The (Il)Logic of America's Asian Wars

America had less reason to intervene in Korea than in Vietnam

In debates on the ethics of US military interventions overseas since 1945, those that are almost categorically accepted as legally and strategically sensible are the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Gulf War (1990-1991). Those that are almost universally dismissed as either immoral, wasteful, or both are the Vietnam War (1965-1973), the War in Afghanistan (2001-2021), and the Iraq War (2003-2011). The Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003 and American involvement in the Vietnam War are often described as both unethical and imprudent, whereas the invasion of Afghanistan is generally regarded as justified but extended beyond necessity after transitioning into a prodigal nation-building project. Richard Hanania, for instance, has criticized the War on Terror but has pointed to the Korean War as a paradigmatic case of successful US imperialism. One response to Hanania’s pivot towards an interventionist foreign policy identified the Korean War as a unique case of justified US military action and used the prosecution of the Vietnam War as an indictment of Washington’s record.

I reject this conventional wisdom in the cases of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, as it reflects a political narrative that came to dominate the Western press and intelligentsia in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive that has yet to be reexamined in popular consciousness. Additionally, the ubiquitous assumption that the Korean War was in America’s strategic and moral interests relies on hindsight and ignores the realities of 1950.

The Korean War

It was unnecessary for America to defend Korea in 1950, and American officials explicitly agreed when they chose to exclude it from the Acheson line. The majority of the American public agreed, as it was only after 1956 that a majority endorsed the defense of Korea. President Harry Truman made the decision to intervene following North Korea’s invasion in 1950 because he wished to salvage his image as someone who was tough on the red menace after his administration was blamed for “losing China” in 1949 when the Communists achieved victory on the mainland and their Nationalist rivals retreated to Taiwan.

Before elaborating, I should remark that while I’m disinclined to believe that it was worth defending Korea in 1950, once the US-ROK alliance was inked in 1954, it was crucial to remain a security guarantor for Seoul since American credibility and resolve were on the line. Moreover, by the late sixties Korea was in the full swing of industrial development and was becoming increasingly consequential for the regional and global economies. Today Korea carries the burden of its own defense more than any other US ally, has an indigenous defense industrial base that manufactures weapons better suited to their own terrain than those of the US, has an active duty army 90% the size of America’s (and a far larger reserve force), and even provides military equipment to the US since it has superior artillery stockpiles. Hence, the present strategic landscape is entirely different, and this isn’t an argument in favor of severing US-ROK ties. After all, I wouldn’t even exist with those ties!

Anyway, Korea in 1950 had no intrinsic value to the US. It has few natural resources, lacks a land border with any US treaty allies, and doesn’t form part of the first island chain. To this day the majority of the relatively small remaining US forces are soldiers rather than sailors, meaning that access to bases on the peninsula is of little significance to American sea power when compared to Japan or the Philippines. There was minimal trade between the US and Korea since the latter had been under Japanese rule until 1945 and the bulk of industry built by Japan was in the north. The country in East Asia that was of strategic value to Washington was Japan, as its location was prime real estate for the US Navy to plug up its Soviet counterpart, and it could also function as an unsinkable aircraft carrier—in Prime Minister Nakasone’s words—for the US Air Force. With basing rights in Japan, America had what was required for a feasible defense posture in Cold War Asia. An additional presence in Korea was superfluous. Therefore, from the standpoint of strictly security and economic interests, there was no reason for America to go to war to guarantee an indefinite partition of Korea.

However, it’s still possible to concede that although there were few material incentives to justify an American intervention, there were legal and moral principles for the US and other UN members to defend. The Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north were separate states with sovereign rights, so it was unacceptable for the DPRK to launch an unprovoked attack across the thirty-eighth parallel in an effort to conquer and incorporate its independent neighbor.

The flaw in this argument is that neither the regime in Seoul nor the one in Pyongyang was a member of the UN until 1991, neither sought a permanent national division of the Korean nation into two states, and neither had declared independence on its own. Hence, they were both creations of their respective superpower patrons after the Americans and Soviets had both left and established independent governments in 1948. It’s true that the US intervention occurred with a UN resolution, but that was due to a Soviet boycott in protest of mainland China’s exclusion from the Security Council’s China seat. Furthermore, the UN forces proceeded to invade the DPRK after pushing its forces back across the thirty-eighth parallel in an effort to unite Korea under the ROK government. Thus, while the war was initiated as a defensive action, it quickly became a more ambitious campaign to topple Kim Il-Sung’s government in Pyongyang.

For this reason, it’s difficult to act as if each regime had the right to independence and sovereignty and that the war was simply a means to uphold those international legal principles. If that were the case, the war would’ve been limited to ejecting the Korean People’s Army (KPA) from the south, not unification under Seoul. America intervened to prop up and then expand a regime it had created and originally planned not to defend (until the president saw it as a face-saver), not to preserve the principle that every legally recognized state has the right to continue to exist.

On top of that, the First Republic under President Syngman Rhee was no more of a constitutional republic than Putin’s Russia or Sisi’s Egypt. Today the ROK is a democracy, but it only became one in 1988. The Rhee regime was not only profoundly corrupt but also highly repressive. State security forces massacred citizens accused of communist affiliations with impunity, and the government relied on ties with criminal elements to retain power. The regime was so unstable that students managed to topple it in 1960, which led to a brief attempt at democracy until General Park Chung-Hee usurped power in a coup the following year.

Today the DPRK is arguably the most monstrous government on the planet. Nonetheless, in 1950 it wasn’t clear which regime had less respect for its citizens’ political rights. The DPRK was undoubtedly more successful at squashing dissent thanks to the tutelage of the USSR, the discipline of the Korean Workers Party (KWP), and the eventual construction of an unrivalled police state. However, there wasn’t any reason at the time to believe that the DPRK would end up even more invasive of its people’s freedom than any other authoritarian government and, by extension, than Rhee’s ROK.

Living standards in both Koreas were low, but the South was slightly behind the North, and the devastation of the Korean War would disrupt and destroy both states’ economic base. It was only after Park’s 1961 coup that the ROK made rapid progress in economic development, courtesy of Park’s management of industrialization and sagacious use of diplomacy to secure external funds from the US (via participation in the Vietnam War) and Japan (via normalization of relations in 1965). Nobody could’ve known in 1950 that a competent and benevolent autocrat would seize power in Korea a decade into the future and that this would set the country on the road to material prosperity. The idea that defending the ROK in 1950 was just part of defending liberalism and capitalist abundance against totalitarianism and grinding poverty is revisionism.

This isn’t to say that the defense of Korea was wrong, it just implies that the rationale retroactively provided is mistaken. The implication of the idea that America had a duty to fight in the Korean War is that the US should provide security for authoritarian governments caught in civil wars that appear to have little to offer in return. It happens to be the case that Korea fortuitously evolved into an exceptionally advanced and accomplished country in the decades after the armistice freezing the war was signed due to the wisdom of its eventual leaders and the creativity and industriousness of its people. However, the odds that this would transpire would have seemed astoundingly low in 1950, and ergo only hindsight could seem to justify Truman’s self-serving decision. I feel it’s necessary to note that on a personal level the US intervention was critical since I wouldn’t exist without it, but reason indicates to me that any disinterested observer at the time would’ve concluded that the outcome of the war in the absence of US involvement wouldn’t have mattered for US strategy, interests, or principles.

The Vietnam War

America’s involvement (1965-1973) in the Second Indochina War (1959-1975) is widely regarded as the greatest debacle of American foreign policy in the twentieth century. In popular culture it’s cynically presented as a misguided venture pursued for the sake of politicians’ reputations and the financial interests of the military-industrial complex. Films from Platoon to Apocalypse Now center on the experience of the American soldier, who’s invariably portrayed as an unlucky young man learning through traumatic conditions and atrocities by compatriots that Uncle Sam values neither his life nor the lives of those whom he is supposed to be protecting from the communists. Public figures and internet netizens reveled in the news of Henry Kissinger’s death for the allegedly criminal expansion of US and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) operations into Cambodia and Laos, and Anthony Bourdain likewise professed a desire to assault Kissinger in retaliation for his purported culpability in engendering the troubles that plague modern Cambodia. America’s involvement in the Vietnam War is popularly remembered as a destructive and immoral waste of lives, reputation, and treasure with unachievable aims pursued under false pretenses that ended with nothing to show for in a dramatic and calamitous humiliation.

The fact that the Korean War is widely perceived as a “good war” while the Vietnam War is considered an unjust one suggests that people have a tendency to uncritically accept the received dogma even when its implications contradict other commitments. If the US and allied intervention to protect the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the south from conquest by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north was unjustifiable, it’s difficult to plausibly explain why the US should’ve done the same for the ROK in 1950.

The justifications given for defending Korea could apply equally well in the case of Vietnam. In fact, there were security interests that made American participation in Vietnam’s civil war even more rational than its participation in Korea’s. There are certain distinctions between the two conflicts that could be cited to legitimize the widely held view that Korea was acceptable and Vietnam unacceptable, but these reasons crumble under examination. As the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen put it, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” While the orthodox understanding of the debacle in Vietnam still predominates, contemporary historians such as Mark Moyar and Keith Taylor have begun to contest it. The historical narrative deserves to be scrutinized to clear the record and, by extension, the mass cognitive dissonance.

America’s entanglement in Indochina was notoriously premised on the claim that allowing a communist takeover across all of Vietnam would cause the same to occur in Laos and Cambodia, which would result in a communist Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Internal documents from the Johnson administration reveal that the country seen as the most strategically consequential in this series of Southeast Asian dominoes was Indonesia due to its proximity to the Straits of Malacca. The domino theory is now retrospectively portrayed as a specious paranoia that resulted in a misapplication of containment based on the faulty assumption of a monolithic communist bloc and ignorance of local politics in the context of decolonization.

This critique of the domino theory elides the fact that there was a genuine risk of communist domination of the region when the US and other Free World Forces joined the war. Counterinsurgency theorist Sir Robert Thompson once remarked that to test the domino theory, you should ask the dominoes. Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, attributed his city-state’s ability to leapfrog to first world status to the fact that Washington held the line in Saigon for a decade, thereby shielding the wider region. If former French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) had all fallen into the communist orbit in 1965, the regional balance of power would’ve been far more precarious for the West. Thailand was facing a communist insurgency in its northeast, and Indonesia was locked in confrontation with Malaysia and its Commonwealth allies until 1966. America’s willingness to take a stand on behalf of South Vietnam may even have contributed to Indonesia’s anti-communist generals’ decision to prevent the attempted coup in October 1965, which risked solidifying the Beijing-Jakarta axis developed under Sukarno. Although it’s unlikely that communism would’ve swept across the entire region, the pro-Western governments would’ve found themselves on an inauspicious chessboard. See here for an elaboration.

Moreover, the Sino-Soviet split hadn’t become fully evident to the West up to this point, and it would’ve been more difficult for the US to exploit it without the situation in Indochina. The infamous Ussuri River clash didn’t take place until 1968, and China posed a threat to Western interests even after its relationship with Moscow had begun to deteriorate in the fifties. Beijing partly began its rift with the USSR because the former sought a more aggressive posture against Western imperialism in contrast to Khrushchev’s pursuit of coexistence. However, North Vietnam’s relationship with the Soviet Union, which tightened over the course of the Second Indochina War, presented Beijing with a new strategic predicament. If postwar Indochina were to fall under Hanoi’s hegemony, it would mean that the region would become part of the Soviet sphere of influence. The intensification of the war in the Cambodian theater following the parliamentary dismissal of Prince Sihanouk’s government in favor of pro-Western General Lon Nol rendered Cambodia an arena of Sino-Vietnamese strategic competition. This would reach a boiling point in 1978 with the Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea and China’s retaliatory campaign on Vietnam’s northern border the following year. The Third Indochina War would shatter any remaining illusion of a united communist front in the Cold War, which would in turn solidify the Sino-American quasi-alliance against the USSR and its satellites.

People may also object that the Korea intervention was permissible because it occurred under UN auspices, while the Vietnam intervention was a unilateral US action. This is not only trivial because 1950 was a unique time since Moscow was boycotting the UN out of disagreement with the Republic of China on Taiwan holding the China seat in lieu of the People’s Republic on the mainland. Therefore, there was no communist power permanently sitting on the Security Council to veto a mission conducted for America’s containment strategy. By 1965 this was no longer the case, but the US entered under the invitation of South Vietnam’s government. Additionally, the action was multilateral because under the More Flags campaign Korea, Australia, Thailand, New Zealand, and the Philippines also sent troops to South Vietnam.

The problem with America’s intervention was not that there was no security interest to justify it but rather that Washington was unable to extricate itself in a timely manner. By the late sixties, Southeast Asia had become far more stable than it had been in 1965, and the Sino-Soviet rift had become deeper. America remained beyond necessity to preserve the credibility of the president and of its commitments to defend allies.

Addendum on ROK and RVN Legitimacy

I anticipate two objections in my comparison of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, namely that the RVN was more tyrannical relative to the DRV than the ROK was relative to the DPRK and that the DRV had more legitimacy as a sovereign state than the RVN, ROK, or DPRK. I’ll address both claims below. This is supplemental, so feel free to ignore this section if you don’t buy the objections.

The RVN’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, is typically presented in history books (at least those written in the twentieth century) as a tyrannical ruler and fanatical Roman Catholic who persecuted Buddhists and lacked popular legitimacy. His brother ran a secret police force, and his sister-in-law displayed disdain for regime critics. The government he ran is framed as a kleptocratic and hapless family dictatorship with no prospect of surviving. The DRV is painted as the authentic creation of the Vietnamese people when its leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed independence from France upon Imperial Japan’s surrender in 1945. In contrast to the rest of the communist world, it was governed through collective leadership and therefore didn’t rely on terror or purges to retain power.

This entire narrative is a fiction. Yes, South Vietnam had an authoritarian government, but it was less repressive than its counterpart north of the seventeenth parallel. The reason that Americans became so familiar with the First Republic’s excesses is because its rulers allowed Western journalists in the country, unlike the DRV’s leaders. Furthermore, the Hanoi regime did have purges and did use the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) against its own citizens to put down uprisings in Nghe An, among other locations, when the people organized against the land collectivization campaign that caused famines unheard of in the South. Ho Chi Minh himself was marginalized on the Politburo, and the hawkish Red River Delta faction led by Le Duan and Le Duc Tho became the guiding force in the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP). They proceeded to purge rivals using their secret police force, the Cong An, on multiple occasions—the largest being the Revisionist Anti-Party Affair in the runup to the Tet Offensive—so that they could wage war against the RVN without internal opposition. Diem banned all religious flags from being flown at demonstrations, including Catholic ones, because he was an anti-colonial nationalist who wanted only the national banner to be displayed. The law came into effect just before a Buddhist holiday, so that might be interpreted as a crackdown, but it’s not conclusive.

Beyond that, the US orchestrated a coup against Diem in 1963 in the hopes of building a new democratic regime, but the result was a series of further coups between generals until Nguyen Van Thieu seized power in 1967 after the US intervention had helped stabilize the situation. The logic of the Korea intervention suggests that America shouldn’t have overthrown Diem despite his authoritarianism just as it hadn’t overthrown Rhee for analogous humanitarian shortcomings. Both the ROK and RVN were dictatorships with democratic aspirations, and the reasoning behind rescuing the ROK from northern invasion—that the US could shield it to enable its modernization and democratization as an alternative to allowing a Soviet-backed tyranny to control the entire nation—seems equally applicable to the Vietnamese situation.

Another variation of the argument is to say that Vietnam’s division was explicitly meant to be temporary when the Geneva Accords were signed in 1954. According to this narrative, there should’ve been an election in 1956 supervised by Poland, Canada, and India so that a communist, Western, and neutral country would be involved in the oversight. The US and Diem sabotaged this international agreement by refusing to sign the Accords and hosting a bogus election in 1955 to establish a puppet autocracy. Therefore, the RVN was never a legitimate state, whereas the DRV was since it had declared independence in 1945, negotiated an agreement with France in March 1946 as a de facto state, and Emperor Bao Dai had recognized it in 1945, abdicated, and adopted the civilian name Vinh Thuy.

This argument also omits crucial facts. First, the RVN’s government in Saigon had already been granted independence before the establishment of the First Republic under Diem in 1955. Under French rule Vietnam was split into Cochin China in the far south, Tonkin in the north, and Annam in between. Cochin China was officially designated a colony, while the other two were classified as protectorates. In 1949 the French National Assembly voted to create a government to rule over the three regions as a single country, which would be an associated member of the French Union, called the State of Vietnam (SVN) under Bao Dai who would delegate the tasks of governance to a prime minister and cabinet. Britain and America recognized the SVN as the sole legitimate government of all of Vietnam in 1950; the USSR and China had done the same for the DRV a month earlier. The SVN’s relationship to France was meant to be analogous to the relationship Australia had with Britain after federation in 1901. There would be a common defense strategy, interoperability of weapons, and combined operations, and the Vietnamese piastre would be pegged to the franc. The SVN never signed the Geneva Accords, only the Viet Minh and French military commanders did. The DRV acknowledged that Poland, Canada, and India would oversee implementation of the agreement’s ceasefire provisions but rejected International Control Commission supervision of unification elections. By contrast, the SVN and US advocated UN oversight of unification elections. Diem’s rigged 1955 election on establishing a presidential republic to supersede the SVN’s constitutional monarchy wasn’t conducted to bolster his own power but rather to cut ties with France. The election was more of a total declaration of independence than a cementing of tyranny given that he already had governing power as prime minister of the SVN.

Additionally, even if the RVN was an artificial state that couldn’t have survived in the absence of American support, the same could be said of Rhee’s ROK. Truman and Stalin had agreed to occupy separate halves of Korea at the Potsdam Conference, and in their respective occupation zones the Soviets and Americans created a state and left in 1948. Originally, a referendum on unification was supposed to be held, but Moscow objected that there wasn’t a method to guarantee fair conduct. Consequently, the occupation zones produced separate states. There was popular support for Kim Il Sung’s communist government when it was first established.¹ Although it’s correct that the UN Temporary Commission in Korea (UNTCK) authorized an election in the American zone and Rhee’s government was initially declared the only legal one afterwards, the UNTC’s members, including Western countries like Australia, rejected the view that the election was legitimate in establishing this claim on the grounds that it had only been held in the southern half of the peninsula under US occupation.

According to the logic of the anti-RVN narrative, the US should’ve permitted the DPRK’s takeover of the South since the Seoul regime wouldn’t have existed without US support, the DPRK enjoyed popularity up to that point, and the Seoul government had to use military force to crack down on rebels in Jeju who refused to accept Seoul’s questionable pretense to be the only legitimate Korean state. Some might say the two situations are disanalogous because the DRV was an organic creation of the Vietnamese, and the SVN was a French invention that later became dependent on America, whereas both Koreas were artificially forged by foreign occupations. However, the Viet Minh were only able to establish a government because the occupying Guomindang forces from China allowed it, and the DRV agreed under Guomindang pressure to become an associated member state of the French Union in March 1946 as part of an accord negotiated with Jean Sainteny. Plus, Diem’s election to establish South Vietnam’s First Republic transpired outside of US occupation unlike the election to form South Korea’s First Republic under Rhee.

1. See page 10, https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Real_North_Korea.html?id=FHpYCwAAQBAJ