“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

David Frost, The Road Not Taken

“A détente is beginning. a modus vivendi. It started already in Korea. The dangers of war at present are less and less. The decisive point in Korea was the quarrel between MacArthur and Truman. This showed that the United States did not want war. After Truman said no to MacArthur’s proposal to attack China, [world] war was excluded… These are the imponderables that make for a modus vivendi…; it is an armed peace.”
General Charles De Gaulle

I. The Critical ‘Conjoncture’ of the Cold War and Resulting Pathway Dependencies

NSC-68 and the Korean War combined to create a critical ‘conjoncture ’ in the early Cold War that crystallized the terms of debate, the means of confrontation and the rules and arenas of engagement of the global, militarized conflict which constituted the central dynamic of the bi-polar world system of the next four decades. Most importantly, it militarized the Cold War, transformed Asia into the central military battlefield between the two camps, and created a US foreign policy consensus in aggressively opposing communism by any means necessary not only in Europe, but throughout the emerging Third World.

The analytic part of this paper concentrates neither on the ‘macro’ (structural/systemic) nor on the ‘micro’ (individual/agency) levels of social analysis, but rather on the ‘mezo’ level, where various institutionalized epistemic communities interact and create ‘path dependencies’ which open up specific avenues of inquiry, decision-making, action and development whilst simultaneously closing off others . Thus, we will focus on the evolving paradigms and interactions of the US, Communist bloc, and Western European foreign policy networks before and during the Korean War.

The explanatory part will then examine the consequences of the ‘conjoncture’ analyzed above, in both space and time. We will briefly highlight its effects and the path dependencies it generated in the central, secondary and peripheral arenas of the Cold War over the short, medium and long term.

II. Dynamics of Foreign Policy Networks Before the Outbreak of the Korean War

Three critical foreign policy networks dominated the first decade after the end of World War II: one centered in Washington, DC, the second in Moscow, and the third in key West European capitals. The internal dynamics of each of these networks, and the interaction between them, provide us with a better understanding of both the origins and the consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the Cold War.

1. Western Europe: Always Fighting the Last War

Although the Marshall Plan was coming to an end, a true Western European economic recovery had not yet taken place by 1950; the threat of powerful Communist parties capable of exploiting this situation with the help of the Soviet Union was therefore still very real, especially in Italy and France. In addition, the three major European powers seemed unwilling to coordinate their foreign policy aims and strategies. NATO remained a paper alliance; the French proposal for a European Defense Community was designed to preclude West Germany from joining NATO and re-establishing its own armed forces ; West Germany under Adenauer insisted to join NATO as an equal partner and be allowed control of its own Army ; while Great Britain, slowly recovering from the post-war slump, still dreamt of re-shaping the British Empire into a “Third Force” comparable, if not equal, to the USA and USSR .

2. The Communist Bloc: “Team Stalin”

All national communist party leaders of the Communist bloc (Yugoslavia’s Tito excepted) acknowledged Joseph Stalin’s unquestioned leadership, particularly in foreign policy matters. Throughout his rule, Soviet foreign policy approaches had been defined by two variables: an ideological one, gravitating between a national/imperialist pole and a communist / revolutionary pole ; and an administrative one, oscillating between a technocratic command state and a repressive militarized state. Unlike in the USA, however, there were no factional divisions between “Team Stalin”’s members: only the Boss himself could decide what the right mix of the four resulting paradigms would be the correct one at any given time and accordingly, which members of his team would belong to his inner circle -and which would not .

New documentary evidence shows us, however, that relations between “The Boss”, China’s Mao and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung were rather more complex by 1950 . Despite Stalin’s reluctance to engage in a war that might lead to an unwanted direct confrontation with the USA, Mao’s military romanticism and Kim’s impatiently aggressive nationalist push to reunite the Koreas into a viable state under his rule played decisive roles in the former’s final acquiescence to direct logistical and indirect military support of the June 25, 1950 invasion of South Korea . In turn, Mao’s promise to assist Kim should he require military support after the start of hostilities was motivated by his fear of encirclement by the USA from its Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese bases , by internal Chinese political reasons aiming to radicalize and thus consolidate the still young Chinese Communist revolution ; and by his desire to finally obtain Stalin’s approval as the leader of a true Communist revolution and Party – and not be thought of as potentially “just another Tito” .

3. USA: “The Great Debate” and the Korean War

By 1950, the “Great Debate” splitting asunder the US foreign policy establishment combined two sets of dichotomies -between “American Exceptionalism” and the fear of its replacement by a “Garrison State”; and between the “Welfare State” and the “Warfare State” . This resulted in four foreign policy approaches –each with its own supporters and detractors:

Until 1947, the majority US foreign policy view was that of cooperative multilateralism, based on three pillars: an effective UNO; collaboration with the USSR; and reliance on Britain to manage the international system as an equal partner . By 1948, these pillars were failing. The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, National Security Act and NATO laid out the political and institutional foundations of a new US foreign policy. However, President Truman opposed for both political and ideological reasons the substantial increases in the US Defense Budget which would give the United States the means to implement its professed policies.

The 1949 Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb and Mao’s Communist victory in mainland China convinced Truman that a re-examination of US national strategy was required . The ascendant State Department foreign policy team led by Secretary Acheson and Office of Policy and Planning Director Nitze drafted NSC-68 and submitted it to the President on April 14, 1950. However, because of its dramatic budgetary implications, as well as anticipated opposition in Congress, President Truman did not act on these recommendations, asking instead for further details and specifications.

After June 25, 1950 NSC-68 provided President Truman with a legitimating intellectual lens though which to view and understand what he considered North Korea’s unprovoked and unexpected aggression on South Korea , and with a means to both build up support for his multilateral containment foreign policy and discredit its main competitors: traditional isolationism and aggressive unilateralism.

The MacArthur-Truman conflict personified, internally, a clash between the very notion of civilian control over the US armed forces and the rise of a true Garrison State ruled by a military elite ; and externally, a conflict between Truman’s policy of multilateral containment and a likely direct confrontation between the USA and the USSR combined with a probable disintegration of the US-European alliance network. The confrontation reached its peak then faded away after Truman relieved MacArthur of all his commands in April 1951. The presidential election, in 1952, of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who essentially pursued the policy of multilateral containment embodied in NSC-68, established a cross-party foreign policy consensus in the USA that was to last virtually until the end of the Cold War.

III. Consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the Cold War

The aggregate impact of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the three foreign policy networks discussed above, and hence on the conduct of the Cold War, was not only dramatic in the short term, but also significant in the medium- and long-term.

Although the Cold War had started since at least 1948, by 1950 the European, Soviet bloc and US foreign policy networks were still largely turned inward, focusing primarily on issues deeply embedded in the historical experiences of their own states and regions. The Korean War propelled them together and connected them for the very first time in a truly global adversarial governance network articulated by the Manichean conflict between freedom and tyranny as described in NSC-68.

The three key short-term consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War were a massive militarization of the Cold War, not only in the United States but also in Western European countries; the jumpstarting of West European and Japanese economies as they scrambled to supply the vast needs of the UN-sponsored troops fighting up and down the Korean Peninsula; and the establishment of a wide network of US-centered alliance systems designed to contain and perhaps even roll back the communist threat: General Eisenhower was appointed NATO’s first SACEUR and given as mandate to transform the alliance into the world’s first truly multinational military organization; a peace treaty was signed with Japan in 1951, just as ANZUS was being ratified; and SEATO and the Baghdad Pact were established in 1955. Perhaps most remarkable, France decided to abandon its historical enmity with Germany and acquiesce, however reluctantly, to its rearmament and entry into NATO as an equal partner.

In the medium term, drawing on the lessons learned in Korea that nuclear weapons could hardly be used as offensive weapons on the battlefield, but only as a means of deterring larger conflicts between the two super-powers , the US adopted a dual strategy of a global nuclear arms race with its main rival, whilst fighting low-intensity wars in Asia designed, in its view, to “free (its peoples) from age-old forms of social and ideological oppression” . From Korea though Indo-China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam, Asia became the central battlefield of the Cold War for the next two decades.

Within the Soviet Bloc, although the Korean War cemented in the short-term the sino-soviet alliance, China’s ability to stand up militarily to the United States during this conflict had the dual effect of solidifying the Communist regime in China and establishing its reputation internationally, especially among the existing and emerging Third World states, thus sawing the seeds both of the sino-soviet split and confrontation of the 1960s and 1970s, and of the proliferation of revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America -which the US saw it as its duty to confront by both direct and covert means.

Finally, in the long term, “[t]he Cold War provided an extreme answer to a question that had been at the center of US foreign policy since the late eighteenth century: in what situations should ideological sympathies be followed by intervention? The extension of the Cold War into the Third World was defined by the answer: everywhere where Communism could be construed as a threat” . Korea was its first true battlefield –and the military, political, economic and ideological competition whose nature and rules of engagement it largely defined would play no small part in Ronald Reagan’s view of the “Evil Empire” and his “Star Wars” program, in the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and, finally, in the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the peaceful implosion of the USSR two years later.