Victory or Negotiation?

Abstract

George Kennan recalls that, in late May or early June 1950, US officials concerned with Russian affairs were surprised to be given information suggesting that ‘somewhere across the broad globe the armed forces of some Communist power were expecting soon to go into action’. None of the experts in Washington thought that the trouble would be in Korea. It was common knowledge that the Soviet Union had armed North Korea and trained its military forces, but all the evidence now available suggests that the actual decision to attack and the date were decided in Pyongyang. Nor is there any evidence of Chinese collusion, and there is reason to think that China was taken by surprise at the North Korean action — though Dean Rusk was later to tell a diplomat from Pakistan that the North Korean attack was ‘clearly instigated and supported’ by both China and the Soviet Union, and Rusk was later to express the belief that China ‘was either a co-conspirator or fully aware of the June 1950 attack’. China was, however, greatly preoccupied at the time with the final defeat of the Nationalist forces, which had sought refuge in Taiwan. The Chinese press emphasized for several weeks after the outbreak of war that the best way for China to help North Korea was to proceed with the liberation of Taiwan, and it was only in August that references to Taiwan became less frequent and then almost disappeared. It was not until 26 August that an article in a Chinese publication suggested that events in Korea might threaten the security of China itself.¹

The object of war is to change the enemy’s mind.

Stephen King-Hall, Defence in the Nuclear Age, 1958, p. 23