The Korean “Sideshow”

Over at 우물안개구리 (Frog in a Well), Jonathan Dresner makes some cutting remarks about Edward Luttwak’s characterizing the Korean War as a “sideshow” in the post-WW2 crusade against communism while Luttwak tries favorably to compare the Shrub in his manifestation as Guy de Lusignan to President “The Buck Stops Here” Truman.  I’m not much interested in Dresner’s poleaxing of Luttwak’s laughably clumsy attempt to rationalize Bush’s policies regarding radical Islamism.  And Dresner makes a fair point in observing that it seems odd at the very least to describe the Korean War, where not only South Koreans, but US and UN troops, engaged in actual, hard fighting, not only with the North Koreans, but the Chinese and even the Russians, as a sideshow to the purportedly main event in Europe.

But in fact, as evidenced perhaps most dramatically by Dean Acheson’s apparent exclusion of Korea from the US security perimeter in his famous January 12, 1950 Washington Press Club Speech, the US did regard Korea as little more than a bit of miscellaneous baggage in the grand terminus of global security arrangements at the end of WW2.  It was only because the North Korean invasion six months later on June 25, 1950 jolted it that the US, very reactively and haltingly at first, as recounted by Acheson himself in Present at the Creation and, in somehwat more detail in the expanded portion theref printed under the title The Korean War, began to re-conceptualize Korea as an arena of and increasingly alarming concern and rapidly growing significance. The suddenness and extreme violence with which Korea was transformed into a critical theatre in the confrontation with Communism which, despite its still secondary importance, nevertheless (as recounted by Acheson) signally affected the post-publication and pre-promulgation development and interpretation of NSC 68, the charter of America’s post-war global security policy and anti-communism and the harbinger of so many other fundamental changes in the American polity (not to mention its massive impact on Korea!) cannot really be grasped unless one appreciates how much less than even a sideshow Korea was in American perceptions of global order and security before 6/25.