The Korean War: A History (30 page)

As Harry Truman presided over a vast demobilization of the military and the wartime industrial complex, it was as if the country were returning to the normalcy of a small standing army and hemispheric isolation. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan ended that idle dream in 1947, but Truman and his advisers still did not have the money to fund a far-flung global effort; the defense budget was steady-state in the late 1940s, hovering around $13 billion. Until 1950 the containment doctrine also approximated what its author, George F. Kennan, wanted it to be: a limited, focused, sober effort relying mostly on diplomatic and economic measures to revive Western European and Japanese industry, and to keep the Russians at bay. If the military came into the equation, Americans should send military advisory groups to threatened countries, not intervene militarily themselves.

In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, Kennan provided a pithy expression of this limited conception: to him the containment doctrine was “primarily a diplomatic and political task, though not wholly without military implications.” Once the Soviets were convinced that more expansionism would not help them, “then the moment would have come for serious talks with them about the future of Europe.” After Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin blockade, and other measures, he thought that moment had arrived by 1950. However, “it was one of the great disappointments of my life to discover that neither our Government nor our Western European allies had any interest in entering into such discussions at all. What they and the others wanted from Moscow, with respect to the future of Europe, was essentially ‘unconditional surrender.’ They were prepared to wait for it. And this was the beginning of the 40 years of Cold War.”
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The central front had been established and fortified and the industrial recovery of Western Europe was under way, and in East Asia the “reverse course”—which Kennan was much involved in—had lifted controls on Japanese heavy industry. Soviet troops withdrew from Manchuria in 1946
and North Korea in 1948. But the Chinese revolution’s stunning victories over Nationalist forces made it unlikely that a Cold War stability would descend on East Asia, akin to that in Europe.

Kennan’s 1947 strategy—five advanced industrial structures exist in the world, we have four, Moscow has one, containment means keeping things that way—might have sufficed to achieve the critical goal of reviving Western and Japanese industry. NSC 68 defined a new global strategy, but it was really NSC 48 that cast the die in the Pacific: the United States would now do something utterly unimagined at the end of World War II: it would prepare to intervene militarily against anticolonial movements in East Asia—first Korea, then Vietnam, with the Chinese revolution as the towering backdrop. The complexities of this turning point have been analyzed and documented by historians, but they remain largely unplumbed, even today, among experts on foreign affairs, political scientists, journalists, and pundits, because their work places far too much weight on realpolitik and the bipolar rivalry with Moscow, and relegates the two biggest wars of the period to the shadows of global concerns.

The Chinese revolution also had a dramatic effect on American partisan politics, fueling the “who lost China” attacks by Republicans, but again Kennan took careful and sober measure of its meaning: as Mao came to power in 1949, Kennan convened a group of East Asian experts at the State Department. After listening for a while, he told them, “China doesn’t matter very much. It’s not very important. It’s never going to be powerful.” China had no integrated industrial base, which Kennan thought basic to any serious capacity for warfare, merely an industrial fringe stitched along its coasts by the imperial powers; thus China should not be included in his containment strategy. Japan did have such a base, and was therefore the key to postwar American policy in East Asia.
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The power that revolutionary nationalism could deploy in the colonies or semicolonies of East Asia was but dimly appreciated in Washington
at the time, and that certainly included Kennan. Instead his attention fastened on the only formidable industrial nation in the region, Japan, and what could be done to revive it and its economic influence in East Asia.

Over nearly two years a bunch of papers were developed in the State Department, feeding into a long analysis known as National Security Council document 48/2, “Policy for Asia,” approved by President Truman at the end of 1949. This document is best known for its declassification with the Pentagon Papers in 1971, since NSC 48 called for shipping military aid to the French in Indochina for the first time (aid that began arriving before the Korean War started in June 1950). But its most important substance was in the political economy that it imagined for East Asia. Ever since the publication of the “open door notes” in 1900 amid an imperial scramble for Chinese real estate, Washington’s ultimate goal had always been unimpeded access to the East Asian region; it wanted native governments strong enough to maintain independence but not strong enough to throw off Western influence. The emergence of anti-colonial regimes in Korea, China, and Vietnam negated that goal, and so American planners forged a second-best world that divided Asia for a generation.

In earlier papers that informed the final draft of NSC 48, American officials enumerated several principles that they thought should regulate economic exchange in a unified East Asian region (including China): “the establishment of conditions favorable to the export of technology and capital and to a liberal trade policy throughout the world,” “reciprocal exchange and mutual advantage,” “production and trade which truly reflect comparative advantage,” and opposition to what they called “general industrialization”—something that could be achieved “only at a high cost as a result of sacrificing production in fields of comparative advantage.” NSC 48 planners anticipated nationalist objections in the grand manner of the nineteenth-century Rothschilds:

Yet “general industrialization” is just what Japan had long pursued, and what South Korea wanted, too—a nationalist strategy to build a comprehensive industrial base that contrasted sharply with the Southeast Asian countries (who tend to be “niche” economies like the smaller states in Europe).

Dean Acheson knew next to nothing about military power. For him and other American statesmen, the defeat of Japan and Germany and the struggle with communism were but one part, and the secondary part, of an American project to revive the world economy from the devastation of the global depression and world war. Acheson was an internationalist in his bones, looking to Europe and especially Britain for support and guidance, and seeking multilateral solutions to postwar problems. At first the problem of restoring the world economy seemed to be solved with the Bretton Woods mechanisms elaborated in 1944 (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund); when by 1947 they had not worked to revive the advanced industrial states, the Marshall Plan arrived in Europe and the “reverse course” in Japan, removing controls on heavy industries in the defeated powers. When by 1950 the allied economies were still not growing sufficiently, NSC 68, written mostly by Paul Nitze but guided by the thinking of Acheson (by then President Truman’s secretary of state), hit upon military Keynesianism as a device that did, finally, prime the pump of the advanced industrial economies (and especially Japan). The Korean War was the crisis that finally got the Japanese and West German economies growing strongly, and vastly stimulated the U.S. economy.

American defense industries hardly knew that Kim Il Sung
would come along and save them either, but he inadvertently rescued a bunch of big-ticket projects—especially on the west coast. In Southern California these included “strategic bombers, supercarriers, and … a previously cancelled Convair contract to develop an intercontinental rocket for the Air Force,” in Mike Davis’s words. By 1952 the aircraft industry was booming again. Los Angeles County had 160,000 people employed in aircraft production. In the mid-fifties defense and aerospace accounted directly or indirectly for 55 percent of employment in the county, and almost as much in San Diego (where nearly 80 percent of all manufacturing was related to national defense). Fully ten thousand Southern California factories serviced the aerospace industry by the 1970s; California was always the land of classic high-tech, “late” industries, but airpower had myriad spin-offs and forward linkages to commercial aviation (just getting off the ground in the 1950s), rocketry, satellites, electronics and electronic warfare, light metal production (aluminum, magnesium), computer software, and ultimately the Silicon Valley boom of the 1990s.
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The military was never a significant factor in peacetime American national life before NSC 68 announced the answer to how much “preparedness” the country needed, thus closing a long American debate: and in mainstream Washington, it has never returned. By 1951 the United States was spending $650 billion on defense in current dollars, and finally reached that maximum point again in the early part of this new century—a sum greater than the combined defense budgets of the next eighteen ranking military powers in 2009.

This new empire had to take on a military cast: first of all because by 1950 the problem was defined militarily (unlike Kennan’s emphasis on economic aid, military advice, and the UN). Second, the United
States had nothing remotely resembling an imperial civil service. Before the 1950s the Foreign Service was a microcosm of the Ivy League and the Eastern establishment, operating outside the sight lines of most Americans and without a whole lot to do. It produced exemplary individuals like George Kennan, but it never had a strong constituency at home. It is well known that McCarthy’s assault on officers in the China service ruined American expertise on East Asia for a generation, but Nixon’s attack on Alger Hiss (a dyed-in-the-wool internationalist) may have had worse consequences: anyone in pinstripes became suspect—people seen as internal foreigners—and the State Department was fatally weakened. In the 1960s came the academic specialists—McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski—svengalis who would tutor the president in the occult science of foreign affairs. They also made war upon the State Department, appropriating its responsibilities while ignoring it, thus diluting its influence even more. The State Department often seems to be a foreign office with no clear constituency, but the permanent military installations around the world persist and perdure; they have an eternal writ all of their own.

In the second half of the twentieth century an entirely new phenomenon emerged in American history, namely, the permanent stationing of soldiers in a myriad of foreign bases across the face of the planet, connected to an enormous domestic complex of defense industries. For the first time in modern history the leading power maintained an extensive network of bases on the territories of its allies and economic competitors—Japan, Germany, Britain, Italy, South Korea, all the industrial powers save France and Russia—marking a radical break with the European balance of power and the operation of realpolitik, and a radical departure in American history: an archipelago of empire.
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The postwar order took shape through positive policy and through the establishment of distinct outer limits, the transgression of which was rare or even inconceivable, provoking immediate crisis—the orientation of West Berlin toward the Soviet bloc, for example.
That’s what the bases were put there for, to defend our allies but also to limit their choices—a light hold on the jugular, which might sound too strong until Americans ask themselves, what would we think of foreign bases on our soil? The typical experience of this hegemony, however, was a mundane, benign, and mostly unremarked daily life of subtle constraint, in which the United States kept allied states on defense, resource, and, for many years, financial dependencies. The aggressors in World War II, Japan and Germany, were tied down by American bases, and they remain so: in the seventh decade after the war we still don’t know what either nation would look like if it were truly independent. We aren’t going to find out anytime soon, either.

The Korean War was thus the occasion for recasting containment as an open-ended, global proposition. A mere decade later President Eisenhower could say, “We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” employing 3.5 million people in the defense establishment and spending more than “the net income of all United States corporations.” That was from his famous critique of the military-industrial complex in his Farewell Address; less remembered is Ike’s final news conference, where he remarked that the armaments industry was so pervasive that it effected “almost an insidious penetration of our own minds,” making Americans think that the only thing the country does is produce weapons and missiles.
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When Western communism collapsed, it appeared for a few years that a serious reduction in the permanent military might occur, but “rogue states” kept it going and then the “war on terror” provided another amorphous, open-ended global commitment.

What our history since 1950 teaches, it seems to me, is the following: first, Kennan’s limited form of containment worked, because
after 1948 or 1949 there was nothing to contain; Russia was not going to attack Western Europe or Japan, and so the central front in Europe was stable and the four industrial bases held by the non-Communist side in the Cold War remained invulnerable, enabling them to develop beyond the wildest dreams of American planners in the 1940s. Second, Acheson’s NSC 68 move toward globalism, requiring a huge defense budget and standing army, failed. It failed to win the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and it turned the United States into a country entirely remote from what the founding fathers had in mind, where every foreign threat, however small or unlikely, became magnified and the fundamental relationship of this country to the world was changed forever. That the United States would fight two major wars in Korea and Vietnam could never have been imagined in 1945, when both were still (correctly) seen as problems related to their long histories of colonialism; that the United States would not be able to win either war would have seemed preposterous. For all these reasons, it would have been better to stick with George Frost Kennan’s sober strategies.