In retrospect the hubristic complacency infecting all three communist capitals seems astounding. Stalin, of course, was operating on a policy of limited liability, turning Mao into the banker of last resort as his price for the new Sino-Soviet pact. In Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War (Columbia University Press), a magisterial new study using archives from all the key countries, the American historian Samuel F Wells Jr observes that, “At Stalin’s insistence, Mao agreed to give Kim a blank cheque to cash if he got into trouble.” There were shades of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the July crisis of 1914. And the parallels don’t stop there. Kim lacked the logistical capacity for a war lasting more than a few weeks. “Much like the German Schlieffen Plan…” comments the military historian Allan Millett, “the North Koreans planned for a short war since it was the only war they could win.” [...]
Like many crisis decisions by leaders, the president was acting from the gut but also on his reading of the past. “Korea is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman told an aide – alluding to the firm line he had taken on providing anti-communist aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947. “If we are tough now,” he added, “they won’t take any next steps.” But, “There’s no telling what they’ll do if we don’t put up a fight now.” The president also took the international dimension seriously, commenting that the UN was “our idea” in 1945 and “in this first big test we just couldn’t let them down”. [...]
As Truman’s biographer Robert J Donovan observes, “war without congressional approval” was “a costly mistake”, for which the president later paid a heavy price when he lost control of the conflict. At this stage in the fighting, political and public opinion was largely supportive. That was true even of a senior Republican such as Senator Robert A Taft, who accused Truman on 28 June of embarking on “de facto war” with North Korea “without consulting Congress” and warned that “if the president can intervene in Korea without congressional approval” he could “go to war in Malaya or Indonesia”. (Taft might as easily have said Vietnam: in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson followed the same tactic as Truman.) Yet Taft added that he would be willing to vote for a resolution of approval if one were put before Congress. The president, however, considered that he had sufficient constitutional authority as commander in chief, and he was confident that the fighting would be over quickly. [...]
Yet Washington had no idea what that job would entail and lacked even rudimentary information about what was going on behind the bamboo curtain. Although Truman had created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, in its early years the CIA lived up to none of those three words. Not only did it fail to deliver accurate intelligence on many of the major crises of the late 1940s – including the Soviet atomic test – its actions were lethargic and, far from being centralised, it operated as a series of rival fiefdoms spread out in ten different buildings across Washington, DC. In the spring of 1950, after a Soviet spy notified Moscow that the US had broken the codes used by the USSR to communicate with its emissaries in Beijing and Pyongyang, the ciphers were changed and the CIA went blind during the crucial months before the North Korean attack.
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