American Intervention: Resisting Aggression
The trouble with
policy planning is that its analyses cannot foresee the mood of the
moment when a decision has to be made. The various statements of
Truman, Acheson, and MacArthur had correctly reflected American
thinking when they were made. The nature of American commitment to
international security was a subject of domestic controversy and
had not ever considered the defense of Korea. NATO was still in the
process of being formed. But when American policymakers came
face-to-face with an actual Communist invasion, they ignored their
policy papers.
The United States
surprised the Communist leaders after Kim Il-sung’s attack on June
25, not only by intervening but by linking the Korean War to the
Chinese civil war. American ground forces were sent to Korea to
establish a defensive perimeter around Pusan, the port city in the
south. That decision was supported by a U.N. Security Council
resolution made possible because the Soviet Union absented itself
from the vote in protest against the fact that the Chinese seat in
the Security Council was still occupied by Taipei. Two days later,
President Truman ordered the U.S. Pacific Fleet to “neutralize” the
Taiwan Strait by preventing military attacks in either direction
across it. The motive was to obtain the widest congressional and
public support for the Korean War; there is no evidence that
Washington considered that it was, in fact, expanding the war into
a confrontation with China.
Until that decision,
Mao had planned to attack Taiwan as his next military move and had
assembled major forces in southeast China’s Fujian province to that
end. The United States had conveyed in many statements—including a
press conference by Truman on January 5—that it would not block
such an effort.
Truman’s decision to
send the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait was intended to placate
public opinion and to limit American risk in Korea. In announcing
the fleet’s dispatch, Truman cited the importance of Taiwan’s
defense but also called on “the Chinese Government on Formosa to
cease all air and sea operations against the mainland.” Truman
further warned: “The Seventh Fleet will see that this is
done.”34
To Mao, an evenhanded
gesture was unimaginable; he interpreted the assurances as
hypocrisy. As far as Mao was concerned, the United States was
reentering the Chinese civil war. The day after Truman’s
announcement, on June 28, 1950, Mao addressed the Eighth Session of
the Central People’s Government Committee, during which he
described the American moves as an invasion of Asia:
The U.S. invasion in Asia can only arouse broad and determined resistance among the people of Asia. Truman said on January 5 that the United States would not intervene in Taiwan. Now he himself has proved he was simply lying. He has also torn up all international agreements guaranteeing that the United States would not interfere in China’s internal affairs.35
In China,
wei qi instincts sprang into action. By
sending troops to Korea and the fleet to the Taiwan Strait, the
United States had, in Chinese eyes, placed two stones on the
wei qi board, both of which menaced
China with the dreaded encirclement.
The United States had
no military plan for Korea when the war broke out. The American
purpose in the Korean War was declared to be to defeat
“aggression,” a legal concept denoting the unauthorized use of
force against a sovereign entity. How would success be defined? Was
it a return to the status quo ante along the 38th parallel, in
which case the aggressor would learn that the worst outcome was
that he did not win—possibly encouraging another attempt? Or did it
require the destruction of North Korea’s military capacity to
undertake aggression? There is no evidence that this question was
ever addressed in the early stages of America’s military
commitment, partly because all governmental attention was needed to
defend the perimeter around Pusan. The practical result was to let
military operations determine political decisions.
After MacArthur’s
stunning September 1950 victory at Inchon—where a surprise
amphibious landing far from the Pusan front halted North Korean
momentum and opened a route to the recapture of the South Korean
capital of Seoul—the Truman administration opted for continuing
military operations until Korea was reunified. It assumed that
Beijing would accept the presence of American forces along the
traditional invasion route into China.
The decision to press
forward with operations inside North Korean territory was formally
authorized by a United Nations resolution on October 7, this time
by the General Assembly under a recently adopted parliamentary
device, the Uniting for Peace Resolution, which allowed the General
Assembly to make decisions on international security by a
two-thirds vote. It authorized “[a]ll constituent acts” to bring
about “a unified, independent and democratic government in the
sovereign State of Korea.”36 Chinese intervention against U.S. forces
was believed to be beyond Chinese capabilities.
None of these views
remotely coincided with the way Beijing regarded international
affairs. As soon as American forces intervened in the Taiwan
Strait, Mao treated the Seventh Fleet’s deployment as an “invasion”
of Asia. China and the United States were approaching a clash by
misinterpreting each other’s strategic design. The United States
strove to oblige China to accept its concept for international
order, based on international organizations like the United
Nations, to which it could not imagine an alternative. From the
outset, Mao had no intention to accept an international system in
the design of which China had no voice. As a result, the outcome of
the American military strategy was inevitably going to be at best
an armistice along whatever dividing line emerged—along the Yalu
River, which denoted the border between North Korea and China, if
the American design prevailed; along some other agreed line if
China intervened or the United States stopped unilaterally short of
Korea’s northern frontier (for example, at the 38th parallel or at
a line, Pyongyang to Wonsan, which emerged later in a Mao message
to Zhou).
What was most
unlikely was Chinese acquiescence in an American presence at a
border that was a traditional invasion route into China and
specifically the base from which Japan had undertaken the
occupation of Manchuria and the invasion of northern China. China
was all the less likely to be passive when such a posture involved
a strategic setback on two fronts: the Taiwan Strait and
Korea—partly because Mao had, to some extent, lost control over
events in the prelude to Korea. The misconceptions of both sides
compounded each other. The United States did not expect the
invasion; China did not expect the reaction. Each side reinforced
the other’s misconceptions by its own actions. At the end of the
process stood two years of war and twenty years of
alienation.