The complex strategic considerations of the Communist world were not matched on the American side. In effect, the United States was fighting for a principle, defeating aggression, and a method of implementing it, via the United Nations. America could gain UN approval because the Soviet ambassador to the UN, in a continuing protest over the exclusion of Communist China from the UN, had absented himself from the crucial vote of the Security Council. There was less clarity about what was meant by the phrase “defeating aggression.” Was it total victory? If less, what was it? How, in short, was the war supposed to end?
As it happened, experience outran theory. General Douglas MacArthur’s surprise landing at Inchon in September 1950 trapped the North Korean army in the South and brought about its substantial defeat. Should the victorious army cross the previous dividing line along the 38th parallel into North Korea and achieve unification? If it did so, it would exceed the literal interpretation of collective security principles because the legal concept of defeating aggression had been achieved. But from a geopolitical point of view, what would have been the lesson? If an aggressor need fear no consequence other than a return to the status quo ante, would a recurrence somewhere else not be likely?
Several alternatives presented themselves—for example, holding the advance at the narrow neck of the peninsula on a line from the cities of Pyongyang to Wonsan, a line roughly 150 miles short of the Chinese frontier. This would have destroyed most of the North’s war-making capacity and brought nine-tenths of the North Korean population into a unified Korea while staying well clear of the Chinese border.
We now know that even before American planners had broached the topic of where to arrest their advance, China was preparing for a possible intervention. As early as July 1950, China had concentrated 250,000 troops on its border with Korea. By August, top Chinese planners were operating on the premise that their still-advancing North Korean ally would collapse once superior American forces were fully deployed to the theater (indeed, they accurately predicted MacArthur’s surprise landing at Inchon). On August 4—while the front was still deep in South Korea, along the so-called Pusan perimeter—Mao told the Politburo, “If the American imperialists are victorious, they will become dizzy with success, and then be in a position to threaten us. We have to help Korea; we have to assist them. This can be in the form of a volunteer force, and be at a time of our choosing, but we must start to prepare.” However, he had told Zhou Enlai that if the United States remained along the Pyongyang to Wonsan line, Chinese forces did not need to attack immediately and should pause for intensified training. What would have happened during or after such a pause must be left to speculation.
But the American forces did not pause; Washington ratified MacArthur’s crossing of the 38th parallel and set no limit to his advance other than the Chinese border.
For Mao, the American movement to the Chinese border involved more than Korean stakes. Truman had, on the outbreak of the Korean War, placed the Seventh Fleet between the combatants in the Taiwan Strait on the argument that protecting both sides of the Chinese civil war from each other demonstrated American commitment to peace in Asia. It was less than nine months since Mao had proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. If the final outcome of the Korean War was the presence of largely American military forces along the Chinese border, and an American fleet interposed between Taiwan and the mainland, approving the North Korean invasion of South Korea would have turned into a strategic disaster.
In an encounter between two different conceptions of world order, America sought to protect the status quo following Westphalian and international legal principles. Nothing ran more counter to Mao’s perceptions of his revolutionary mission than the protection of the status quo. Chinese history taught him the many times Korea had been used as an invasion route into China. His own revolutionary experience had been based on the proposition that civil wars ended with victory or defeat, not stalemate. And he convinced himself that America, once ensconced along the Yalu River separating China from Korea, would as a next step complete the encirclement of China by moving into Vietnam. (This was four years before America’s actual involvement in Indochina.) Zhou Enlai gave voice to this analysis, and demonstrated the outsized role Korea plays in Chinese strategic thinking, when he told an August 26, 1950, meeting of the Central Military Commission that Korea was “indeed the focus of the struggles in the world … After conquering Korea, the United States will certainly turn to Vietnam and other colonial countries. Therefore the Korean problem is at least the key to the East.”
Considerations such as these induced Mao to repeat the strategy pursued by Chinese leaders in 1593 against the Japanese invasion led by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Fighting a war with a superpower was a daunting proposition; at least two Chinese field marshals refused to command the units destined for battle with American forces. Mao insisted, and the Chinese surprise attack drove back the American deployments from the Yalu River.
But after the Chinese intervention, what was now the purpose of the war, and which strategy would implement it? These questions produced an intense American debate foreshadowing far more bitter controversies in later American wars. (The difference was that, in contrast to the opponents of the Vietnam War, the critics of the Korean War accused the Truman administration of using not enough force; they sought victory, not withdrawal.)
The public controversy took place between the theater commander Douglas MacArthur and the Truman administration backed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. MacArthur argued the traditional case that had been the basis of every previous American military involvement: the purpose of war was victory to be achieved by whatever means required, including aerial attacks on China itself; stalemate was a strategic setback; Communist aggression had to be defeated where it was occurring, which was in Asia; American military capacity needed to be used to the extent necessary, not conserved for hypothetical contingencies in distant geographic regions, meaning Western Europe.
The Truman administration responded in two ways: In a demonstration of civilian control over the American military, on April 11, 1951, President Truman relieved MacArthur of his military command for making statements contradicting the administration’s policy. On substance, Truman stressed the containment concept: the major threat was the Soviet Union, whose strategic goal was the domination of Europe. Hence fighting the Korean War to a military conclusion, even more extending it into China, was, in the words of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, a combat leader in the war against Germany, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
After some months, the battlefront settled near the 38th parallel in June 1951, where the war had started—just as it had half a millennium earlier. At that point, the Chinese offered negotiations, which the United States accepted. A settlement was reached two years later that has, with some intense but short interruptions, lasted more than sixty years to this writing.
In the negotiations, as in the origins of the war, two different approaches to strategy confronted each other. The Truman administration expressed the American view about the relationship of power and legitimacy. According to it, war and peace were distinct phases of policy; when negotiations started, the application of force ceased, and diplomacy took over. Each activity was thought to operate by its own rules. Force was needed to produce the negotiation, then it had to stand aside; the outcome of the negotiation would depend on an atmosphere of goodwill, which would be destroyed by military pressure. In that spirit, American forces were ordered to confine themselves to essentially defensive measures during the talks and avoid initiating large-scale offensive measures.
The Chinese view was the exact opposite. War and peace were two sides of the same coin. Negotiations were an extension of the battlefield. In accordance with China’s ancient strategist Sun Tzu in his Art of War, the essential contest would be psychological—to affect the adversary’s calculations and degrade his confidence in success. De-esca
lation by the adversary was a sign of weakness to be exploited by pressing one’s own military advantage. The Communist side used the stalemate to enhance the discomfort of the American public with an inconclusive war. In fact, during the negotiations, America suffered as many casualties as it had during the offensive phase of the war.
In the end, each side achieved its objective: America had upheld the doctrine of containment and preserved the territorial integrity of an ally that has since evolved into one of the key countries of Asia; China vindicated its determination to defend the approaches to its borders, and demonstrated its disdain of international rules it had had no voice in creating. The outcome was a draw. But it revealed a potential vulnerability in America’s ability to relate strategy to diplomacy, power to legitimacy, and to define its essential aims. Korea, in the end, drew a line across the century. It was the first war in which America specifically renounced victory as an objective, and in that was an augur of things to come.
The biggest loser, as it turned out, was the Soviet Union. It had encouraged the original decision to invade and sustained its consequences by providing large stores of supplies to its allies. But it lost their trust. The seeds of the Sino-Soviet split were sown in the Korean War because the Soviets insisted on payment for their assistance and refused to give combat support. The war also triggered a rapid and vast American rearmament, which restored the imbalance in Western Europe in a big step toward the situation of strength that the American containment doctrine demanded.
Each side suffered setbacks. Some Chinese historians hold that China lost an opportunity to unify Taiwan with the mainland in order to sustain an unreliable ally; the United States lost its aura of invincibility that had attached to it since World War II and some of its sense of direction. Other Asian revolutionaries learned the lesson of drawing America into an inconclusive war that might outrun the American public’s willingness to support it. America was left with the gap in its thinking on strategy and international order that was to haunt it in the jungles of Vietnam.
VIETNAM AND THE BREAKDOWN OF THE NATIONAL CONSENSUS
Even amidst the hardships of the Korean War, a combination of Wilsonian principles and Rooseveltian geostrategy produced an extraordinary momentum behind the first decade and a half of Cold War policy. Despite the incipient domestic debate, it saw America through the 1948–49 American airlift to thwart Soviet ultimatums on access to Berlin, the Korean War, and the defeat of the Soviet effort to place intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba in 1962. This was followed by the 1963 treaty with the Soviet Union renouncing nuclear testing in the atmosphere—a symbol of the need for the superpowers to discuss and limit their capability to destroy humanity. The containment policy was supported by an essentially bipartisan consensus in Congress. Relations between the policymaking and the intellectual communities were professional, assumed to be based on shared long-term goals.
But roughly coincident with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the national consensus began to break down. Part of the reason was the shock of the assassination of a young President who had called on America to fulfill its idealistic traditions. Though the assailant was a Communist who had sojourned in the Soviet Union, among many of the younger generation the loss raised questions about the moral validity of the American enterprise.
The Cold War had begun with a call to support democracy and liberty across the world, reinforced by Kennedy at his inauguration. Yet over a period of time, the military doctrines that sustained the strategy of containment began to have a blighting effect on public perceptions. The gap between the destructiveness of the weapons and the purposes for which they might be used proved unbridgeable. All theories for the limited use of military nuclear technology proved infeasible. The reigning strategy was based on the ability to inflict a level of civilian casualties judged unbearable but surely involving tens of millions on both sides in a matter of days. This calculus constrained the self-confidence of national leaders and the public’s faith in their leadership.
Besides this, as the containment policy migrated into the fringes of Asia, it encountered conditions quite opposite of those in Europe. The Marshall Plan and NATO succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe, even if impaired. Economic recovery could restore political vitality. But in much of the underdeveloped world, the political framework was fragile or new, and economic aid led to corruption as frequently as to stability.
These dilemmas came to a head in the Vietnam War. Truman had sent civilian advisors to South Vietnam to resist a guerrilla war in 1951; Eisenhower had added military advisors in 1954; Kennedy authorized combat troops as auxiliaries in 1962; Johnson deployed an expeditionary force in 1965 that eventually rose to more than half a million. The Kennedy administration had gone to the edge of participating in the war, and the Johnson administration made it its own because it was convinced that the North Vietnamese assault into South Vietnam was the spearhead of a Sino-Soviet drive for global domination and that it needed to be resisted by American forces lest all of Southeast Asia fall under Communist control.
In defending Asia, America proposed to proceed as it had in Western Europe. In accord with President Eisenhower’s “domino theory,” in which the fall of one country to Communism would cause others to fall, it applied the doctrine of containment to thwart the aggressor (on the model of NATO) and economic and political rehabilitation (as in the Marshall Plan). At the same time, to avoid “widening the war,” the United States refrained from targeting sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos from which Hanoi’s forces launched attacks to inflict thousands of casualties and to which they withdrew to thwart pursuit.
None of these administrations had vouchsafed a plan for ending the war other than preserving the independence of South Vietnam, destroying the forces armed and deployed by Hanoi to subvert it, and bombing North Vietnam with sufficient force to cause Hanoi to reconsider its policy of conquest and begin negotiations. This had not been treated as a remarkable or controversial program until the middle of the Johnson administration. Then a wave of protests and media critiques—culminating after the 1968 Tet Offensive, in conventional military terms a devastating defeat for North Vietnam but treated in the Western press as a stunning victory and evidence of American failure—struck a chord with administration officials.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the Singapore state and perhaps the wisest Asian leader of his period, was vocal in his firm belief, maintained to this writing, that American intervention was indispensable to preserve the possibility of an independent Southeast Asia. The analysis of the consequences for the region of a Communist victory in Vietnam was largely correct. But by the time of America’s full-scale participation in Vietnam, Sino-Soviet unity no longer existed, having been in perceptible crisis throughout the 1960s. China, wracked by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, increasingly regarded the Soviet Union as a dangerous and threatening adversary.
The containment principles employed in Europe proved much less applicable in Asia. European instability came about when the economic crisis caused by the war threatened to undermine traditional domestic political institutions. In Southeast Asia, after a century of colonization, these institutions had yet to be created—especially in South Vietnam, which had never existed as a state in history.
America attempted to close the gap through a campaign of political construction side by side with the military effort. While simultaneously fighting a conventional war against North Vietnamese divisions and a jungle war against Vietcong guerrillas, America threw itself into political engineering in a region that had not known self-government for centuries or democracy ever.
After a series of coups (the first of which, in November 1963, was actually encouraged by the American Embassy and acquiesced in by the White House in the expectation that military rule would produce more liberal institutions), General Nguyen Van Thieu emerged as the South Vietnamese President. At the outset of the Cold War, the non-Communist
orientation of a government had been taken—perhaps overly expansively—as proof that it was worth preserving against Soviet designs. Now, in the emerging atmosphere of recrimination, the inability of South Vietnam to emerge as a fully operational democracy (amidst a bloody civil war) led to bitter denunciation. A war initially supported by a considerable majority and raised to its existing dimensions by a president citing universal principles of liberty and human rights was now decried as evidence of a unique American moral obtuseness. Charges of immorality and deception were used with abandon; “barbaric” was a favorite adjective. American military involvement was described as a form of “insanity” revealing profound flaws in the American way of life; accusations of wanton slaughter of civilians became routine.
The domestic debate over the Vietnam War proved to be one of the most scarring in American history. The administrations that had involved America in Indochina were staffed by individuals of substantial intelligence and probity who suddenly found themselves accused of near-criminal folly and deliberate deception. What had started as a reasonable debate about feasibility and strategy turned into street demonstrations, invective, and violence.
The critics were right in pointing out that American strategy, particularly in the opening phases of the war, was ill suited to the realities of asymmetric conflict. Bombing campaigns alternating with “pauses” to test Hanoi’s readiness for negotiation tended to produce stalemate—bringing to bear enough power to incur denunciation and resistance, but not enough to secure the adversary’s readiness for serious negotiations. The dilemmas of Vietnam were very much the consequence of academic theories regarding graduated escalation that had sustained the Cold War; while conceptually coherent in terms of a standoff between nuclear superpowers, they were less applicable to an asymmetric conflict fought against an adversary pursuing a guerrilla strategy. Some of the expectations for the relationship of economic reform to political evolution proved unfeasible in Asia. But these were subjects appropriate for serious debate, not vilification and, at the fringes of the protest movement, assaults on university and government buildings.
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