From Korea to Vietnam:
The Evolution of U.S. Interventionism in Asia
Mel Gurtov
Portland State University
ABSTRACTThe wars in Korea and Vietnam were of a piece, directly related byvirtue of U.S. global strategy and China’s security concerns. This article,
focusing mainly on the U.S. side in these wars, argues that threecharacteristics of American policy had enduring meaning for the rest of
the Cold War and even beyond: the official mindsets that led to U.S.
involvement, the centrality of the China threat in American decision
making, and the common legacy of intervention against nationalism andin support of authoritarian regimes.

Keywords: Korean War, Vietnam War, U.S. policy in Asia, NSC-68,
U.S.-China relations, Cold War, nationalism, U.S. interventions

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Introduction
The Korean War was the seminal event of the Cold War in Asia. By
invoking containment of communism to deal with the outbreak of war on
the peninsula, the United States carried the Truman Doctrine into Asia.
Japan became the key U.S. military ally in Asia, Chinese intervention in
Korea sealed U.S.-China enmity for the next thirty years, and Korea
stayed divided without a peace treaty. At one and the same time, war in
Korea drew Asia into the orbit of vital U.S. interests and strengthened the
U.S. commitment to Europe’s primacy.1 The war rigidified ideologicalpositions and ensured that the East-West geopolitical struggle would go
on for many years. As importantly, the ensuing big-power confrontationin Vietnam, in which the United States and China tangled by proxy,
represented a straight line from Korea. These two conflicts directly or
indirectly enveloped nearly all of Asia, forcing governments to choosesides in the Cold War competition.
This paper will argue that the importance of the Korean and Vietnam
wars goes beyond their strategic connection. The distinction that Ernest
May observed many years ago between “axiomatic” and “calculated”
policies clearly applies to decision making in these two wars. 2 The
official mindsets that led to U.S. involvement, the centrality of the China
threat in American decision making, and the common legacy ofintervention against nationalism and in support of authoritarian regimes
were all features of U.S. policy throughout the remainder of the Cold
War in Asia. But not only then or there; after the Cold War, nationalist
identities and U.S. internationalist ambitions collided repeatedly in otherparts of the world.
Korea: The “Globalization of Containment”
President Truman’s containment speech of March 1947, thoughfocused on the Mediterranean, not Asia, nevertheless prefigured the U.S.
response to Korean events in June 1950. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff
recognized, even if Soviet advances in Greece and Turkey were thwarted,“ the USSR “may decide to accelerate expansion in the Far East, in orderto gain control of those areas which outflank us in the Near and Middle
East.” 3 A consistent Cold War principle was thus established: theinterconnectedness of global events—falling dominoes, in short.
Containing presumed Soviet moves in southern Europe was of a piecewith containment in Asia.
During the next two years U.S. policy came to embrace the idea thatthe so-called Yalta system—built on the assumption of post-war U.S.Soviet cooperation—was no longer viable. In the Pacific that meant therevival of Japan as a security partner, with a bilateral peace treaty
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dependent on Japanese consent to the establishment of major U.S.
military bases for the indefinite future, and secret arrangements for U.S.
ships carrying nuclear weapons.4 This “revival of Japanese militarism,”
as the Chinese would call it then and later, invited a communist response,
which came in the form of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance(see below) in February 1950. The treaty specified that the Soviet Union
would come to China’s aid in the event of an attack by Japan “or any
other State which should unite in any form with Japan in acts ofaggression.” Thus was the Cold War line in the sand drawn, precluding
Japanese neutralism in foreign policy and early normalization ofrelations with the PRC.
The next major benchmark in the evolution of the Cold War in Asia
was NSC-68, a secret study commissioned by President Truman andsubmitted for his approval in April 1950. (The document was officiallyapproved in December, obviously influenced by the Korean War andChinese intervention.) The study provided the essential ideologicaldimension to U.S. policy.5 Perhaps the most important statement of U.S.
grand strategy in the entire Cold War, NSC-68 clarified that global
instability, “even in the absence of the Soviet Union,” required a major
U.S. military buildup and an activist response to Soviet machinations.
NSC-68 had its internal critics—George Kennan, for instance, thought itwrong to establish national security strategy by way of doctrine—but it
was a consensus document that provided benefits for all the players,
notably the U.S. military. Yet it is important to understand that NSC-68
and other NSC studies around the same time, such as NSC-48 (1949),
went beyond containment and recommendations for U.S. rearmament.
Of equal importance was the objective to preserve the global economic
system that Bretton Woods had created—a liberal trading order in which
U.S. exports could thrive and U.S. financial supremacy could besustained.6
Ideologically, NSC-68 was the predictable outgrowth of an
administration-wide conviction that the communist threat was global inscope, monolithic in structure, and largely “schematic” (Kennan’s word)
in intent. The declassified NSC studies of China are of a piece withpublic statements by U.S. leaders in seeing little to distinguish the China
threat from the Soviet threat—though with the exception that NSC
experts did note the potential for Sino-Soviet differences to emerge.7 But
on the whole, Kennan’s early warnings about Stalin’s foreign policy—
warnings whose alarmist language he would later regret 8 —found a
receptive audience in Washington, and were easily transferable toconcerns about a communist China.
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On the eve of the Korean War Chinese leaders had reached the samekinds of conclusions about “U.S. imperialism” that U.S. leaders had
reached about China: an implacable threat, headed by people who would
never agree to treat China on the basis of “equality and mutual benefit.”
The combination of Chinese communist suspicions and anger over U.S.
support of Chiang Kai-shek, on one hand, and Patrick Hurley’s
accusations of pro-communist sympathies among Foreign Service andState Department officers who served in China or on the China Desk, on
the other, effectively closed the door on the possibility of finding
common ground. Truman spoke of reaching out to Chinese “liberals”
instead of to Mao’s inner circle, an erroneous choice that further
contributed to putting off the day when U.S.-China relations could benormalized. Thus, well before war broke out in Korea, any chance ofU.S. recognition of China was dashed.9 Mao’s only option was to “leanto one side” and drive the best bargain he could—the Sino-Soviet Treatyof Mutual Assistance, long understood as the last of China’s unequal
treaties.
Although we now know that the North Korean invasion of the Southwas the subject of intense bargaining among the three communist
countries’ leaders, and that Chinese intervention in support of the Northwas by no means preordained, Truman’s inner circle was surely unawareof such details. Even if they had been known, it is doubtful that theywould have led to a decision by the president not to intervene in Korea.
The thinking behind NSC-68, and (as Glenn Paige’s account makes clear)
the small number of people involved in the Korean decisions,10 virtuallyassured U.S. intervention in Korea—no matter Dean Acheson’s“perimeter speech,” the warnings of U.S. military and civilian officials
about the looming Korean “volcano” of civil war, 11 Congressional
reluctance to provide economic assistance to the ROK, or Kennan’s
concern that a communist threat in the East would draw attention awayfrom the main threat to U.S. national security in the West. As Truman
would recall, the first images that came to his mind when he got word ofNorth Korea’s crossing of the 38th parallel were of Munich, Manchuria,
and Ethiopia.12 Given the American political scene—pressures from theRepublican right wing and the onset to McCarthyism—Truman was notabout to risk charges of being soft on communism.13
In making his historic commitment to South Korea’s defense,
Truman was not merely responding to a communist probe of the West’s
weak spots, as some U.S. officials initially thought. For the UnitedStates, the decision was considered a “test case.” The “test” wasconceived by the president and his chief advisers as having both
calculated and axiomatic elements: opposition to communist aggression
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wherever it occurred (an extension, therefore, of the Truman Doctrine inEurope); preservation of the collective security system under the United
Nations; and no appeasement.14 Thus, the reputation of the United States
as a dependable ally was believed to be on the line. 15 The Koreandecision was made with considerable concern about security issues,
including protection of Japan and Taiwan; but no one questioned thecorrectness of intervening. Yet the Korean War, after all, was a civil war
as much as it was an international war, a clash of contending Koreannationalisms brought on by the U.S.-Soviet decision at the end of WorldWar II to divide the country. But the debate among Truman’s inner
circle never entertained such matters; nor did it address the nature of thegovernment the United States became committed to defending. Nor,
finally, did U.S. leaders consider Korea’s intrinsic value—its culture andhistory—separately from its place in the global contest with theSoviets.16
What was important for American leaders about Korea was its
derivative value. It could have been anywhere, said Assistant Secretaryof State Dean Rusk; the U.S. response would have been the same.17 It
was a moral conflict as much as a strategic one. This unchallenged
perspective facilitated the miscalculations and misperceptions that would
follow.18 Vietnam would fall into the same category—a country of no
particular importance to U.S. national interests when considered inisolation, yet somehow “vital” to protect nonetheless in the context of theCold War. Hence Korea marked the initial step in the globalization ofcontainment, as Robert Osgood wrote, 19 and Vietnam would be thesecond. These conflicts set the stage for global interventionism, on theassumption that the communist menace had become worldwide in scope
and that Chinese aggressiveness was the Asian component of a fullfledged Moscow-directed assault on the West.
The Chinese saw the matter in similar terms. Though hesitant tomake a commitment to defend North Korea without assurances of fullSoviet support—the final decision was not made until October 4-5,
1950—the PRC leadership viewed the possibility of a U.S. occupation of
the entire Korean peninsula and Taiwan as sufficient reason tointervene. 20 The fact of U.S. entry into North Korea was decisive; itthreatened China’s own security and the socialist revolutions in bothcountries. 21 Mao reasoned that whether or not China prevailed against
U.S. forces, China simply had to act; otherwise, not merely its security
but also its prestige would suffer, “and the American invaders will run
more rampant, and have negative effects for the entire Far East.”22 In theend Beijing, just like Washington, felt a moral as well as a security
imperative to go to war.23 Yet in both cases, leaders underestimated theInternational Journal of Korean Studies  Vol. XIV, No. 2

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opponent’s will and misunderstood its motives.24
China and the United States could each claim victory in the Korean
War, since their Korean allies had been successfully protected. But thatwas hardly the whole story, for both had failed in their larger strategic
objective, which was to deter future interventions elsewhere in Asia. For
the United States, moreover, war in Korea had become a sharp-edged
political issue, with Republicans charging that Truman’s limited-war
doctrine was immoral and Truman’s joint chiefs of staff answering that awider war to “win” in Korea would have been (in General Omar
Bradley’s famous words) “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at thewrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Thus, for the United States,
limited victory in Korea surely contributed to seeing Vietnam as theinevitable next stop for containment. Indeed, by the time the Koreanarmistice was signed in 1953, the first of several U.S. administrations(Dwight Eisenhower’s) had already committed to preventing theextension of communism in Asia.
Vietnam: A Second Test
Numerous explanations of “why Vietnam?” have emerged since thewar ended in 1975. Bureaucratic explanations have been popular:“groupthink” in high-level decision making; presidents’ hopes not to lose
the next election; conditioned behavior in response to crisis. Other
analysts have focused on presidential hubris, the politics of escalation,
the imperial presidency, concern about the U.S. reputation, and theexcessive influence of the military, among many others. Common to
many of these interpretations is American hegemony: the belief among
U.S. leaders that the nation was being tested again, and that leadership of
the Free World demanded a major commitment to winning lest thecommunist world prevail in Southeast Asia and beyond.
War in Vietnam preoccupied every U.S. president from Roosevelt to
Ford. Each of them, and their top advisers, subscribed to the basic ideathat while Vietnam was not intrinsically important, it had increasing
symbolic meaning for America’s power position in the world. As one
reads the basic documents—the NSC strategic assessments from 1950 on,
the presidential papers, and the Pentagon Papers collection, among
others—one finds Vietnam moving inexorably to center stage in U.S.
global strategy. At first this evolution was a function of war in Korea:
While the Americans were engaged in Northeast Asia, it behooved theTruman and Eisenhower administrations to support the French effort inIndochina. The two wars were interlinked, and the French were viewed
as America’s proxy in the common struggle to stem the communist tide.
Once an armistice was arranged in Korea, Vietnam became America’s
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war for the next twenty-five years, first in ongoing support of the French,
then (following the Geneva Conference in 1954 that divided Vietnam) in
replacement of them. War in Korea made U.S. involvement in Vietnam
easier; but even without the Korean War, the United States probably
would have had to come to France’s aid, mainly because the conflict inIndochina was inevitably viewed as another Cold War contest, but also
because it did not want to alienate France at a time when European unity
was paramount.
The United States, particularly the State Department’s Far Easterndesk,25 certainly had misgivings about supporting French colonialism andFrance’s choice of a Vietnamese leader (Emperor Bao Dai) who, like
Syngman Rhee, had long lived outside his country. Bao Dai, moreover,
was widely regarded as a colonial puppet; he, like other leaders in Saigon
in the years to follow, would never be able to claim the nationalist mantle
that Ho Chi Minh held. But Ho, after all, was considered another Mao,
not another Tito; his communism mattered far more (to Acheson and theState Department’s European desk) than his Vietnamese nationalism.26
U.S. recognition of Bao Dai’s government in February 1950 thus
followed Chinese and Soviet recognition of Ho’s the month before.
Moreover, whereas Korea’s independence was never a contested issue,
Vietnam’s (as well as Cambodia’s and Laos’) was. France’s constant
postponement of grants of independence to the three colonies wasanother source of U.S. irritation.
Nevertheless, U.S. presidents
consistently placed such reservations second to strategic assessments thatcalled for ever-larger investments of money and then troops to fight“Soviet imperialism.”
Following on Truman’s commitment to intervention in Korea, U.S.
military support, which eventually accounted for around 80 percent ofFrance’s war costs, began to flow into Vietnam. Accompanying the flow
was an escalating perception of threat. 27 NSC-48/1 (December 1949)
spoke of the need to contain communism in Indochina. NSC-64(February 1950) linked events in Indochina to “anticipated communist
plans to seize all of Southeast Asia,” recited the domino theory, andrecommended that “all practicable measures be taken to prevent further
communist expansion in Southeast Asia.” Reflecting the outbreak of war
in Korea, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of December 1950
considered direct Chinese intervention in Indochina “imminent.” NSC48/2 (December 1950) repeated that concern in calling for U.S. economic
and military assistance against “threats from Communist aggression,
direct or indirect . . .” NSC-124/2 (June 1952) also put the China threat at
center stage, warning that “the danger of an overt military attack against
Southeast Asia is inherent in the existence of a hostile and aggressive
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Communist China.” And NSC-5405 (January 1954) considered defenseof Indochina the “keystone of the defense of mainland Southeast Asia
except possibly Malaya.”
These and other official assessments prophesied that the loss of evena single country to communism would be the beginning of a political andeconomic disaster for U.S. interests. Consequently, whereas before
Korea, the security community’s advice to the president was to support
the “Bao Dai solution” and sustain the French war effort, after Korea—
and as the French effort began to fail—the United States was looking forways to contain a presumptively Chinese threat and prevent a negotiatedcapitulation to Ho Chi Minh’s forces. Thus, NSC-5405 rejected any
political solution, including a coalition government in Vietnam, andinstead stated: “It will be U.S. policy to accept nothing short of a military
victory in Indo-China.”28
But it did. The United States was forced to swallow what the NSC
called a “disaster” in Vietnam, the agreement reached at the Geneva
Conference to divide the country at the seventeenth parallel. From there
on, it was U.S. policy to replace the French, prevent the holding of
national elections called for in the Geneva Accords because of thecertainty of Ho Chi Minh’s victory, and go about “nation building” with
yet another absentee leader who lacked nationalist credentials, Ngo Dinh
Diem. But efforts to “reform” his and successor governments failed justas they had in South Korea and in Vietnam under French rule.
Constantly thwarted by corrupt and ineffectual South Vietnamese leaders,the Americans felt perfectly justified in promoting coups and giving thegreen light (in the case of Diem and his brother) to assassinations, again
to no avail.29
The second Vietnam War revealed a peculiarly American penchantfor relying on military solutions. At one level was counter-guerrilla
warfare to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people. Under
Kennedy, this effort was shaped by the conviction that communist
organizers in the countrysides of the Third World were no more than“scavengers of the modernization process.” “Communism is best
understood as a disease of the transition to modernization,” said Walt
Rostow in a much-publicized speech.30 If guerrilla warfare, Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev’s “military arm,” could be defeated in Vietnam,
Rostow proclaimed, there would be no more Cubas, Congos, orVietnams. Kennedy clearly agreed.31
At some point, however, it became evident that counter-guerrilla
tactics were not working. In a briefing of top officials, General Maxwell
Taylor said: “The ability of the Viet-Cong continuously to rebuild theirunits and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this134

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guerrilla war. . . . Not only do the Viet-Cong units have the recuperative
power of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintainmorale.” 32 Taylor evidently did not consider anti-foreign nationalism
much of an explanation. After 1964, U.S. strategy leaned more on force
at a second level: the unprecedented bombing of both North and South
Vietnam. Here there was considerable internal confusion and bickering
about what bombing was supposed to accomplish—breaking Hanoi’s
will? Destroying North Vietnam’s industrial capabilities? Improving
morale in the South?—but no lack of enthusiasm for the task itself. Yet
no amount of military firepower proved capable either of defeating or
demoralizing the enemy, or uplifting the South Vietnamese military andcivilian leadership.
The U.S. response to clear indications that military measures of any
kind and dimension were failing to produce victory speaks directly to thehegemony thesis. By 1965, the argument of some of Lyndon Johnson’s
advisers for continuing the bombing strategy (now called “sustained
reprisal”) had turned to “setting a higher price for the future upon alladventures of guerrilla warfare . . . ” Even though “the odds of success[by bombing] . . . may be somewhere between 25% and 75%,” bombing
would at least make Hanoi’s plans more expensive.33 To this argument
was added the idea that what was really at stake, even in failure, wasAmerica’s reputation:
It is essential—however badly SEA [Southeast Asia] may goover the next 1-3 years—that U.S. emerge as a “good doctor.”
We must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten
bloodied, and hurt the enemy very badly. We must avoid
harmful appearances which will affect judgments by, andprovide pretexts to, other nations regarding . . . U.S. policy,
power, resolve and competence to deal with their problems.34
There were, of course, top advisers such as Walt Rostow and the
Joint Chiefs of Staff who persisted in believing that more bombing
would produce the desired results. But what the above excerpts reveal isthat lost faith in bombing did not end it; rather, bombing became a showof national resolve, essential for the next time. The key national interest,
John McNaughton (a top adviser to Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara) would say in the same memo just quoted, was no longer
about saving Vietnam. U.S. aims were now
70%--To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as aguarantor).
20%--To keep SVN [South Vietnam] (and the adjacent) territory
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from Chinese hands.
10%--To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer wayof life.35
If the dominoes were not to keep falling, reputation was the key anddisplays of staying power were essential to that reputation. As Rostow
would argue, the United States could still achieve its objectives inVietnam “if we enter the exercise with the same determination andstaying power that we entered the long test on Berlin and the short test on
the Cuba missiles. But it will take that kind of Presidential commitment
and staying power.” While acknowledging “anxieties and complications
on our side of the line,” what mattered most to Rostow—and, he had
every reason to believe, to everyone else in the Kennedy-Johnson
administrations—was the “limited but real margin of influence on theoutcome which flows from the simple fact that at this stage of history weare the greatest power in the world—if we behave like it.”36 Here was aperfect example of axiomatic thinking.
Reputation, test case, hegemony—every president concerned with
Vietnam bought into the validity of these ideas and determined somehow
to make the most of a war they knew was being lost. By the time the war
had become “Johnson’s war,” it was increasingly evident to the president
that victory was eluding him. Notwithstanding his tough public words,
Johnson privately sharply questioned his military and civilian advisers
about why and how they thought the United States could win in Vietnam.
In one meeting he specifically wondered whether “Westerners can everwin in Asia” and while fighting side by side with a “government [that]changes every month.” Maybe the United States should “make our standsomewhere else?” he offered.37
But at that meeting and in conversations revealed after his death,
Johnson succumbed to the logic of “national security.” He had grave andgrowing doubts: “the biggest damn mess I ever saw,” he said on one
taped conversation with McGeorge Bundy in the Oval Office. “I don’t
think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out.” Inanother conversation with Senator Richard B. Russell, a close friend,
Johnson admitted that “We’re in the quicksands up to our neck, and I just
don’t know what the hell to do about it.” Johnson worried about sending
young men to die and about being impeached for being “soft oncommunism.”38 Thus, he fell back on the anti-communist zeal that had
always worked for presidents, with Congress and with the public.
Johnson simply saw no alternative to deeper involvement.
And what of the Chinese? 39 Having been a strong supporter ofVietnam’s revolution against the French—mainly in the form of advisers
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International Journal of Korean Studies  Fall 2010and military aid—China reacted to U.S. escalation in the mid-1960s inmuch the same way as in Korea: It considered the threat to Vietnam
equivalent to a threat to the PRC’s own security. Chinese leaders told
their Vietnamese counterparts that they would send troops if requested—
and in the end, China did dispatch about 320,000 troops, though none forcombat. But at the same time, and contrary to the Korean experience,
Mao and other conveyed to Washington that it did not want a war with
the United States—messages that Washington reciprocated. Though
there were aerial incidents that might have led to direct Sino-American
conflict, both governments took steps to prevent it. U.S. troops neverentered North Vietnam, and the U.S. government never publicized thefact that Chinese troops were there. “One can say,” a Chinese scholar
has written, “that the two sides established initial trust during theconfrontation.”40
Conclusion
There are several remarkable similarities in the U.S. and Chineseexperiences in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Leaders in both countries
considered the outbreak of fighting important tests of will and credibility.
The conflicts were assessed as threats to national security that demanded
a strong response for moral reasons as well. Beneath the surface
domestic politics in both China and the United States also compelledintervention. Still, despite the view in both Washington and Beijing thateach was the main enemy in the wars, they took steps to keep the wars
from expanding into China, and in the U.S. case from resorting to(though considering) use of nuclear weapons.
But while U.S. leaders are to be commended for rejecting total war
and improving crisis communication with China by the 1960s, decision
making in other respects left much to be desired. Among the mostimportant deficiencies revealed in the course of U.S. decision making on
the two wars was the tendency to fall back on what Morton Halperin has
called “shared images”: axioms of foreign affairs supposedly learned
from earlier experiences in dealing with the communist world. Amongthem are “no appeasement,” “peace is indivisible,” the unique U.S.
responsibility for defense of the Free World, and the primacy of militarystrength to achieve national security.41 Stereotypical thinking, and themisapplication of lessons supposedly learned from other conflicts, 42
blinded U.S. decision makers (and probably decision makers in the
USSR and China too) to the particular historical, political, and cultural
conditions that they faced in Korea and Vietnam. 43 They also kept
decision makers from challenging official truths and proposing
alternatives. Were these conflicts tests of U.S. will? Was the USSRInternational Journal of Korean Studies  Vol. XIV, No. 2

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pulling the strings? Was the domino principle valid? Did U.S. policies
contribute to bringing on or prolonging the war? Were there nonviolent
opportunities to end the war? Unfortunately, history overpowered
calculation, as Ernest May has concluded. 44 Of course it did not help
matters that in the 1950s Asia experts in the State Department and othergovernment agencies—people who might have asked the impertinent
questions—had been sidelined by the McCarthyist purges. Those few
who were left to challenge U.S. policy, such as George Ball in the State
Department, were given a hearing but were invariably outnumbered andoften castigated for not being “team players.”45
Military approaches to fundamentally political solutions to thesewars ensured a future of seemingly insatiable demands by the Pentagon
for more money, weapons, and manpower. No cost was too great whennational security was determined to be at stake. The wars in Korea andVietnam, and other U.S. interventions that followed, set a pattern of highmilitary spending that continues to the present wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. 46 The pattern reflects consistent Pentagon resistance tolowering weapons procurement, redefining missions and objectives, orreevaluating threats. Rather, the thrust of the Pentagon’s planning is tobuild on prior budgets, weapons acquisitions, and threat analyses.
U.S. involvement in Vietnam deviated from Korea in a number ofrespects, principal among them being its unilateral character. President
Truman took the Korea issue before the UN—and, thanks to the absenceof the Soviet representative, secured Security Council approval—andeventually received troop support from a number of countries. He could
thus claim that intervention was legitimate, both in terms of repelling
North Korean aggression and defending the South Korean government
and people. But Vietnam was a largely unilateral effort; though various
countries (including South Korea) contributed, the war from first to last
was a matter of American decision.47 Nevertheless, legitimacy was an
issue in other ways. One has to do with the war-making power ofCongress: Truman never asked Congress for a declaration of war ineither case, or even consulted with Congress beforehand; and (with the
exception of Eisenhower’s informal but critical consultations with key
members of Congress on Vietnam in mid-1954) no president brought
Congress into discussion of policy making. Moreover, the support theUnited States received from other countries in both wars never impacted
U.S. decision making. A “coalition of the willing” always presumed U.S.
leadership. The “imperial presidency” and U.S. unilateralism were thusborn in these wars; we have witnessed the survival of these trends mostrecently in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that since 1973 a War
Powers Resolution has been the law.48
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Nor was U.S. involvement in either war influenced by thedetermination to defend the legitimacy of the Korean or Vietnamese
governments. To the contrary, in Korea the United States mistrusted
Syngman Rhee, considered overthrowing him, and sought to leverage apromise of security assistance to restrain him from provoking a war with
the North.49 While Rhee was hardly an American puppet—no more sothan Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors in Saigon—neither was heentirely free of U.S. influence. The U.S. role in bringing Rhee and Diemfrom abroad to take power, and holding the purse strings as well as theweapons to keep them in power, clearly helped keep them in line—until
such time as they became dispensable. U.S. anti-communism, notpromotion of Korean or Vietnamese democracy, always counted most in
determining Washington’s position on these governments.
“Limited war” is another legacy of Korea and Vietnam. Presidents
throughout were disposed to “minimax” strategies: seeking maximum
gains with relatively smaller investments. Of course the sacrifices ofblood and treasure were very large in both wars; yet presidents withheld
uses of force that would have created much larger conflicts, such as
carrying the war into China, committing still larger numbers of groundtroops, and using the atomic bomb. All presidents thus had to endurepolitical flak for not fighting to win: General MacArthur’s accusations
after Truman fired him would be just the beginning of presidential
troubles when fighting for anything less than complete victory andallegedly interfering with the professional military’s right to conduct
hostilities as it sees fit. After Truman, limited war gave way to John
Foster Dulles’ doctrine of “massive retaliation”— the replacement ofendless ground wars with nuclear deterrence—but that strategic shift wasmore imaginary than real. As the Vietnam War in its post-French phasemade all too clear, nuclear weapons were irrelevant in civil wars.
In limiting U.S. objectives in Korea and Vietnam to deterrence anddefense, however, the aims of policy were not met. The United States
saw Korea still divided and a North Vietnamese takeover of the South.
Moreover, U.S. presidents presided over the expansion of both wars inother directions. Vietnam became an extension of the Korean War, atleast in the minds of U.S. leaders; and the war in Vietnam engulfed both
Laos and Cambodia.
In Cambodia, the Nixon administration’s
preference for military action rather than acceptance of Prince
Sihanouk’s version of neutrality led to the overthrow of the government
and the start of a nightmarish reign of terror under the Khmer Rouge.
Thus, large-scale U.S. interventions accomplished defense of South
Korea, but at the cost of constant inter-Korean tension, a long-term U.S.
military presence there and in Japan, and postponement of normal
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relationships with Vietnam, China, and North Korea. 50 (China, too,failed to achieve important objectives: It was unable to recover Taiwan,
and it planted the seeds of a hostile relationship with post-war Vietnam.)
It might be objected that in the context of the Cold War, presidents
and their top advisers had limited options: Intervention in Korea andVietnam was unavoidable for both domestic and international reasons.
After all, the Soviet Union and its allies appeared to be on the march; ifthey weren’t stopped, it was irresponsible not to take action to stopthem—and politically risky as well. (LBJ thought he would be
impeached if he pulled U.S. forces out of Vietnam; and not being “thefirst president to lose a war” was the rule number one of presidents
involved in war.) Hindsight only obscures the real-world choices that
faced leaders who had witnessed the Soviets clamping down on Eastern
Europe. These leaders therefore had every reason to presume andanticipate aggressive communist behavior in Asia.
But while these are reasonable counter-arguments to nonintervention,
they inadvertently make the very point I conclude with based on the casestudies.
American administrations are consistently faced with
unpalatable choices because of their prior commitment to being global
policeman. They misinterpret the circumstances of the time—thecommunist threat, the terrorist threat—as requiring a crusade rather thanconsidering each situation from the standpoint of that country’s own
history and nationalist identity. (Where, we should ask, are the Korean
and Vietnamese people and history in the documentary record of thesewars?) U.S. leaders often argue that leadership of the Free World isthrust upon them, and that “history” has chosen the United States to bear
the greatest burdens. In reality, the notion that America is destined tolead, and moreover is beneficent and non-imperial in leading, forms partof the mythology that justifies interventionism. 51 “We are theindispensable nation,” as Madeleine Albright once put it. President
Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech continues this tradition.
The trap of “national security” has been acknowledged by none otherthan Robert McNamara. His memoirs list eleven lessons that should belearned from Vietnam, perhaps the most important of which is thefollowing:
We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders areomniscient. Where our own security is not directly at stake, ourjudgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest
should be put to the test of open discussion in international.

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Notes:1

Recall that U.S. entry into the war in Korea was soon accompanied by therearmament of Germany, establishment of a common European defense strategy
and command center, and an increase in U.S. ground forces in Europe.

2

Ernest R. May, “The Nature of Foreign Policy: The Calculated versus the
Axiomatic,” Daedalus, September 1962, pp. 653-67.

3

Quoted by Akira Iriye, The Cold War in Asia: A Historical Introduction(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 156.

4

Ibid., pp.173-74; Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations
Throughout History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 295. As LaFeberwrites, democratizing Japan was not the primary objective of the U.S.
occupation. “The highest objectives were, first, to use Japan as the hub of an
open, multilateral capitalism in Asia; second, to contain communism; and third
to reassure neighbors by keeping Japan orderly and controlled.” The secretagreements, recently discovered by the new DPJ government in Tokyo, regarded
use of U.S. bases and passage for nuclear-armed ships, including the right of
U.S. ships carrying nuclear weapons to enter Japanese ports. Martin Fackler,“Japan Drops Denial of Cold War ‘Treaties,’” New York Times, March 9, 2010.

5

See Michael Yahuda, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific (London:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 2d rev. ed., p. 111 on NSC-68 as an ideologicaldocument.
6

Benjamin Schwarz, “Why America Thinks It Has to Run the World,” The
Atlantic, April 1996, p. 39.

7

National Intelligence Council, ed., Tracking the Dragon: National Intelligence
Estimates on China During the Era of Mao, 1948-1976 (Washington, D.C.: NIC,
2004), pp. 37-60, 67-80, 87-98, 375-90, 403-12.
8See, for instance, the CNN interview with Kennan in May and June 1996, at
www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/01/interviews/kennan.
9
See the documents in Michael H. Hunt, ed., Crises in U.S. Foreign Policy: An
International History Reader (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996),
pp. xxx.
10

Glenn D. Paige, The Korean Decision: June 24-30, 1950 (New York: Free
Press, 1968), p. 282. Except for the decision of June 29, 1950 to send combat
troops to the Pusan area, Truman did not consult with any formal group such as
the NSC. All the decision making was ad hoc.
11

Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and theEmergence of Separate Regimes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1981), p. 192.

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12

Harry S Truman, Memoirs, vol. II: Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), p. 333. “I felt strongly,” Truman wrote, “that if South
Korea was allowed to fall Communist leaders would be emboldened to override
nations closer to our own shores. . . . If this was allowed to go unchallenged it
would mean a third world war . . . ” Ibid.
13

See, for example, his speech of October 27, 1948 in defense of his “doctrine,”atPublicPapersofthePresidents
1948,
onlineatwww.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=2011&st=communism&st1=.

14

See Paige, The Korean Decision, pp. 98-100

15Ibid., p. 175.

16

Ibid., p. 350.

17

Ibid., p. 331.

18

See John G. Stoessinger, Nations in Darkness: China, Russia, and America,
4th ed. (New York: Random House, 1986), chap. 4.

19

Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).

20

Zhang Baijia, “‘Resist America’: China’s Role in the Korean and Vietnam
Wars,” in Michael D. Swaine and Zhang Tuosheng, eds., Managing SinoAmerican Crises: Case Studies and Analysis (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, 1996), pp. 187-88, 190.

21

Ibid., p. 186.

22

See his telegrams to Stalin and Premier Zhou Enlai in October 1950, in New
York Times, February 26, 1992, p. A4.
23

Zhang Baijia, “‘Resist America,’” p. 190. One other Chinese motive wasrevealed by Mao in once-secret internal talks: his need to demonstrate his
revolutionary credentials to Stalin. Mao would say that only when China sent
troops into Korea did Stalin trust him. Stuart Schram, ed., Chairman Mao Talks
to the People: Talks and Letters, 1956-1971 (New York: Pantheon, 1974), p. ?

24

See Allen S. Whiting, “U.S. Crisis Management vis-à-vis China,” in Swaine
and Zhang, eds., Managing Sino-American Crises, pp. 218-19.

25

See William Appleman Williams et al., eds., America in Vietnam: A
Documentary History (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), pp. 54-55, 90-91, 1056.

26

Ibid., pp. 93-97.

27

The documents cited in this paragraph are from Neil Sheehan et al., eds., The
Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam, 1971), pp. 9, 27-32 [hereafter, PP(B)],142

International Journal of Korean Studies  Fall 2010and in the much larger “Gravel Edition” of the Pentagon Papers published by
Beacon Press.
28

PP(B), pp. 36-37.

29See, for instance, the cables of Ambassador (to Saigon) Henry Cabot Lodge inPP (B), pp. 208-10 and his comments at a meeting of the policy-making
principals in July 1965, in Hunt, ed., Crises in U.S. Foreign Policy, pp. 352-53:“We have to do what we think we ought to do regardless of what the Saigon
government does. As we move ahead on a new phase—it gives us the right andduty to do certain things with or without the government’s approval.” That isclearly what happened in November 1963 when Kennedy in all but executive
order authorized U.S. agreement to Diem’s elimination. The latest once-secret
information on that episode is available from the National Security Archive at
nsarchiv.org.

30

W. W. Rostow, “Guerrilla Warfare in the Underdeveloped Areas,”
Department of State Bulletin, vol. 45, No. 1154 (August 7, 1961), pp. 233-38.

31

Most emphatically in a speech of April 20, 1961, following on the disastrous
attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government in the landing at the Bay of
Pigs. Text in Williams et al., eds., America in Vietnam, pp. 189-91.

32

PP (B), p. 372.

33

Memo from McGeorge Bundy to Lyndon Johnson, February 7, 1965, ibid., p.
426.

34

Draft memo from John T. McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense forInternational Security Affairs, to McNamara, March 24, 1965, ibid., p. 438.

35

Ibid., p. 432.

36

Memo from Rostow to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, November 23, 1964,
ibid., pp. 419-23.

37

Memos of meetings with Johnson and advisers, July 21-22, 1965, in Hunt, ed.,Crises in U.S. Foreign Policy, pp. 351-58.

38

Russell Baker, “What L.B.J. Knew,” New York Times, March 18, 1997, p.
A19.
39

Here I rely especially on Zhang Baijia, “‘Resist America,’” pp. 197-208.

40
Ibid., p 208. The scholar does not consider, however, how that trust waseasily undermined by later developments, such as the U.S. invasion of
Cambodia under Nixon, which drew very sharp Chinese criticism.
41

Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974), pp. 11-12.

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42

See Melvin Gurtov and Konrad Kellen, “Vietnam: Lessons and Mislessons,”
RAND Corporation Paper P-4084 (June, 1969).

43

Unlike in Korea, “the forgotten war,” the Vietnam War produced a huge
literature on the political and cultural history of the country—but only after theUnited States had been involved for about a decade. That output shows no signof slowing. Still, the Korean War has produced a number of distinguished works,
including Bruce Cumings’ two-volume history cited previously; William
Stueck’s The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1995) and later works; Chen Jian’s China’s Road to the
Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994); and David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter:
America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007).
44

Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in
American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, chap. 3.
45James C. Thomson, Jr., “How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy,” in
Eugene R. Wittkopf and James M. McCormick, eds., The Domestic Sources ofAmerican Foreign Policy: Insights and Evidence (Lanham, Md.: Rowman &Littlefield, 2008), 5th ed., pp. 291-302.
46

See the testimony of Gordon Adams before the U.S. Senate Committee on the
Budget, February 23, 2010 at http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/Adams
Testimony.pdf. “The total resources
requested [by the Obama defense department] are, in constant dollars, 16%higher than the 1952 Korean War budget peak, 26% higher than the peak
defense budgets of 1985, and 36% higher than the 1968 peak year for Vietnam
War-era defense budgets.”

47

When, for example, the British objected to American domination of decision
making on the war and proposed that a committee might run it, Truman andGeneral Omar Bradley responded that if anyone didn’t like the way the war was
being waged they could withdraw; the United States was in charge. Minutes of
conversation with Prime Minister Attlee, December 6, 1950, in Hunt, ed., Crises
in U.S. Foreign Policy, p. 222.

48

The War Powers Resolution was intended to restrict presidential prerogativewith respect to the dispatch of troops abroad without Congressional
authorization. But the resolution has never kept presidents from acting as theypleased, whether with reference to the WPR or not. Efforts in Congress to
invoke the WPR have typically failed, usually due to deference in Congress topresidential power in foreign affairs. Such was the case recently when
Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) tried to use the war powers bill to force
U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan within 30 days or by the end of 2010 at thelatest. See Carl Hulse, “House Rejects Plan to Leave Afghanistan By Year’sEnd,” New York Times, March 11, 2010, p. A6.

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49

See Victor D. Cha’s article, “‘Rhee-straint’: The Origins of the U.S.-ROK
Alliance,” in this volume.
50

For an excellent general argument on behalf of a U.S. foreign policy ofnonintervention, see Earl C. Ravenal, Never Again: Learning from America’s
Foreign Policy Failures (Philadelphia, Penna.: Temple University Press, 1978).

51

See my Superpower on Crusade: The Bush Doctrine in US Foreign Policy(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2007) as well as Christopher Layne andBenjamin Schwarz, “American Hegemony—Without an Enemy,” Foreign
Policy, No. 92 (Fall, 1993), pp. 1-7.

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