Impact

After over three years of fighting and two years of on-and-off negotiations, the shooting finally stopped. Much of Korea lay in ruins. Koreans killed, wounded, or missing numbered approximately 3 million, a tenth of the population. Another 5 million became refugees and perhaps double that saw their families permanently divided. Although civil strife and guerrilla warfare never affected the overall balance, they combined with US air action to produce massive civilian casualties. Each side suffered destruction of over a half million homes and the bulk of their industrial plant. Yet the country remained divided and, despite the advance of plans for reunification on both sides, that division was bound to last indefinitely, a fact confirmed by the Geneva Conference on Korea in May 1954.

Nothing could compensate the Korean people for the death and destruction suffered, but by thrusting the peninsula into the limelight as never before in the Cold War, the war had its compensations. It ensured that the United States would never again let its guard down in Korea. In the war’s aftermath, Washington quickly concluded a military defense pact with Seoul. It maintained in South Korea tens of thousands of its own troops as well as substantial air-power, and it provided massive aid for augmentation of the ROK Army. The ongoing American commitment to the ROK made unlikely the resumption of war by the Communists, and Washington’s dear message to Rhee that support would end if he initiated a new conflict served to discourage adventurism by the ROK. A replay of June 25,1950, by either side was a remote possibility.

Another compensation was greatly expanded economic assistance for reconstruction and development for both Korean governments. The ROK became the largest recipient of American largesse for the remainder of the 1950s and, as Charles K. Armstrong has recently written, the DPRK became "the most ambitious multilateral development project ever undertaken by the socialist countries during the Cold War."393 The Korean governments, though

Bitter enemies, held in common their dependence on outside powers, just as they had before the war and just as had exiled independence groups during the era of Japanese rule, but now the material benefits were far greater.

Although China did not become a scene of the fighting and thus avoided huge destruction to its property and civilian population, the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Korea - the euphemism for PRC armies - suffered nearly 400,000 casualties, including over 148,000 dead. They fought tenaciously in Korea, but their inferiority to US forces in the air and in firepower and mechanization on the ground cost them dearly, eliminating any chance of decisive victory and leading eventually to Chinese concessions on the armistice line and POWs. The Soviets provided major materiel assistance, but it was slow in coming and air support was limited to areas near the Manchurian border. The experience could not help but whet Mao’s appetite to develop nuclear weapons, the shortest route to closing the gap with the United States.

Closing that gap was important not only for defensive purposes. When Mao intervened in Korea, he had hoped to use success there to achieve a favorable settlement regarding Taiwan. Success had been limited, and by 1953 the United States was in no mood to bargain on the last stronghold of the Nationalists. Indeed, if in early 1950 the Communist government on the mainland stood an excellent chance of capturing Taiwan within the next year, by July 1953 the United States was all but committed to defending the Nationalist position there, a commitment that became formal less than two years later.

The PRC did derive positive advantages from its Korean venture. At home, Mao used the war to mobilize the people and solidify his and his party’s position. The war forced postponement of a first five-year plan for economic development, but China built up credit with the Soviets that paid important dividends in financial and advisory assistance later on. Stalin’s successors eventually assisted Mao in a nuclear-weapons program that led in 1964 to a successful test of an atomic bomb. Further, PRC success in fighting the United States to a stalemate in Korea greatly elevated China’s stature abroad. Less than a year after the armistice, China played a critical role in mediating the end of the first Indochina war and in 1955 it emerged as the star player at the Bandung Conference of African and Asian states. Whereas prior to the war China had played a secondary role to the Soviet Union in North Korea, it now was all but a coequal there. After generations of humiliation, China had returned to major power status in East Asia.

China’s accomplishments served immediate Soviet interests, as they removed any chance for Sino-American rapprochement, protected the DPRK, and kept the United States deeply engaged militarily in a country of limited

Strategic interest and far distant from Europe. For the long term, however, the rise of the PRC gave Beijing the self-confidence to define its own revolutionary agenda, both at home and abroad, and set the stage for the Sino-Soviet split, which proved a huge strategic setback in the Soviet Union’s struggle with the United States.

What is more, the Korean War added immeasurably to Moscow’s international burdens, as both North Korea and China became greater drains on Soviet resources; so did the arms race with the United States, which quadrupled its defense expenditures and assisted in the rearmament of Western Europe, including eventually West Germany. The arms competition was also a burden to the United States, but the greater economic capacity of the West made it far more bearable. Indeed, Japan’s economic recovery was advanced exponentially by the sudden demand for industrial goods needed to prosecute the war in Korea, while the economies of the United States and its West European allies all emerged stronger in 1953 than they had been three years earlier. In contrast, the war led Stalin to push harder than ever for the rapid industrialization of Eastern Europe, one result of which was a decline in consumer goods and, in the aftermath of his death, the first signs of widespread unrest in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The Soviet Union would have been better off had the war never occurred and perhaps even had Korea been united under the ROK in late 1950.

Although through much ofthe war the Western alliance seemed in crisis, at its end the United States had four more divisions in Europe than when it began, Greece and Turkey had joined NATO, the European Coal and Steel Community was under way - signaling a major advance in cooperation between West Germany and France - and the potentially acrimonious issue of distribution of raw materials had been contained. Much carping continued back and forth across the Atlantic, to be sure, but US flexibility on such issues as escalation in Korea, rearmament of West Germany, and economic issues related to the military buildup of NATO countries helped solidify the alliance, as did Soviet scare tactics.

The war was far from an unqualified victory for the United States. While it achieved its initial objective ofsaving the ROK, its reckless campaign in North Korea in the fall of 1950 led to embarrassing setbacks at the hands of the Chinese and tied down hundreds of thousands of US troops in a country that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had long considered of marginal significance. The crisis of late 1950 and early 1951 led to a rebellion against US leadership in the UN General Assembly that, for the short term, reduced risks of the expansion of war beyond Korea, but later on discouraged the Truman administration

From applying the kind of sustained if limited military pressure on the enemy that might have induced the Communists to accept an armistice at a much earlier date. During the third and fourth stages of the war, India emerged as a clear leader among Third World neutrals, who were increasingly assertive in staking out their own course in the General Assembly. With the United Nations about to explode in numbers as a result of the achievement of nationhood by former colonial territories, majorities for US positions in that body were bound to become more and more difficult to obtain.

Of course, South Korea was an emerging nation as well, but for the moment its survival in the war was as much a liability as an advantage to US diplomacy in the Third World. The war solidified Rhee’s position at the head of the ROK and, due to the clear US commitment to the ROK’s defense and economic reconstruction, increased his capacity to manipulate Washington. Outside the United States and South Korea, Rhee was a most unpopular figure and American support for him had its price, especially among Third World neutrals such as India and Indonesia. If the war helped solidify US leadership in Western Europe and Japan, it left the contest between Communism and liberal democracy up for grabs among the emerging nations of the underdeveloped world. In fact, by tying the United States more tightly than ever to the colonial powers and by alienating it from and empowering China, the war complicated Washington’s task in adjusting to the tide of change in Asia and Africa.

The position of the United States regarding Japan is especially revealing of the difficulty in balancing interests between First World allies and Third World areas. The Korean War had smoothed the path toward peace and security treaties between the two powers, ratified in 1952, and provided a great stimulus to the Japanese economy. Yet despite the sharply increased production ofmateriel for use in Korea and American aid programs in Southeast Asia, Japan continued to have a sizable balance-of-payments deficit. A possible solution to the problem was to reestablish pre-1945 levels of trade with China, but Washington adamantly opposed this approach for fear that it would lure Tokyo into the Communist sphere. That left as options either increased Japanese exports to North America and Western Europe, which would create domestic controversies in the nations involved, not to mention animosity toward the United States among European allies for promoting the idea, or increased Japanese exports to Southeast Asia, a process well advanced by 1953.394

Two problems existed with this latter option, however: first, Southeast Asian markets were oflimited size and alone were unlikely to enable Japan to erase its deficit; second, the region was highly unstable, especially given the ongoing French struggle against Communist-dominated nationalist forces in Indochina. Between 1950 and 1953, US support to the French had increased by leaps and bounds, in no small part because of concerns about Southeast Asia’s perceived importance regarding Japan’s economic well-being and diplomatic orientation and the view that if Indochina fell to the Communists, so would the rest of the region. Yet the French campaign showed no sign of success, largely because France proved unwilling to grant real power to antiCommunist nationalists. The Korean War did not create this problem, but the heightening of polarization between the United States and the Communist world that it ushered in served to compound Washington’s difficulties in balancing the needs of leading allies with Third World realities.395

In the end, the Korean War was a clear-cut victory for no one, but it helped to stabilize the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States at a level below direct combat. The war sparked major rearmament in the United States, thus narrowing the gap in conventional forces between it and the Soviet Union, and solidified US commitments to and presence in Western Europe and Japan. These developments, in turn, made less likely than before a Soviet-initiated or - backed probe in a key area that would provoke an unanticipated American response and escalate into a global conflagration. Yet the war left a legacy that would exacerbate conflict in other areas. It may have helped avert a global bloodletting like that of 1914-18 or 1937-45, but its cost remained tragically high.