For a compact, relatively small-scale conflict, the Korean War—this week’s sojourn for the Strategy & War Course at the U.S. Naval War College—abounds in insights. The historical narrative appears straightforward—an invasion, two outside interventions, eventual equilibrium at roughly the midpoint of the Korean Peninsula—yet the conflict defies easy classification. Or rather, it can be classified in a multitude of ways.
That may help explain why it was so hard for the belligerents to wring lasting political value out of fighting on the Korean Peninsula, and why the war ended disappointingly for them.Think about it. The Korean War was a post-imperial, anti-imperial struggle amid the ruins of the Japanese Empire. Who would rule territories vacated by Japan? Speaking from the decks of the battleship Missouri, General Douglas MacArthur proclaimed that the guns had fallen silent with the downfall of Imperial Japan. MacArthur’s words might ring true for Americans. But the fighting for supremacy resumed in East and Southeast Asia almost instantly—if it paused at all.
The struggle was especially acute in Korea. Japan had annexed the peninsula in 1910, gone to extravagant lengths to expunge Korean culture, and played divide-and-rule among Korean factions to neutralize the opposition. Venomous politics was the rule following Japan’s departure, strife on the peninsula almost a foregone conclusion.The Korean War, then, convulsed Northeast Asia during the aftermath of World War II, when the victors were still trying to sort out a durable postwar order. Prosecuting a new war within war termination poses a challenge of a high order for statesmen and commanders.
To complicate matters further, the Korean War took place during the war-termination phase of the Chinese Civil War. Mao’s China could hardly look indifferently on events on the Korean Peninsula, which shares a border with Manchuria and overshadows the Yellow Sea, at Beijing’s maritime door. After debating with Stalin, Mao resolved to intervene. Japan might rearm and revert to militarism, returning to mainland Asia. To prevent a rerun of history, it seemed imperative to keep Japan from again using the peninsula as a geopolitical springboard. The Chinese Communist regime, furthermore, stood to gain domestically if it could fight America, the world’s predominant power, to a standstill. Military success in the near abroad helped cement communist rule at home.
Finally, and most obviously, the Korean War was a theater in the Cold War. It was an event that was more complex than it might appear. Korea constituted a remote, secondary, hot theater in a global, uneasy, peacetime strategic competition. Such asymmetries rendered diplomatic and strategic calculations awkward indeed. Clausewitz, for instance, declares that a belligerent should open a secondary theater only if the endeavor appears “exceptionally rewarding,” the belligerent commands “decisive superiority” in the principal theater, and the diversion of effort won’t place the main theater in jeopardy. But what if it’s not obvious whether the larger war—i.e., the Cold War—is a war at all? How much manpower and how many resources do you apportion to the more important yet quieter theater, and how much to more immediate concerns? Messy times beget strong, clashing opinions.
The Korean War, then, may offer a glimpse of strategic debates yet to come as Asia enters another age of peacetime competition.
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Kim’s Uncle
Why is china’s ally n best friend North Korea is a toilet while s. Korea a thriving, prosperous democracy? US fought to keep s. Korea to determine its own destiny and now s. Korea is a major trading partner and ally of the US while china has a pile of turd North Korea!!! So red Chinese died by several hundred thousands in order for North Korea remain a pile of turd? LOL. Chinese communists are very bright!
Thomas Fox
I respectfully disagree that the Chinese intervened in the Korean War for fear a resurgent, militaristic Japan. At the end of WW2 Japan was emasculated militarily and by treaty-this still holds true some 60 years later. But I predict that will soon change. Chinas current bullying of its neighbors will soon lead to war.
peter a. wilson
Dear Professor Holmes, One of the most profound consequences of the Korean War was how it militarized the Cold War. By giving Mao the ok to support Kim IL Sung's "adventure" Stalin committed one of his greatest strategic blunders. The U.S. expanded its nuclear arsenal by two orders of magnitude in five years and launched a high technoloy arms race that the Soviet Union was in a very poor condition to compete. NATO was militarized along with the U.S. forward deploymnet of nuclear strike forces around the Soviet Union's periphery during the Eishenhower New Look era. See "Super Powers in Economic Decline" by R. Cohen and P. Wilson for a more extensive discussion in this regard. Peter Wilson
Anon
"Mao’s China could hardly look indifferently on events on the Korean Peninsula, which shares a border with Manchuria and overshadows the Yellow Sea, at Beijing’s maritime door."
This sentence sums it all up. Today, the US thinks that by encouraging its proxy Japan, to reassert its 1895 claims over China's annexed territories close to Taiwan, at China's maritime door, it is containing China. This will unquestionably lead to all out war. No Chinese I know will allow Japan to claim the Dioyu Islands.