the offensive was the product of extensive negotiation among Kim Il-Sung, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung. If both of the latter rulers saw the risks of Kim’s proposed initiative, in the final analysis they nevertheless backed his play. The Cumings school of argument for its part has been discredited—except in the most rarefied of academic circles—by the course of events. South Korea may not be a Jeffersonian idyll, but its development into an economically prosperous and politically open society is nevertheless a sharp contrast to the squalid tyranny perpetuated north of the Thirty-eighth Parallel.

That the Korean War may have been criticized for the wrong reasons does not, however, automatically make it a “good war” or in the best interests of the United States. Several factors combined to encourage the position expressed in the famous speech to the National Press Club by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in January 1950: namely, that Korea (along with Taiwan) was not a part of the primary U.S. defense perimeter. First and foremost was the earlier comprehensive and expensive failure of U.S. policy on the Asian mainland from 1941 to 1949. Nationalist China had absorbed increasing material and moral resources in its fight with the communists without anything resembling corresponding returns. As early as 1945 the Truman administration seriously considered leaving the Nationalists to their own devices and hoped for collaboration between the Nationalists and Communists. Instead, it inherited a diplomatic debacle that in turn generated the first major breach in the bipartisan approach to foreign policy that had been at least the public-relations norm since the attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941). The eventual controversy over “who lost China” also served as an entering wedge for critics of the Democrats as either soft on communism or naive as to its nature. By no means were all of these critics followers of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), and their attacks bit deeply into an administration already seen by many of its ostensible supporters as abandoning the New Deal (1933–1940). Deliberately accepting another Asian involvement seemed correspondingly foolish.

Related to the unstable Korean situation was the anxiety that open support for Rhee might encourage the Nationalist refugee government on Taiwan to make similar claims for assistance—perhaps even to imitate Rhee by a campaign of provocation against the Chinese mainland designed to force America’s hand. Neither the state department nor the Pentagon believed Taiwan could withstand an attack by the People’s Liberation Army–an assault that was widely expected before the end of 1950 in high Washington circles, with the hope that it could be kept off the front pages of U.S. newspapers.

Korea was also a distinctly unpromising ally. The U.S. forces that occupied the southern half of the peninsula in the autumn of 1945 had no mission beyond a vague one of restoring Korean independence. Even without local and great-power rivalry, that was a tall order. A half-century as a Japanese colony had left Korea without a significant administrative apparatus, middle class, economic structure, or indeed anything else that seemed to offer promises of future contribution to order and prosperity. The rapid establishment under Soviet auspices of a communist client state north of the Thirty-eighth Parallel helped create a certain negative consensus, as Koreans unwilling to test their future under that system migrated to a South that by 1948 had established, under U.S. and United Nations (UN) auspices, its own government, right-wing and nationalist, under Rhee. Even by the most relaxed standards of the Cold War, Rhee was a hard man. While the new Republic of Korea claimed, as did its northern counterpart, to represent all of Korea, Rhee’s treatment of dissidents reflected his conviction that the struggle between the two halves was mortal–and he intended the South to survive at whatever cost.

Rhee was encouraged in this view by a series of insurrections that staggered the new country from its inception. The exact mix of indigenous initiative and support from Pyongyang remains undetermined. What was noticed by the U.S. occupiers was the brutality with which Rhee’s army and police, both poorly trained and ill disciplined, proceeded against the insurgencies. On the other hand, as the military aspect of the counterinsurgency succeeded, the South Korean government began offering and implementing small-scale reforms, particularly in land ownership and tenure. In the final analysis, while the Rhee government was neither universally accepted nor generally popular, the alternative offered by the North was not sufficiently appealing to spark a general uprising in its favor.

That negative, however, did not make South Korea prima facie alliance-worthy. In 1949 the last U.S. occupation forces, by then no more than a token, withdrew. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) predicted the incompetent authoritarianism of the Republic of Korea (ROK) would lead to eventual takeover of the peninsula by communist forces. General Douglas MacArthur, supreme American commander in the Far East, for once agreed with the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Korea could not defeat a Northern invasion without a substantial infusion of U.S. forces–which should not be made available. In case of an invasion the United States would evacuate its nationals and submit the issue to the UN where the Soviet Union was expected to block action by exercising its Security Council veto.

That limited-risk policy reflected a third set of strictures against making war in Korea. U.S. armed forces had been drawn down to the danger point. Even the nuclear deterrent was hollow at the core, with planes described as atomic bombers in fact unable to deliver the weapons. The garrison of Germany consisted of a single division, plus another division’s worth of lightly armed constabulary troops. The deployable strategic reserve in the United States consisted of another single division, the 82nd Airborne. The four divisions occupying Japan were at two-thirds or less of their full war strength, while their operational readiness was generally recognized as deficient by any reasonable standards. Korea, moreover, was an unpromising theater relative to armed forces doctrines that, based on recent experience, continued to emphasize decisive operations. To the army and air force in particular, “limited war” was barely a theoretical concept, while Korea was a virtual definition of a geostrategic dead end.

Acheson was not alone in his exclusion of South Korea from the sphere of U.S. vital interests. In the spring of 1950 Democratic Senator Thomas T. Connolly (D-Texas), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, predicted the eventual abandonment of South Korea and denied it was essential to U.S. security. The ambassador to the ROK, John J. Muccio, predicted a Northern victory in any general conflict. Military advisers to the embryonic army of South Korea were more optimistic, but primarily for career reasons as opposed to professional convictions. They were, after all, assigned to teach the South Koreans to fight and win American-style. It is not good for a professional soldier to admit in public that he is failing in his mission.

Despite all the prewar reservations, the United States eventually committed itself to a large-scale limited war in Korea, and eventually gained an operational stalemate that in time became a grand strategic victory. It did so, however, against its own well-considered and well-conceived policies, developed over a period of several years. Such reactions to circumstance were characteristic of U.S. foreign policy after 1945. In this case the results spoke for the behavior. That does not make the commitment wise.

–DENNIS SHOWALTER, COLORADO COLLEGE