Hi.

Welcome back. This segment focuses on how the Korean War

began in 1950. You'll have noticed that in the course we
do tend to zoom in from time to time on how wars
begin. We don't do this for all these wars in 250
years of world history. [LAUGH] That would be impossible. But we do zoom in on some
of these
choices. Why? First, because we tend to zoom in on
choices about wars that had a large impact on the history of
the world. And by the way, I think the Korean War had
a large impact on the history of the world, much larger than would be implied
just by the fate of Korea itself, though that was
important. But second, by zooming in on these
particular occasions, we get a little bit of insight into the mindsets of people at
the time. We just happen to choose the mindsets of
people wearing crowns or holding high office, but in many ways their mindsets
and values are typical of many others. It's important not to see the Cold War as
just some kind of simplistic linear story of, welp, two sides
are in conflict with each other. The character of this confrontation really changed
a lot in 1949, 1950, and 1951.
That's a pivot point. In 1949, important parts of Europe and
Asia are being organized around very different
social systems. Okay. That didn't necessarily mean that those
two systems had to come into military
conflict. From a point of view of the United States,
they had to have some readiness for this. But they weren't sending lots of troops
to
go out to Europe and to defend Europe. They were, in fact, pulling troops out of
Europe. They weren't sending lots of troops into East Asia to defend East Asia from
communism. They had just declined to intervene in the
Chinese Civil War and were getting ready to pull troops out
of Korea, and even questioning whether to keep occupation
forces in Japan of the same size. So, they thought that they were in a broad
political and economic confrontation/
rivalry, but that it didn't necessarily mean that they were
on a path to some kind of gigantic war. It's important then to recover the world
of 1949. The United States is envisioning probably
some kind of multipolar world emerging, in which there will be a group of
communist states, but they're hoping that the Soviet
Union and China will begin to disagree with each other and that
they'll be both friends and rivals. They see an increasingly empowered Western
Europe again becoming an important force in its own right, but
they hope having good relations with the United
States, participating in the world economy, with some American
military assistance and economic support but declining. They see a series of new
independent
states and reconstructed states, like Japan and
East Asia, again with the American military role going down, but with America
providing
some foreign aid, military and economic, to
help those new states get on their feet. So, they're envisioning a fairly complex
world. Now, the implications for that, in Western
Europe, is the United States gives Western Europe a
treaty, in '48 and '49, called the North Atlantic
Treaty, that promises that if you're attacked, we'll
come to your defense. That's meant to reassure the Europeans, a reassurance that
they hadn't had in the
1930s. But it�s just a treaty. It doesn't mean that large numbers of
American ground troops are now going to be based in Europe. The Americans don't
intend that, that will
happen in 1949. Their occupation forces in Europe are
being drawn down. They don't have serious ground combat
forces stationed in Europe in 1949. They're expecting the West Europeans now
are on a path of rebuilding, regaining their
strength. In Asia, they have this similar concept. They write this down in an
agreed
presidential decision document, NSC, National Security Council Document, 48/2
that envisions these new independent power centers in Asia that
they hope will be friendly with United States, getting some financial
support from the United States. And in this document, and in later
statements, the Americans are hoping to kind of keep
communism on the Asian mainland, to have a defense perimeter that provides
reassurances to places like Japan and the Philippine
Islands. Now meanwhile, in 1949 and early 1950,
there is a big argument going on in the American
government about national defense. It's a very revealing argument.
On one side are the internationalists, they believe that even these commitments
that I've been talking about cannot be supported by the very low levels of
defense spending in the American budget. On the other side, the majority of the
Congress, and actually President Truman and his
budget office, want to cut the defense spending still further
and want to push more spending into helping
Americans at home. They want to cut defense spending.
After all, they have the atomic bomb, and nobody else
does, and maybe that'll be good enough to provide the
security reassurance they need. There are two major blows in 1949 that
shake American complacency. The first is the Soviets detonate their
own atomic bomb. This is actually a photograph taken by
Soviet officials at the time of their first
A-bomb test. The Americans only detected the tests through air samples that picked
up the radioactive
particles. The other huge blow for the United States
is the fall of China to the Communists. Here's Mao Zedong in 1949 announcing the
establishment of the new People's Republic
of China. So the Soviet A-Bomb test is disturbing
because, if both the Soviets and the Americans have A-Bombs
and neither side can use atomic bombs against each other, then maybe you're left
with a balance of conventional forces. But in Europe, that looks like that balance
favors a much larger Red Army. That creates a lot of
unease, shall we say. And then in China, you've got a
dramatically expanded Communist position with a lot of revolutionary momentum in
their favor. What's that going to mean? So the arguments in late �49 and early
1950 get much more intense because,
Meanwhile, President Truman is still determined to keep defense
spending way down and concentrate his energies on
America's domestic development. But now flip your perspective, from the
point of view of the Soviet government and the Chinese government, what are they
thinking
about? The Soviet Union is still recovering from
the enormous damage it suffered and losses it took during the
Second World War. China is just coming out of a civil war. You could easily make a
very plausible
argument that their first priority's going to be domestic
reconstruction and rebuilding, consolidation of their new
republic. But when Stalin and Mao get together, they're already talking
about ways in which they can make advances. Mao, for example, is very focused on
the
desire to chase the Nationalists over the island of Taiwan and
wipe out their last bastion. In early 1950, he's planning that invasion.
By the way, the Americans fear that Mao plans to invade Taiwan, but
actually in early 1950, the American government has kind of philosophically
resigned itself to the fact that Taiwan is going to be lost. They are not going to
defend the Chinese
Nationalists position in Taiwan, even though many people in
Congress want them to. And Mao and Stalin are also looking at
ways the Chinese can help the insurgents fighting
the French in Indo-China. And they're also paying more and more
attention to what's going on in Korea. Let's look at the situation in Korea in
1949-1950. Here's the part of the world we're looking
at. We've looked at maps covering this part of
the world in different settings for something
like 100 years now. You could make a pretty good argument that this particular
pocket of Northeast
Asia, and a fairly small part of Northwestern
Europe, seem to be the arenas where an awful lot of world history gets decided.
So here's Korea. Korea had been a colony of the Japanese
since about 1910. After World War II, that colony was taken
away by the victorious powers. It was going to go back to Korean control,
all the issues arise, well, which Koreans? Who's going to run it? The United
Nations has responsibility for
sorting that out. In the meantime, the United Nations recognizes
that Korea is under the military administration of
occupying powers. Those occupying powers are the Soviet
Union and its forces in the North, the Americans and their forces in
the South, with the division of the occupation running about along the
38th parallel there. What happens then, though, is that two rival republics are
created in these
two different zones of occupation as the Cold War intensifies
in the late 1940s. A Republic of Korea, here, and a Democratic
People's Republic of Korea, up here. Both of these new Korean states, each of
which claimed the whole peninsula for themselves, are, in a
way, both revolutionary-style governments. The South Korean side, the Republic of
Korea, is led by Syngman Rhee, a longtime Korean nationalist who'd been
hoping to enlist outside help in getting the
Japanese out. Here's a picture of Syngman Rhee. Rhee's ideology might fall in that
family
of political beliefs that I called National Conservatives:
top-down modernizers, very nationalist. On the other side, the Soviet Union and
the new People's Republic of China, support the
leadership of Kim Il Sung. Kim Il Sung had been part of a group of Chinese and
Korean revolutionaries
fighting against the Japanese. During World War II, Kim had been in the
Soviet Red Army. After World War II, the Soviets nominate
him to play a leading role in their zone of
occupation, and he ends up becoming the lead figure in the state they sponsor
in their zone. Naturally, these two rival governments are
in tension with each other, but the critical variable is: What do
their superpower patrons think? The Americans, looking at Syngman Rhee,
they're actually ambivalent. There are some things they like about his new
government, there are a lot of things
they don't like about his new government, and
above all, they do not want him starting a war with North Korea. The Americans do
not want any kind of war
in Korea. Indeed, they've decided that they're
going to withdraw the last of their occupation forces out of
South Korea. They make that decision in 1948 and �49. They pull those forces out,
leaving behind
a small number of people advising the new South
Korean army. On the North Korean side, the Soviets and the North Koreans are also
having their
discussions. But the outcome is very different.
Kim Il Sung repeatedly pleads with Stalin. Give me the authorization, give me the
help to launch a decisive invasion that will unify Korea
under our control. Finally, Stalin and Kim have a decisive
meeting in April 1950 in Moscow. We actually now have the Soviet records of
a key part of that conversation. To the extent you can find any
documentation of exactly how the Korean war begins, it would be the record of this
meeting in April 1950. If you're a note taker for one of Joseph Stalin's meetings,
probably the
safest thing for you to do is to write really careful and accurate notes of exactly
what your
man said. These records, long secret, have this
really interesting passage.
Let's take a close look. Comrade Stalin confirmed to Kim Il Sung
that the international environment has sufficiently changed to permit a more
active stance on the unification of Korea. Why?
He explains his reasoning. Internationally, the Chinese Communist
Party's victory over the Guomingdang, that's 1949, previous year,
has improved the environment for actions in Korea. China's no longer busy with
internal
fighting and can devote its attention and energy to the
assistance of Korea. Note, if necessary, China has at its
disposal troops which can be utilized in Korea without any harm to the
other needs of China. It's a pretty significant statement. He adds, the Chinese
victory is also
important psychologically. It has proved the strength of Asian
revolutionaries and shown the weakness of Asian reactionaries and their
mentors in the West and America. Americans left China and did not dare to challenge
the new Chinese authorities
militarily. There is good evidence that both Stalin
and Mao had actually expected that the Americans would have intervened
massively in the Chinese Civil War. They may have been a bit surprised when
the Americans did not do so, and you can see here the kind of
conclusion Stalin drew from that. And now, he adds that he and Mao have
signed a treaty of alliance with the USSR. Americans will be even more hesitant to
challenge the communists in Asia. According to information coming from the
United States, it is really so. The prevailing mood is not to interfere. This is an
absolutely critical judgment
he's making. What's his evidence for making it? What is he referring to here?
Answer: We don't know. What we do know is that that NSC document I told you about,
in which the Americans
have drawn their defense perimeter off the
coast and have made the decision to pull their troops out
of Korea, Stalin has that document. Some key British officials stationed in
Washington who had
access to those documents were working as spies for the Soviet Union
at this time. So, that may be what he's referring to. In January of 1950, the
American Secretary
of State, Dean Acheson, had even alluded publicly to the defense perimeter
extending from Japan to the Ryukyu Islands to the
Philippines, and so the Soviets may have drawn this
conclusion that the Americans are going to adopt a hands-off attitude.
Such a mood is reinforced by the fact that the USSR now as the atomic bomb and that
our positions are solidified in Pyongyang. That's Kim Il Sung's capital. However,
we have to weigh once again all
the pros and cons of the liberation. First of all, will Americans interfere or
not? Second, the liberation can be started only
if the Chinese leadership endorses it. So he's actually being remarkably
transparent and analytical about his key judgments. You can see the conclusion he's
coming to
on the first question. As to the second one, what then follows is
an intensive series of discussions with Chinese leader Mao Zedong, especially in
May 1950, in which Mao agrees to support the North Korean move.
He has some reciprocal requests of assistance he wants from the Soviets in
return. At the end of June 1950, the North Koreans launched a massive invasion,
supported by Soviet military equipment including tanks, and an
operational plan that's been written by the Soviet general
staff. What then happens, in the last days of
June and first days of July 1950, is that the United States, backed by the United
Nations, actually decides to fight to save South
Korea and commit American forces to a war there.
Now, just pause for a second on this. Stalin had expected that the Americans
would not do that. He had good reason for coming to that
point of view, because actually the American
government had carefully studied this issue and had repeatedly
concluded, in writing, that it would not defend South Korea
against an attack. Why, then, did Truman and his
administration effectively do a 180-degree flip and decide they would
defend South Korea? There's a wonderful analysis of just this
point that was done long ago by a late, close colleague of mine, named Ernest May,
in
which he talked about the difference between
calculated and axiomatic reasoning. As a matter of cold, analytic calculation, the
American government had decided that
it should not get involved in a war to save South Korea. It was the wrong place to
have a war if a
war came. But when the attack actually happened, it
seemed so brazen to them. What it instantly evoked was an analogy:
This feels like Hitler in 1938. It feels like the kind of aggression we were
confronted against
back then, and we didn't stand up then. It felt to them, and these were all men
who had been profoundly marked by that period in the
late 1930s and early 1940s, it felt emotionally, viscerally, to them
like they were being tested again. Will you stand up to worldwide
aggression? And drawing from that sense of historical
analogy, they just instinctively responded: We have to
meet the challenge. You constantly see in the contemporary
documents these references to the 1930s and to Hitler, and that
axiomatic reasoning quickly overrode all the prior careful, cold-blooded
calculations as they decide to make their
stand. It turns out to be a very tough decision.
South Korea is almost entirely overrun. The Americans just barely hold on, as you
can see from this map. The North Koreans driving south.
By the beginning of August 1950, this perimeter, right here, is the only area
still held by the United States Forces, fighting under United Nations
authorization, and their South Korean allies. But they were able to hold on.
What happened next created a whole new war.
Indeed, caused the whole world to think that World War III was about to start.
We'll talk about that next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]