Hawks Learn the Wrong Lessons from the Korean War

It is easy for hardliners seventy years later to say that the U.S. should have been willing to risk escalation in Korea, but that would have entailed waging a much larger, bloodier war.

Mike Gallagher and Aaron MacLean want us to view the Korean War through their lens of extreme hawkishness:

Thus, a third lesson of the Korean War is that once fighting has broken out, excessive self-restraint can invite further aggression. Demonstrating a credible willingness to escalate and the capacity to dominate should such escalation be required can promote peace. To point out this paradox is not to express a desire for World War III, but to prescribe a course for its prevention.

The authors want to warn us about how the Chinese government distorts the history of the war, but in the process they engage in plenty of their own distortions. It is bizarre to view the Truman administration’s conduct of the war as being characterized by “excessive self-restraint” when Truman presided over the irresponsible overreach that triggered Chinese intervention. One of Truman’s faults in managing the war was not too much restraint, but a lack of it. The fact that Truman chose not to escalate further in a dangerous gamble to extricate the U.S. from the ensuing mess is one of the only things he got right.

It is easy for hardliners seventy years later to say that the U.S. should have been willing to risk escalation in Korea, but that would have entailed waging a much larger, bloodier war than the one that U.S. fought and there would have been no guarantee of a more decisive result. If the U.S. had resorted to the use of nuclear weapons again, it would have blackened its international reputation then and for decades to come even if it had “won.” It is also debatable whether the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War would have made that much of a difference, but fortunately no one ever tried finding out. Lamenting that the U.S. wasn’t willing to unleash those atrocious weapons on even more people doesn’t exactly fill us with confidence that the authors don’t want WWIII.