Seventy Years Ago This Week


The Korean War started 70 years ago this week. It remains one of the strangest, most misunderstood and brutal chapters in U.S. history. It’s also largely forgotten in our national conversation, which stings given the brave and courageous actions of so many servicemen and women.

The Council on Foreign Relations just concluded a session with leading scholars and analysts on the war and its many legacies. Three takeaways include:

  1. U.S. military leaders opposed entering what started as a civil war, coming just five years after the end of World War Two. The U.S. entry and staggering subsequent military build-up was driven by Secretary of State Dean Acheson who took advantage of President Truman’s inexperience in foreign policy.
  2. The Chinese entry into the war created deep panic in U.S. national security circles. This panic triggered growth in the U.S. defense budget from $13.5 to $60 billion in just six months. It was the moment that the U.S. became a global national security state with troops remaining on the Korean Peninsula today.
  3. No President since the war’s end has tried to solve the underlying North Korea problem in substantive, comprehensive terms. All have focused largely on containment and denuclearization. The Koreas will likely reunite some day, though not in my lifetime, but we have generally not approached the problem in this holistic, big-picture manner. The U.S. raised the stakes in moving immediately to the highest level of diplomacy with Kim Jong-un in recent years, which was very risky. It might have worked with a more competent and better prepared Administration in Washington DC. The efforts were, instead, a “major miscalculation and missed opportunity” according to one of the analysts in the Zoom session.
To learn more about the Korean War, try David Halberstam’s 2007 book. “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.” 


Image courtesy of  PBS.