Seventy years ago this summer, the United States was grappling with the implications of the outbreak of the Korean War.  The North Korean attack on South Korea on June 25, 1950, aided and abetted by Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders, made the Korean Peninsula the epicenter of the Cold War and transformed Washington’s approach to East Asia. As historian Warren Cohen has written, the Korean War changed the U.S.-Soviet confrontation “from a systemic political competition into an ideologically driven, militarized conflict.” This legacy helps explain the nature of the U.S.-China confrontation today, which is based in part on some similarly problematic assumptions. 

Prior to June 1950, Washington had largely dismissed the Korean Peninsula as strategically irrelevant. U.S. military forces that had accepted the Japanese surrender there in 1945 had mostly been withdrawn, and the Peninsula was excluded from the U.S. “defensive perimeter” in the western Pacific in a retrospectively famous speech delivered by Secretary of State Dean Acheson at the National Press Club on January 12, 1950—less than six months before the North Korean attack.  Nonetheless, the administration of President Harry Truman immediately decided to intervene militarily (under United Nations auspices) to repel the attack rather than tolerate such a blatant and aggressive extension of Communist influence and control. 

The cumulative strategic consequences of this abrupt shift were profound. The Korean War essentially ended the debate over NSC-68 (“United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”), a seminal National Security Council document that had been submitted for Truman’s approval in April 1950 but which was still undergoing interagency deliberation when the war broke out. NSC-68 proposed a dramatic increase in military spending to affect a “rollback” of Soviet Communist influence, and thus represented a stark departure from an emphasis on political and economic strategies of containment—as originally intended by diplomat George Kennan, the author of the containment doctrine. Central to the document was its aggressive and expansive characterization of Soviet strategic intentions and designs. The North Korean attack largely decided the argument in favor of the authors of NSC-68, which has since been viewed as the historical blueprint for the “militarized” version of containment that Washington pursued for the remainder of the Cold War. 

Within East Asia, this was manifest in a broad array of policy shifts that expanded the U.S. military presence and U.S. military commitments across the region. In addition to providing the rationale for the U.S. military alliance with South Korea, the Korean War also provided the impetus for the U.S. military alliance with Japan and resolved what had been a debate over whether to retain U.S. military bases there. The war also prompted the Truman administration to extend military protection to Taiwan, after having earlier withdrawn from intervention in the Chinese Civil War; this led eventually to the U.S.-Taiwan Mutual Defense Treaty. Finally, fears of Communist expansion in the wake of the Korean attack provided the basis for increasing U.S. military support to French efforts against the Communist insurgency in Vietnam—thereby setting the stage for eventual American inheritance of that conflict from France. 

Yet all this was arguably based on some misunderstanding and an exaggeration of Communist motives and ambitions. The presumption in Washington at the time was that the North Korean invasion was first and foremost a Soviet operation, directed by Moscow to expand its geographic control and influence.  North Korean leader Kim Il-Song was viewed as a pawn of Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin, and even statements by Beijing that were critical of the U.S. intervention in Korea were presumed to be directed by Moscow. Although it is certainly true that Kim launched the attack only after securing the concurrence of both Stalin and Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, hindsight and historical archives have revealed the extent to which both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders had reservations about granting their support, and how Kim extracted it from them, partly by playing them off against each other.  These fault-lines were not known or contemplated in Washington in 1950. U.S. policymakers were also slow to recognize or acknowledge the possibility of Chinese intervention in the conflict. 

The idea that Moscow’s intentions were limited, or that Kim was anything more than an agent for Soviet designs, received little consideration in Washington. Kennan, as the Truman administration’s top Russia expert, was centrally involved in the summer of 1950 in assessing Soviet motives as the administration deliberated over how to respond to the crisis. He and other Soviet specialists judged that Stalin was not seeking a general war or a showdown with the United States, and was probably as surprised by and apprehensive about the motives behind the U.S. military intervention as Washington was about Stalin’s intentions. Kennan was frustrated by his colleagues’ unwillingness to acknowledge or give credence to this possibility, and recorded so in his diary on July 12, 1950: 

“Plainly, the government has moved into an area where there is a reluctance to recognize the finer distinctions of the psychology of our adversaries . . . In such times, it is safer and easier to cease the attempt to analyze the probabilities involved in your enemy’s mental processes or calculate his weaknesses.  It seems safer to give him the benefit of every doubt in matters of strength and to credit him indiscriminately with all aggressive designs, even when some of them are mutually contradictory.”

A month later, Kennan lamented that “utter confusion” reigned in American foreign policy:  “The President doesn’t understand it; Congress doesn’t understand it; nor does the public, nor does the press.  They all wander around in a labyrinth of ignorance and error and conjecture, in which truth is intermingled with fiction at a hundred points, in which unjustified assumptions have attained the validity of premises, and in which there is no recognized and authoritative theory to hold on to.” 

This no doubt was compounded by the domestic American political environment prevailing in 1950.  The Truman administration was under fire from Republicans (who had been denied the White House since 1933) for being “soft on Communism” after the Chinese Communist Party seized control in October 1949, and Sen. Joseph McCarthy launched the aberrant movement that took his name in a February 1950 speech accusing the administration of harboring Communist sympathizers. No doubt this helped fuel the decision to take a hard line in response to the North Korean invasion, regardless of the absence of a clear and accurate understanding of what dynamics and calculus on the Communist side had brought it about.

Seventy years later, we see many of the same ingredients driving U.S. policy in East Asia, and especially Washington’s approach to China—which has replaced the Soviet Union as the challenger in an “ideologically driven, militarized conflict.”  The military alliance network that the United States constructed in East Asia in the wake of the Korean War remains the primary vehicle for U.S. policy in the region, which is still focused more on military rather than political and economic strategies—as per NSC-68.  And U.S. policy is still based on an exaggeration of Communist motives—in this case a belief that China is pursuing a hostile, exclusive hegemony in East Asia and is seeking to impose its model of governance and economic development on the rest of the world.  Notwithstanding Beijing’s global ambitions and assertiveness and arrogance, little attention is given to the insecurities and defensiveness that are among the drivers of Chinese international behavior, or to Beijing’s desire for peaceful coexistence with the United States. As Kennan wrote, “it is safer and easier” to give Beijing “the benefit of every doubt in matters of strength” and to credit it “indiscriminately with all aggressive designs, even when some of them are contradictory.” 

As in 1950, domestic American politics is fueling this inflated threat perception and rush to confrontational foreign policies. The polarization and dysfunctionality of political discourse in the Trump era has heightened Americans’ sense of resentment and vulnerability, and spawned a new version of McCarthyism that chastises anyone deemed “soft on China.” In this environment, as Kennan also wrote, “truth is intermingled with fiction at a hundred points” and “unjustified assumptions have attained the validity of premises.” This has facilitated the current trend of holding China accountable for many of America’s problems and advocating a Cold War-style pushback against Beijing as the solution to those problems. (Although Beijing merits blame for its failure to do more to contain the global spread of the coronavirus, it is not responsible for the failure to prevent or contain the spread of the virus within the United States.)   

The risk the United States faces today is that of replicating a prolonged cold war like that which lasted another four decades after the Korean War.  China certainly poses a profound strategic challenge to the United States. But it is not one that can be approached with a seventy-year-old playbook. 

Paul Heer is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest dealing with Chinese and East Asian issues. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He has also served as Robert E. Wilhelm Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies and as Adjunct Professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).