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. At the same time, Acheson’s political economy—the “great crescent”—was a masterstroke. The Korean War decisively interrupted American plans to restitch American and Japanese economic relations with other parts of East Asia; indeed the repositioning of Japan as a major industrial producer in response to a raging antiimperial revolution on the Asian mainland is the key to explaining most of East and Southeast Asian history for three decades, until the Indochina War finally ended in 1975.
What do You think about The Korean War: A History?
