“For if Korea produced such crucial aspects of the cold war as high defense budgets, a militarized NATO, and the spread of American commitments, and if Korea was an accident, then the imperatives of bipolarity or the U.S. domestic system are not a sufficient explanation for much of the cold war. The United States and the USSR may have been "enemies by position" (to use Aron's phrase), but this did not require much that we have come to associate with bipolarity, especially the globalization of commitments and the viewing of most local conflicts as tests of strength between the superpowers. Similar problems arise with those theories that stress the needs not of the international system but of the American internal politicoeconomic system. Thus, according to Ambrose, By June 1950, a series of desperate needs had come together. Truman had to have a crisis to sell the N.S.C. 68 program; Chiang could not hold on in Formosa nor Rhee in South Korea without an American commitment; the U.S. Air Force and Navy needed a justification to retain their bases in Japan; the Democrats had to prove to the McCarthyites that they could stand up to the communists in Asia as well as in Europe. The needs were met on 25 June 1950 [Ambrose, 1971: 195].”

Korean War

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