History
Causes of the Korean War
The causes of the Korean War can be attributed to the division of Korea after World War II, with the North being influenced by communism and the South by capitalism. Tensions escalated due to border skirmishes and ideological differences, leading to the outbreak of the war in 1950. The involvement of global superpowers, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union, further fueled the conflict.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
12 Key excerpts on "Causes of the Korean War"
eBook - ePubThe Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History
1865 to the Present
- Christos Frentzos, Antonio S. Thompson, Antonio Thompson(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Part VIIThe Korean War and its Aftermath
Passage contains an image
23The Korean War, 1950–1953
A Historiographical Summary James I. MatrayOn July 27, 1953, an armistice halted the fighting in Korea. Coincidentally, interpretive peace also was taking hold among historians and political scientists on the causes, course, and meaning of the Korean War. Serious debate did not begin until scholars had rejected the credibility of an orthodox judgment that for almost two decades dominated accounts of the Korean conflict. Prior to the 1970s, few histories challenged President Harry S. Truman’s public declaration on June 27, 1950 that the North Korean attack on South Korea proved that “communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war.”1 To date, sharp differences persist on almost every critical issue, but with two notable exceptions. First, Korean War scholars have reached agreement that this conflict marked a watershed in postwar international affairs, militarizing the Soviet-American competition and extending the Cold War to the entire world. Second, a consensus now prevails that the origins of the Korean conflict date from at least World War II. By contrast, the most important question that has constituted for some time the great divide in the literature on the Korean War is whether it was more an international conflict or a civil war.Cold War assumptions influenced the authors of a long list of overviews that presented an orthodox interpretation of the Korean War before the release of archival documents. During the decade after the armistice, Rutherford M. Poats, John Dille, and Robert Leckie published straightforward narrative accounts of the conflict, congratulating the United States for acting to halt Communist expansion. Establishing an early interpretive baseline in 1963, T.R. Fehrenbach, in a full-length study, explained that the United States was not prepared militarily or mentally to fight a limited war in Korea. Preservation of U.S. credibility and prestige, however, demanded military intervention. British historian David Rees relied on research in documents available at the time to publish in 1964 what was for two decades the standard history of the conflict. He praised the United States for waging a limited war that defeated aggression.2 Other surveys confirmed conventional wisdom, as historians apparently thought that they had received the last word on the conflict, as Korea earned its status as the forgotten war during the next decade.3
eBook - ePubVoices from the Korean War
Personal Stories of American, Korean, and Chinese Soldiers
- Richard Peters, Xiaobing Li(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- The University Press of Kentucky(Publisher)
Part One The Korean War A Short History Passage contains an image
Chapter 1
Background and Origins of the WarIt is one of the more unfortunate and ironic events in history that Korea, a nation that prior to 1945 included the most homogeneous and united of all peoples, should become a nation divided. Whatever differences may have existed in regard to caste or class, the Korean people speak the same language throughout the peninsula and, with minor variations between north and south, are of the same culture. This cruel fate is made even more tragic by the fact that the Korean people were divided by other powers—clearly the victims of Cold War politics.1The tragedy of Korea, however, began long before the Korean War. Thanks to victories over China in 1894 and Russia in 1905, between 1905 and 1945 Japan governed Korea as a colony, with the blessings of Great Britain and the United States. The Japanese ruled harshly and backed up their policies with brutal police and army forces as they strived to destroy all vestiges of Korean culture. While Korea did make economic progress under Japanese rule, the political climate remained repressive. In the words of one historian, “Japanese imperialism stuck a knife in old Korea and twisted it, and that wound has gnawed at the Korean national identity ever since.”2The Japanese occupation was made even more difficult for Koreans to accept by their close cultural ties to China and their view of the Japanese as products of inferior culture. Partially for these reasons, in the end the Japanese were unable to extinguish Korean culture and nationalism. When World War II ended in 1945, Korean nationalists, bonded by their common hatred of the Japanese, competed for leadership in the attempt to establish a free and independent Korea.3
eBook - PDFUnequal Partners in Peace and War
The Republic of Korea and the United States, 1948-1953
- Jongsuk Chay(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Because of the complexity of this question, many authors avoid attempting to find causal linkages and simply try to clarify the origins or explain the background of the war. Thousands of pages have been written on the causal factors and background of the Korean War. Yet, until all the testimonies of those who were directly involved in the war making can be examined (many of them are no longer in this world, and some of the evidence may have already been destroyed) and all the archives of the major countries that were involved in the process leading to the war are fully opened, all attempts, including this one, to try to explain why the war began can be only partial and temporary. A question to be raised first is who started the invasion. There have been debates over this fundamental question, and to some the answer still may not be clear. But for millions of Koreans who personally witnessed the rolling out of the formidable North Korean military machine across the 38th parallel and the quick occupation of the capital city of South Korea in late June 1950, the debate is a luxurious verbal exercise. 6 A more important question concerns the motives and the reasons behind the roles of those who were responsible for the invasion. By this time, it seems clear that Kim II Sung, the leader of the North Korean regime, was the person who initiated the planning for the invasion and led at least the beginning of the war and definitely was the one most responsible for the war. Only Kim himself could give the final word about exactly why he conceived the idea of launching the war, and someday, when the North Korean governmental archives are The Outbreak of the War 111 fully opened, we may find more direct evidence for his reasoning about the invasion. The seemingly most obvious motivational factor for the venture was Kim's desire to achieve the reunification of the Korean peninsula.
eBook - ePubThe Korean War
An Annotated Bibliography
- Keith D. McFarland(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Child of Conflict . Seattle: University of Washington, 1983, pp. 133–162.A persuasive case is made that the origins of the war rested on internal rather than external factors. Tells of the guerrilla conflict in the South, including violent opposition to U.S. policy. With the defeat of Southern partisans in 1950, the war turned to conventional warfare. Covers a topic virtually ignored by those looking at the cause of the war.410. Moon, Chang-Joo. “Development of Politics and Political Science in Korea after World War II.” Koreana Quarterly 10 (Autumn 1968): 282–302.Survey of the political developments in South Korea and the role played by political scientists in the creation, emergence, development and demise of the Rhee government.411. Oh, John Kie-Chiang. Korea: Democracy on Trial . Ithaca: Cornell University, 1968.Analyzes the emergence of and political problems encountered in establishing the Republic of Korea and the fifteen years that followed. In spite of the difficulties, the transition to Western Democracy was successful and beneficial to South Koreans.412. Oliver, Robert T. “The Republic of Korea Looks Ahead.” Current History 15:85 (September 1948): 156–161; 15: 86 (October 1948) 218–221.Examines the establishment of the Republic of Korea and assesses its future. Positive factors include the homogeneity of its people, freedom of international debts, industriousness of its citizens and the fact that the new government represents a strong break with the past. Negative factors also loom large, especially the divisions brought about by the tug-of-war between Russia and the U.S. and the Soviet desire to gain control of the region; thus, the nation’s future is very questionable.413. Oliver, Robert T. “A Study in Devotion.” Reader’s Digest 69:411 (July 1956): 113–118.This study of the Austrian born wife of Syngman Rhee, Francesca Donner, whom he married in 1934, traces Rhee’s struggle through World War II, the post-war period and the Korean War through her eyes. Tells of her activities in those tumultuous times.414. —— . Syngman Rhee: The Man Behind the Myth
eBook - ePub- William Stueck(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- The University Press of Kentucky(Publisher)
The desire to avoid repeating the disaster of the appeasement of Nazi aggression in the 1930s was so keen that sixteen nations agreed to intervene to repel the invasion, fighting under the flag of the United Nations. The question of Soviet responsibility for the attack has therefore rightfully been at the center of historical analysis of the war’s origins. Writings on the war in the 1950s and 1960s, most prominently David Rees’ history of the conflict, 1 followed policy makers in assuming that the Soviet client state in Korea had neither the physical means nor the political autonomy to launch a large-scale military offensive on its own. The journalist I. F. Stone challenged that view as early as 1952, 2 but until the release of Western documents in the 1970s prompted a new wave of literature on the war, his remained a minority view. The most influential of the revisionist historians whose work dominated the field in the 1980s, Bruce Cumings, concluded on the basis of newly released American documents that although Kim II Sung probably consulted with Stalin, he planned and carried out the attack largely on his own. Cumings also concluded that the North Korean action may in fact have been a response to a Southern attack, as the communist countries had always maintained, a provocation perhaps orchestrated by Chinese nationalists and by Americans eager to reassert a U.S. military presence in East Asia. At any rate, he argued, the war can best be explained as a civil war, a continuation of the violent struggle between the political right and left in Korea that had begun with the collapse of Japanese colonial rule in 1945
eBook - ePub- Donald W. Boose, James I. Matray(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Journal of American-East Asian Relations , 2(4), 425舑458.- Weathersby, K. 1995. Korea, 1949-50: to attack or not to attack: Stalin, Kim Il Sung, and the prelude to war. Cold War International History Project Bulletin , 5, 1舑9.
- Whiting, A.S. 1960. China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Williams, W.J. (ed.) 1993. A Revolutionary War: Korea and the Transformation of the Postwar World . Chicago: Imprint Publications.
- Wint, G. 1965. Communist China’s Crusade: Mao’s Road to Power and the New Campaign for World Revolution . New York: Praeger.
- Wolfe, T.W. 1970. Soviet Power and Europe, 1945-1970 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Yang, H. 1967. The Ideology and Politics of North Korea [in Korean] . Seoul: Asiatic Research Center, Korea University.
- Yim, Y. 1967. The Korean war [in Japanese], in History of the Korean War: Rediscovery of Modern History [in Japanese] , edited by Minzokumondaikenkyusho. Tokyo: Korea Hyoronsha.
Passage contains an image
4 The United States
Steven CaseyDOI: 10.4324/9781315613611-6To Americans at the time, the November 1952 presidential election was a momentous event. For the first time in 24 years the Republican Party won the White House, breaking a string of five straight Democratic successes. As U.S. political commentators debated the reasons for this stunning reversal, three issues stood out—Korea, communism, and corruption—but few doubted that the first of these, the ongoing bloody stalemated war in Korea, was by far the most crucial. Parents whose sons had been drafted “were bitterly resentful of the [Harry S. Truman] administration,” writer and pollster Samuel Lubell observed after talking to many of them during the campaign. For other Americans, even the bread-and-butter economic issues that so often dominate presidential campaigns seemed subordinate to the war. “Surprising numbers of voters came to resent the prevailing prosperity as being ‘bought by the lives of boys in Korea,’” Lubell explained. “The feeling was general that the Korean War was all that stood in the way of an economic recession,” he concluded. “From accepting that belief, many persons moved on emotionally to where they felt something immoral and guilt-laden in the ‘you’ve never had it better’ argument of the Democrats” (Lubell 1956
eBook - PDFAmerica in the World
A History in Documents since 1898, Revised and Updated
- Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Mark Lawrence, Jeffrey A. Engel, Andrew Preston(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
8 The Korean War and the Cold War of the 1950s The Cold War took an ominous turn in 1950. Open hostilities erupted on the Ko- rean Peninsula, which had been split at the thirty-eighth parallel at the end of World War II. Troops and tanks from the communist north poured into the pro- Western south. What many historians interpret today as a civil war between Kore- ans immediately appeared to policy makers around the world, and in Washington in particular, as part of a global communist assault orchestrated by Beijing and Moscow. American policy makers responded with force, vowing to defend the south- ern regime, while plotting as well a long-term evolution of American society and military planning capable of defeating the global communist threat over time. They soon split over exactly how much force they might best employ in Korea and beyond. President Harry S. Truman in particular wanted South Korea liber- ated, but not at the cost of a broader war in Asia against Chinese and Soviet troops. Others, most notably the American commander in the region, General Douglas MacArthur, believed there should be no limits on the American war efort against global communism. This clash between Truman and MacArthur became one of the signature moments in the struggle between civilian and military control of American war making in the nation’s history. The struggle also encapsulated the broad questions of the 1950s for American policy makers: how much was enough to secure American interests and Washington’s allies, and how much—in defense spending, domestic surveillance of communist threats, or the size of government itself—would undermine the very freedom they hoped to defend. At the moment MacArthur lost his job for too often and too vocally endorsing a wholesale assault on communism, including perhaps even the use of atomic weapons, Truman’s White House embraced the National Security Council’s NSC-68, a global blueprint for vastly expanding the national security state.
eBook - ePubFrom Lexington to Baghdad and Beyond
War and Politics in the American Experience
- Donald M Snow, Dennis M. Drew(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
6KOREAN WARIf World War II had been the ultimate example of total war, the Korean conflict began the trend back to limited engagement. Begun a mere five years after the conclusion of the Second World War, Korea started a process of adjustment for American military and political leaders. It is a process of understanding and interaction that still continues.The Korean War was a new experience for the United States and for the international order that emerged from the ashes of World War II. For the United States, the experience was unique in at least three ways. First, it was our first limited war in modern (twentieth-century) times. As such, it represented a discontinuity in experience that required painful learning and adjustment. Second, it was the first significant cold war confrontation and represented a novel challenge to the emerging American role in the world. Third, it was the first major American military engagement not preceded by a formal declaration of military intent by the Congress of the United States, and it began a constitutional and political process that culminated in the War Powers Act of 1973. For the international system, Korea was the first instance of the application of the collective security provisions of the United Nations Charter, although not an application as envisaged by its framers. Each of these points is of sufficient importance to merit elaboration.Although the United States had fought wars that were limited in terms of the severity with which they were fought (e.g., the War of 1812) or the ease of their accomplishment (e.g., the Spanish-American War), the Korean conflict was the first time the modern U.S. military, developed and prepared for total war and led by an officer corps steeped in the total wars of the twentieth century, was thrust into a situation in which the political objectives were limited. The result was to create friction between the military and political leaderships. It was a disagreement for which neither group was especially well prepared, and the result was probably unnecessary ill will and inefficiency in the conduct of the hostilities.
eBook - PDFNuclear Endgame
The Need for Engagement with North Korea
- Jacques L. Fuqua Jr.(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
37 Had economic rapprochement been achieved by U.S. and Soviet oc- cupation authorities, it might have served as sufficient impetus for greater political rapprochement; whether it would have led to reunification and how quickly remains an open question. Korea was beset by significant ob- stacles: disagreement between the populations of both occupation zones as to the future of Korea; disagreement among the southern population over the issue of trusteeship; significant political stratification within the southern zone; and divergent policy pursuits by both occupation authorities. These circumstances must be considered within the broader context of world events: Korea came to represent the larger Cold War being waged between the two occupying powers, to which, in the end, it would ultimately fall victim. In the end, it was a convergence of historical lessons learned by the Korean people through efforts to subjugate them, their unfulfilled expecta- tions after liberation from the Japanese colonial authority, and unsuccessful Historical Foundations 55 political and economic occupation policies that came to lay the groundwork for the situation on the Korean peninsula as the world knows it today. The following two chapters will examine how these seemingly distant events of over half a century ago have impacted the geopolitical landscape of the Korean peninsula and East Asia over the past sixty years. 4 Triangular Relationships: North Korea, China, and the Former Soviet Union It does not matter whether we eat our meal with the right hand or the left, whether you use a spoon or chopsticks at the table.
eBook - PDFTrans-Pacific Relations
America, Europe, and Asia in the Twentieth Century
- Richard Jensen, Jon Davidann, Yoneyuki Sugita, Richard Jensen, Jon Davidann, Yoneyuki Sugita(Authors)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Part III The Limits of Power: The United States in Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand in the Cold War This page intentionally left blank Chapter 8 The Korean War: An Interpretive History Stanley Sandier The land of Korea holds more than its fair share of irony. Korea has no "lost territories," no ethnic minorities, no border disputes (there is no ques- tion as to where Korea begins and China or Russia ends), and a most simplified language and alphabet. Yet this most unified of nations has been cruelly sundered for more than half a century along a totally artificial po- litical border. The land once known as "the Hermit Kingdom" became in the twentieth century a cockpit of conflict for the major world powers, and this most Christian of lands (next to only the Vatican and the United States, primarily thanks to American missionaries) has seen its northern half pro- claimed as officially free of religion. Korea was only the second Asian nation to sign a treaty with the United States, in 1882. Yet for decades afterward American officialdom treated the Koreans with contempt. President Theodore Roosevelt (TR) encouraged Japanese designs on the peninsula, while TR's secretary of state suggested that Japan take over the entire country, which the Japanese did, in 1910. When the doughty young Korean patriot Syngman Rhee attempted to travel from America to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 to plead his na- tion's cause, the U.S. State Department informed him that he would need to secure a Japanese passport! In the American view of the world at that time, Japan bulked far larger than Korea. Korea thus passed into the long night of a Japanese imperialism hardly different from that of the European powers or the United States. The land was developed, with railways, communications, commercial cities, some educational opportunities, and the emergence of a small indigenous elite that did business with the foreign rulers.
eBook - PDF- Clinton Fernandes(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Greenwood(Publisher)
Returning to Korea in 1945, neither side was strong within the country, but neither was the puppet of any external force, whether Washington or Moscow. The belief among the Northern leaders, then and later, was that they better represented the majority of ordinary Koreans. Consequently, they expected a popular uprising in their favor if they marched on Seoul. Such uprisings did take place in the South in 1948–1949, most notably on the southernmost island of Cheju- do, which saw the uprising suppressed only after the loss of perhaps 30,000 lives (Merrill 1983: 141–143). By 1950, however, refugees from the North, including members of the business elite and Christians, had rein- forced the conservative Rhee government. Despite this, when the North’s armies launched their attack on Seoul in mid-1950, the government and military of the South were easily routed and saved only by U.S.-led inter- vention under the auspices of the United Nations. 144 Hot Spot: Asia and Oceania THE KOREAN WAR The beginning of the Korean War is enlightening to students of North Korea’s relations with its Communist allies, the Soviet Union and China. Kim Il-sung hoped to escape Chinese influence. To this end, he withheld infor- mation from the Chinese leadership (Beijing was not even informed of the attack date), refused to take Chinese advice once the war turned against him, and tried to avoid requesting Chinese military assistance in October 1950, when the North Korean army was retreating from U.N. forces. Chinese leaders ultimately decided to intervene in the Korean War late in 1950, feel- ing the U.S. intended to drive across the Yalu River and invade China while it was weak from years of civil war. The Chinese government also believed that a clash with the U.S. government at some point was inevitable; to their eyes, Korea offered the most favorable battlefield (Hao and Zhai 1990: 106–111; Shen 2003–2004: 9–11).
eBook - PDFGuide to U.S. Foreign Policy
A Diplomatic History
- Robert J. McMahon, Thomas W. Zeiler, Robert J. McMahon, Thomas W. Zeiler(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
279 ★ b y J a m e s I . M a t r a y c h a p t e r 1 9 Korea and Anti-Communist Policies in East Asia N orth Korea attacked South Korea on June 25, 1950, igniting the conventional phase of the Korean War. Cold War assump-tions governed the immediate reaction of U.S. leaders to this conflict, as Truman administration officials never doubted for a moment that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (in power 1924–1953) had ordered the invasion as the first step in his plan for world conquest. “Communism,” President Harry S. Truman (1945–1953) argued in his memoirs, “was acting in Korea just as [Adolf] Hitler, [Benito] Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fif-teen, and twenty years earlier.” If North Korea’s aggression went “unchallenged, the world was certain to be plunged into another world war.” 1 ROOTS OF THE KOREAN WAR The dominant role of anti-communism in dictating postwar U.S. foreign policy prevented Truman from recognizing that the origins of this conflict dated to at least the start of World War II (1939–1945). At that time, Korea was a colony of the Japanese Empire. Since 1905, the Korean people had endured merciless political repression, economic exploitation, and cul-tural suppression. Patriotic Koreans who lacked government experience fought Japanese colonialism as exiles in the United States, China, and Soviet Siberia, but disagreement on strategy and purpose prevented unity in the liberation movement. Ulti-mately, Korea’s war and continued division was a consequence of the refusal, after 1945, of the United States, the Soviet Union, and, later, China to allow the Korean people to decide for themselves the future course of their nation’s development. Two Koreas Before 1941, the United States had no vital interests in Korea and was largely indifferent to the fate of this remote Asian country, despite the fact that the United States had been the first Western state to sign a treaty with Korea in 1882.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
