Why Did America Fight the Korean War?

What was the Korean War? And why was America involved in such a faraway conflict? Was the United States' sacrifice—35,000 killed, over 100,000 wounded—worth it? Historian Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, shares the fascinating story of the transformative war that many have forgotten.

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Script:

Mention the Korean War today and most people will look at you with a blank stare. At the time it was fought, just five years after World War II ended, everyone recognized it as a world-shaping conflict, a stark confrontation between the forces of democracy and communism.

It began on June 25, 1950 when Soviet-backed communist North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and invaded its US-backed anti-communist South Korean neighbor. Within weeks the communists had nearly absorbed the entire country. The United States at first was confused over whether it should—or even could—respond. America had slashed its military budget after the end of World War II and was short both men and equipment. It still had not awakened fully to the expansionist threat of Soviet Russia.

The Soviets—buoyed by their own recent development of an atomic bomb and Mao Zedong’s communist victory in China—sensed America’s lack of resolve and encouraged the North’s aggression. Yet within weeks President Harry Truman rushed troops to save the shrinking Allied perimeter at Pusan on the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. And by late September, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur had successfully completed the Inchon landings and launched counter-attacks.

He quickly reclaimed the entire south and sent American-led United Nations forces far into North Korea to reunite the entire peninsula—only to be surprised when hundreds of thousands of Chinese Red Army troops crossed the Yalu River at the Chinese border and sent the outnumbered Americans reeling back into South Korea.

Thanks to the genius of General Matthew Ridgeway, who arrived to assume supreme command in South Korea in December 1950, over the next 100 days US led UN forces pushed the communists back across the 38th Parallel. The fighting was fierce. Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, exchanged hands between communist and US led forces five times before it was finally secured.

During the years 1952 and 1953, the war grew static, neither side able to deliver a knockout blow. Eventually the conflict ended with a tense armistice in July 1953. For over the next 60 years, a cold war persisted between the Stalinist North and what, by the 1980s, had evolved into the democratic, economic powerhouse of South Korea.

Over 35,000 Americans died in the Korean War. The war marked the first major armed conflict of the Nuclear Age, and one in which the United States had not clearly defeated the enemy and thus not dictated terms of surrender. Was fighting the Korean War and restoring the South—without uniting the entire peninsula—worth the huge cost in blood and treasure?

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