[On July 27th, 1953 an armistice signed by President Eisenhower ended the Korean War. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that endpoint and other Korean conflict contexts!]
On what significantly
differentiates the war’s most prominent American leaders, and what links them
nonetheless.
Last March,
I wrote about the 80th anniversary of General Douglas MacArthur’s
famous departure from the Philippines in this
post. It provides important contexts for what I want to say in the remainder
of this post, so please check that one out if you would and then come on back.
Welcome
back! As I detailed in that post, MacArthur had a long
history of disobeying presidential orders by the time of the Korean War,
which began with him in the role of Supreme
Commander for the Allied Powers (in post-WWII Japan, but it transferred
more or less directly to Korea). But to my mind the division between him and
President Harry Truman wasn’t simply about the chain of command, although that
was the overt and understandable (and Constitutional) rationale for Truman
relieving MacArthur of his position in April 1951. I would emphasize
instead the stunningly reckless attitudes MacArthur took toward both China and (especially)
the
use of nuclear weapons to achieve “total victory,” attitudes which if
pursued to their endpoint would almost certainly have resulted in the third
World War that was always possible during the Cold War. While Truman’s description
of the Korean conflict as a
“peace action” is certainly a complicated one, it does reflect his crucial unwillingness
(particularly compared to his top general) to pursue total warfare.
That’s a
vital point, indeed quite possibly a world-saving one, and I don’t intend to
undermine it with this third paragraph. But at the same time, it’s difficult to
argue that Truman’s decision to involve the United States in the Korean
conflict at all wasn’t driven by his own belief that this was a
proxy war against Communism, was part of larger Cold War conflicts with both
the Soviet Union and China. Because of the respective lengths of the conflicts
and numbers of U.S. casualties and presence in popular consciousness and so on,
I don’t think the Korean War has ever received anything close to the kinds of
critiques that the
Vietnam War did, not in their own respective eras nor since. But this was
another global conflict in which the United States did not have to be involved,
and at least in part Truman involved the U.S. because of parallel perspectives
to those which motivated MacArthur. The drastic differences in their actions
and goals notwithstanding, those perspectives are a frustratingly shared part
of these histories.
Next post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Any other Korean War contexts you’d highlight?
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