Mike Gallagher and Aaron MacLean
Seventy years ago this week, the armistice that froze the Korean War was signed. During a year of savage battlefield maneuvering and two more of bitter stalemate, nearly 40,000 American troops gave their lives. Several thousand more allied troops also died, as did millions of Koreans, many of them heroically in combat against communist aggression, and even more as its civilian victims. The southern half of the Korean peninsula, now a thriving democracy, took decades to recover. The northern half never has, remaining impoverished, oppressed, and a source of instability.
The median age of surviving U.S. Korean War veterans is around 90. Recognition of their service has been unforgivably muted despite their valor in some of the most grueling combat American troops have ever faced. But the more general U.S. lack of interest in the war’s strategic lessons is also remarkable—and dangerous.
In China, by contrast, the “War to Resist America and Aid Korea,” as it is officially known, has never been forgotten. And in recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has been aggressively seeking to revive the public’s interest in an idealized version of it. In March, an essay in the CCP’s top theoretical journal praised how the Chinese army “defeated the world’s No. 1 enemy armed to the teeth on the Korean battlefield and performed mighty and majestic battle dramas that shocked the world and caused ghosts and gods to weep.”
In a disturbing 2020 speech commemorating the anniversary of China’s entry into the war, Chinese leader Xi Jinping made it clear that its legacy is central to his dark vision of China’s role in the world. Claiming that Beijing’s intervention began when “a war started by the imperialist aggressors reached China’s door,” Xi drew lessons for the present. In the Korean War, he said, China resolved to send those “aggressors” “a message they will understand.” Today, such aggressors can be reminded that “with an iron will,” China “wrote an earth-shaking epic defeating an enemy rich in steel but weak in will.”
In the view of the CCP, from 1950 to 1953, an immensely weak China, reeling from its own recently concluded civil war, fought the titanic power of the United States and its Western allies to a standstill, establishing that Beijing’s strategic demands could not be ignored. For the party, this conviction remains unshakable, even though the truth is that Communist aggression triggered the war and the performance of Chinese troops, hundreds of thousands of whom died, was vastly worse than CCP propaganda suggests.
In the light of China’s aggressions today, the United States must understand how China is using the Korean War’s legacy as a form of political preparation for wars to come. At the same time, there must be an honest reckoning with why the United States has buried its memories of the conflict for so long.
The Korean War is ambiguously sandwiched in the U.S. public consciousness between memories of victory in World War II and perceptions of tragedy in Vietnam. An elite consensus has settled on approval of President Harry Truman’s leadership during the Korean War, particularly his focus on preventing escalation. At the time, however, Americans took a dimmer view of Truman’s handling of the conflict, which opened with shocking military setbacks and continued for two years of self-imposed, costly stalemate before ending in a frustrating armistice. Americans have long struggled to interpret, let alone celebrate, this brutal but limited action fought in a secondary theater, coming so soon after victory and ending in a tie. But the American tendency to forget the truth and the Chinese eagerness to remember a complicated mix of fact and fiction offer their own lessons, which are especially relevant in view of potential for war over Taiwan.
UNREADY, UNSTEADY
The first lesson is that Washington must not neglect deterrence and readiness. The Korean War was almost lost as a consequence of the Truman administration’s failures on both fronts. By the late 1940s, America’s security establishment was committed to facing the challenge presented by Soviet power—but deeply divided about what doing so would require and what, precisely, should be defended. In January 1950, five months before North Korea invaded its southern neighbor, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech on U.S. policy in Asia at the National Press Club. When he listed the countries included within the U.S. “defensive perimeter” in the region, he conspicuously excluded South Korea, even though it was occupied by American troops until the middle of 1949.
It is not quite right to say, as Acheson’s political opponents later did, that this omission was the blunder that invited the North’s invasion. In truth, Acheson’s full remarks were a fair, if ambiguously worded, characterization of the Truman administration’s Korea policy. Acheson suggested that Washington’s “direct responsibility” for South Korea had ended. He implied that like any other sovereign country, South Korea would now need to rely on itself in the event of an attack, and failing that, to rely on “the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations.” If anyone had bothered to ask who might do the fighting on behalf of the civilized world and the United Nations, the essential incoherence of the administration’s policy would have been swiftly revealed.
Acheson’s remarks were reviewed carefully in the Kremlin. The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was looking for opportunities to probe American resolve beyond the Cold War’s main European theater, and two weeks after Acheson spoke, he gave the North Korean ruler Kim Il Sung permission to invade. Together, the two despots wagered that the United States would not fight for the South, a wager that many American leaders would also have placed before the invasion began.
A Communist invasion in Asia coming on the heels of the CCP’s takeover of China was covered with shock and drama by the American media, and U.S. public opinion coalesced swiftly in support of intervention. A poorly timed Soviet boycott of the UN Security Council permitted that body to officially condemn the invasion, and Truman decided that U.S. intervention, described as a “police action,” would proceed under the UN banner.
The first lesson of the Korean War is that Washington must not neglect deterrence and readiness.
Washington, however, was unprepared to fight. The Truman administration’s tragic diplomatic shortsightedness was compounded by the deterioration of the U.S. military’s capabilities. From an admittedly unsustainable peak of over 12 million in 1945, the number of active U.S. troops had plummeted by nearly 90 percent; there were far too few to man the distant ramparts against the Soviet empire and its allies. Defense spending had similarly withered, dropping from 40 percent of GDP in 1945 to roughly 5 percent in 1950. The quality of the active force’s equipment and its training and fighting culture had also degraded in ways difficult to quantify but ably documented in histories of the period. The result was that when the United States responded to the Communist offensive by sending ground troops to the peninsula, large U.S. formations were frequently defeated and sometimes annihilated by Soviet-trained North Korean units and, later, Chinese “volunteers.”
Such outcomes were shocking then, and they should focus our attention now. In terms of both strategic deterrence and military readiness, contemporary U.S. policy has alarming parallels with 1950. From its recent peak of 4.5 percent of GDP in 2010, U.S. defense spending has fallen to 3.1 percent of GDP and is still shrinking. A manpower crisis threatens the all-volunteer force; the army missed its 2022 recruiting goal by a shocking 25 percent, compelling changes in its force structure.
Washington’s official stance on defending Taiwan, forged in the 1950s, remains one of “strategic ambiguity.” But today, the ambiguity often seems distinctly less than strategic: President Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that the United States will use force to defend Taiwan, only to see his own staff intervene to soften his remarks. Meanwhile, the United States has failed to make sufficient military investments, especially in short-range and intermediate-range missiles, that would render a defense of the island more plausible. As in 1950, the United States seems to be tempting a tyrant in Beijing who harbors imperial ambitious to try his luck.
BATTLEFIELD SUCCESS, POLITICAL FAILURE
Following the near disaster in the summer of 1950, troops under U.S. General Douglas MacArthur’s command made dramatic progress into the North. That, however, led to a Chinese intervention that MacArthur initially failed to detect and that brutally drove UN forces south again. Throughout these terrible surprises and setbacks, greater portions of the U.S. military machine were brought gradually to bear, with the result that by the summer of 1951, military prospects for Communist forces on the peninsula had grown bleak.
The momentum generated by the Chinese intervention had been reversed, and under the inspired leadership of U.S. General Matthew Ridgway, UN forces again went on the offensive, backed by enormous economic resources and tremendous American military might in the air and at sea. Conditions for Chinese and North Korean troops steadily deteriorated, obviating their advantage in manpower and ability to absorb shocking human losses. Meanwhile, in June 1951, the Truman administration, still rattled by its early battlefield losses and under significant international pressure, announced its desire for a cease-fire.
Given these circumstances, why did the war last another two years? The answer reveals a second valuable lesson: politics and combat are deeply intertwined. Today, as then, U.S. adversaries enjoy a much more sophisticated grasp of the interplay between battlefield maneuvering and political warfare than their American counterparts do. For the CCP, in particular, there is no dichotomy between peace and war.
Following expressions of support by the UN and the Truman administration for a cease-fire along the 38th parallel, the latitude line at which U.S. military planners chose to divide North and South Korea after World War II, Ridgway proposed that cease-fire talks take place at sea. The enemy agreed but insisted that the talks occur on land at Kaesong, one of the few places where Communist forces remained south of the 38th parallel. This forced the UN delegation to approach the site of the talks displaying white flags.
These delegates thought they were attending the first session of negotiations ultimately intended to achieve peace. They were slow to understand that the Communist delegation had entirely different objectives in mind. Communist negotiators refused even to agree to an agenda, furiously denounced the UN delegation’s use of the term “communist,” and insisted that UN forces withdraw further south.
The West cannot accept that opponents of the United States do not think the way Americans do.
The themes of this embarrassing episode were recapitulated throughout two more tortuous years of talks. As T. R. Fehrenbach, a historian of the period, put it, Communist forces had succeeded in transferring the war from the battlefield, where they were losing, to the negotiating table, where they might still achieve something.
Having regained the advantage, Communist leaders would not soon relinquish it. They exploited the pause in the UN counteroffensive, which the UN had unilaterally offered in good faith with the commencement of talks, to dig deep into the earth around their own frontline. This action shielded their frontline formations from American airpower and rendered further major UN advances north—for example, to a naturally defensible line between Pyongyang and Wonsan—significantly more difficult.
Having consolidated their position on the battlefield, Communist negotiators declared in August that their UN interlocutors were acting in bad faith and broke off talks; negotiations did not resume until October. Thereafter, one outrageous pretext after the next was deployed to obstruct progress, take advantage of the UN’s naiveté, and humiliate the UN in the court of global opinion, especially regarding the issue of prisoners of war.
The UN sought to treat Communist prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Communist captors treated UN prisoners of war with remarkable cruelty, and approximately 40 percent of American POWs died in captivity. Meanwhile, according to surveys conducted in UN POW camps, many of the enemy prisoners held in the south expressed an understandable desire not to be repatriated to North Korea or China. But the Communists orchestrated a series of sophisticated gambits, integrating revolts by organized party cadres in the camps with positions taken at the negotiating table, to project an alternate reality. Many in the press and in foreign ministries around the world took it as a fact that the UN was mistreating POWs and preventing their longed-for repatriation. This would be the principal issue on which negotiations foundered, as Communist negotiators insisted until 1953 that the UN repatriate all of the prisoners it held.
Again, the parallels between the 1950s and today are clear. There is something innocent and irrepressible in the Western inability to accept that opponents of the United States do not think the way Americans do, and particularly that the CCP sees no shame in twisting the truth to advance its ambitions. Recently, after the COVID-19 pandemic began, international authorities rushed to assist China and to investigate the source of the outbreak in a spirit of genuine concern. In stark contrast, the CCP closed off all cooperation, destroyed evidence, caused key personnel to disappear, and mounted a campaign to claim that the virus originated in a U.S. military lab in Maryland. Political warfare is a constant for the CCP. The United States and the international order that it backs are still its targets today, even without a hot war.
PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH
The Korean War dragged on through 159 plenary sessions of talks and two long years of additional violence. There is a tendency in later commentary to forgive the Truman administration for these stalemate years on the ground that the president also managed to prevent the war from escalating. In April 1951, Truman relieved MacArthur of his command in Korea. This event now forms a central episode in positive accounts of Truman’s leadership of the war: a plain-mannered Cold War liberal devoted to containing the conflict and preserving alliances staring down a megalomaniacal right-wing general who told Truman first that the Chinese would not intervene and then argued for expanding the war by attacking China directly, including with nuclear weapons.
There is truth to this characterization. But beneath its tone of self-congratulation, this consensus account underrates the costs of prolonging the war and overrates the risk of escalation that existed in 1951. Absolving the Truman administration of blame for the war’s stalemate phase tends to assume that there were only two options available to decision-makers in the first half of 1951: what actually happened, or World War III. It also loses sight of how, in the face of the enemy’s intransigence, the United States’ lack of diplomatic sophistication combined with its self-imposed military restraint allowed many thousands more to die, only to achieve worse outcomes than were available in 1951. The consequences for the Korean Peninsula and the growth of CCP power continue to resonate today.
To be clear, relieving MacArthur of his command was justified. If anything, Truman waited too long to do it after MacArthur failed to anticipate or even detect the Chinese intervention and then grew increasingly insubordinate, criticizing Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in his communications with Congress. But reducing the Truman-MacArthur conflict to a ready-made morality tale obscures the more complicated policy debate that the two men were having. Between the extremes of Truman’s restraint and the possibility of global war, numerous options existed. Truman’s decision to renounce nuclear threats and to restrict combat operations to Korea and its airspace prolonged the war and, paradoxically, extended the period in which it could have escalated.
Excessive self-restraint can invite further aggression.
Truman’s restraint and the attitude of his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, make for a study in contrasts. Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election in no small part because of public disgust over the stalemate in Korea. Although Truman and his advisers mostly seemed to wish that the war wasn’t happening at all, as president-elect, Eisenhower traveled to the Korean peninsula and embraced the war’s challenges. From the outset of his tenure, he regularly contemplated and discussed the possibility of escalation, even approving the development of war plans that involved the use of nuclear weapons. In May 1953, U.S. Secretary of State John Dulles informed Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that the U.S. might escalate its tactics in Korea. By July, the Communists had signed the armistice.
What role Eisenhower’s willingness to raise the stakes played in the war’s end is still a subject of fierce debate among historians. Indeed, it remains unclear whether Nehru passed Dulles’s threat on to Stalin. And many other factors led to the armistice; most significantly, Stalin’s death in March 1953 removed the war’s true originator from the picture.
Nevertheless, when the Truman administration repeatedly offered olive branches and held back on the battlefield, the United States’ enemies redoubled their efforts. Eisenhower argued during his campaign that what Truman called a “police action” was in fact a necessary “crusade”; months after Eisenhower signaled that the party was about to come to an end one way or another, the armistice was concluded. Eisenhower would again exhibit this kind of determination during the 1954–55 Taiwan Strait Crisis, securing advance authorization from Congress to use military force, publicly stating that he was willing to use tactical nuclear weapons in a war with China, and surging military assets to the region. U.S. allies signaled their discomfort, as they surely would have in 1951 had Truman been more aggressive.
But the gambit in the strait succeeded. And Eisenhower was extremely meticulous when it came to alliance management. In 1957, he said his foreign policy vision was simple: “to wage the Cold War in a militant, but reasonable, style whereby we appeal to the people of the world as a better group to hang with than the Communists.” Today, as then, only the United States can mobilize the free world in order to prevent—and, if necessary, to win—a war.
Thus, a third lesson of the Korean War is that once fighting has broken out, excessive self-restraint can invite further aggression. Demonstrating a credible willingness to escalate and the capacity to dominate should such escalation be required can promote peace. To point out this paradox is not to express a desire for World War III, but to prescribe a course for its prevention.
DON’T FORGET THE ARMISTICE
The United States forgot the Korean War because its outcome was unsatisfactory—even shameful, in the eyes of some Americans. Meanwhile, despite some grim realities in its performance in the conflict, China has found the war to be a source of inspiration.
This aggressive revisionism is not limited to elite proclamations. In 2021, The Battle at Lake Changjin, a film retelling the fighting around the Chosin Reservoir, became the highest-grossing Chinese movie in history. Commissioned for the party’s centenary celebrations by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, the movie makes for surreal viewing, suggesting that the Korean War began with MacArthur’s invasion at Inchon. Mao Zedong, portrayed as a fatherly warrior-saint, deploys legions of strapping peasant boys to repel sinister hordes of capitalist warlords from the Chinese periphery. Mentions of the Soviet Union, and even more strikingly, Koreans are in short supply.
The United States must not practice its own form of fictionalization by forgetting or misinterpreting the Korean War’s lessons—particularly because China’s active, albeit highly distorted, revival of the war’s memory should be taken as an indication of its belligerent present-day intent. Anniversary speeches such as Xi’s and movies such as The Battle at Lake Changjin are themselves a form of preparation for war. Taken in combination with explicit statements by Xi that his generals must be ready to “dare to fight” and evidence that the Chinese have already begun to fight for Taiwan in the information and cyber domains, there can be little doubt about what is coming if Washington does not urgently commit to applying the Korean War’s lessons, properly understood.
In its last war with China, Washington failed to deter its adversaries, failed to prepare its military, and prolonged the fighting, ultimately accepting outcomes in 1953 that would probably have been available in 1951 had it adequately projected its own resolve. The next time, the stakes will be even higher—and Washington must do better.
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