What Is Our Role in East Asia?

• DOI: 10.1177/106591296501800107
• Published date: 01 March 1965
• Author: D.F. Fleming
• Date: 01 March 1965
• Subject Matter: Articles

WHAT IS OUR ROLE IN EAST ASIA?
D. F. FLEMING
Vanderbilt University
HE
COLD
WAR
is nearly twenty years old and it is obviously waning in its
~ main theater. During World War II Roosevelt and Hull labored long to
-JL create a basis for making and keeping the peace in cooperation with the Soviet
Union, the great ally which had borne the heavy brunt of the fighting on land and
suffered most from death and destruction. However, when Roosevelt and Hull
passed from the scene in 1945 their successors abruptly reversed their policies and
opted for conflict with the Soviet Union over East Europe, and for the containment
and encirclement of both the Soviets and communism throughout the world.
The same complete reversal of healing policies had happened twice before in
our
history, after the death of Lincoln and after the fall of Wilson. In 1918 the tragic
results of the reversal were delayed, but they came inexorably. The stupidities and
agonies and infinite wastes of World War I had convinced many millions of the best
citizens the world over that a new start had to be made, a league of nations must be
created that would get all the nations into one body and prevent any more suicidal
balance-of-power wars between rival alliances. Never in all human history had an
overpowering need been so clear and clamant, yet it was quickly denied in the United
States Senate, where the opponents of Woodrow Wilson preferred to return to isola-
tion and let the world drift as before. Our lead in refusing responsibility for the
peace was followed by Britain and France in the crises of the League of Nations and
the world drifted into a far worse world war in 1939.
We
do not know that our leadership in the League of Nations would have made
the difference, but we do know that we did not try to make it succeed, except futilely
on the fringes of the League during the Manchurian crisis in 1931-32. In 1945 we
dutifully created another league of nations and entered it, but we also plunged at
once into two crusades -
an old-fashioned balance-of-power fight with the Soviet
Union and a crusade against communism everywhere. In other words, we heavily
overcompensated for the failure of isolationism by coming close to assuming re-
sponsibility for everything everywhere in the world.
Our quick assumption of global responsibility was signaled by Churchill’s iron
curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, in Truman’s applauding pres-
ence, and by the proclamation a year later of the Truman Doctrine, forbidding the
expansion of communism anywhere and in effect forbidding all revolutions around
the globe, since they might turn communist.
The Truman Doctrine was the rashest and most sweeping commitment ever
made by any government at any time. In it Mr. Truman followed his own inclina-
tions, and those of the advisers to whom he listened, and at the same time sought
to foil his Republican critics, who had won the congressional elections of 1946 on
NOTE: D. F. Fleming is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Vanderbilt University
and the author of a two volume history of The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960. He
-
,
has recently served as Visiting Professor at the University of Arizona.
73

---

74
charges of softness on communism. No man ever gave greater hostages to fortune.
Within two years the success of the communist-led revolution in China punched a
hole in Truman’s Doctrine as big as a continent, one containing the world’s largest
and oldest people. A year later, in 1950, the Korean War broke out and President
Truman was compelled to defend his global policy in what became a long frustrating
war. His Republican opponents at first applauded, but in the end they saddled him
with &dquo;Truman’s War,&dquo; and it was primarily responsible for the defeat of his party
in the 1952 election. Eisenhower went to Korea, as he had promised, and afterwards
accepted a stalemate peace.
Then for some seven years under the leadership of John Foster Dulles our
objective was &dquo;liberation&dquo; and the &dquo;rollback&dquo; of both communism and Russia in
Europe. The Soviets did accept a negotiated withdrawal from Austria and they with-
drew voluntarily from Finland, but the main lines of their World War II advance
held. This was not strange, after what happened at Munich in 1938.
During the long years of the cold war we were taught that there was a great
Red Monolith which controlled all Communists everywhere, including the Chinese.
Today, everybody knows that there is the deepest kind of split between Russia and
China and that all the Communist states of East Europe are evolving lives of their
own, usually in the direction of somewhat more freedom at home and better relations
with the West. After leading the world in spending at least a trillion dollars on cold
war armaments we have not been able to reverse the main result of World War
II
in Europe. There has been no rollback and we have come to understand that the
terribly exhausted and devastated Soviet Union of the postwar years was both in-
capable of attempting and unwilling to attempt the world conquest which our post-
Roosevelt leaders so hastily ascribed to her, and which we soon accepted as our first
article of national faith.
In his last months President Kennedy gave us magnificent leadership in the
direction of ending the cold war. In his address at American University, on June 11,
1963, he acknowledged Russia’s abysmal postwar weakness and called for a reap-
praisal of our attitudes toward her and toward the cold war. President Johnson has
also furthered this trend.
But there remains the Far East. There, Communist China has weathered severe
setbacks and is gathering strength. She is also still in the militant stage of her revolu-
tion and very angry at us because of our support of the Chiang Kai-shek regime on
Formosa and in the mouths of two Chinese harbors, because of our tremendous mili-
tary power on Okinawa and along her coasts, and because of our other blockades of
every kind -
economic, diplomatic, and political. Moreover, she sees us occupying
and fortifying the tips of two peninsulas on the Asiatic mainland, Korea and Viet-
nam, which are very close to her heartland. All the conditions for deep and perma-
nent resentment on China’s part are present.
For our part the prosecution of the cold war in Asia has always aroused the
strongest emotions of our political right wing. The defection of China to commu-
nism had not been expected and it has never been forgiven. Nor has a much wider
section of our people been able to forget the bitter frustrations of the Korean War.
So why not simply turn the focus of the cold war toward the Far East and keep our

---

75
tremendous arms expenditures going another decade or two? And why not really
push the cold war to &dquo;victory&dquo; in Asia?
Before we go in this direction we should soberly review our involvements in
Asia and try to ascertain what our objectives there are.
KOREA
Korea is a good place to begin.’- What does the record show there? It shows,
first, that we proposed the division of Korea at the 38th Parallel to prevent the
Russians from occupying all of Korea, which they could easily have done, and that
they readily agreed. When our occupation forces finally arrived in Korea, on Sep-
tember 8, 1945, General Hodge found a Peoples Republic Government already
organized by a national assembly representing all Korea. He suppressed this broadly
representative government in the South and in the North the Russians managed to
install their kind of rule. In the South we set up a rightist tyranny under Syngman
Rhee, which was soon decisively repudiated in the election of May 30, 1950.
Contrary to the almost universal assumption, we do not know which side began
the shooting in Korea on June 25. We do know that the North Koreans were well
armed and ready and that they had been conducting a propaganda campaign for
unification, but Rhee’s government had been publicly threatening for months to
march north. It had been defeated at the polls and may have been desperate. We
do not know, either, that the Soviet government was behind the swift North Korean
invasion of the South. It was boycotting the UN Security Council at the time, in
support of seating Red China in the UN, and was not present to veto UN
action in
South Korea’s defense. If Moscow knew about the invasion, would it commit such
an obvious blunder?
We
know that the UN
quickly approved the Truman Administration’s almost
instant decision to fight to defend South Korea, and that on October 7, 1950, it very
reluctantly approved our new objective of going north to destroy the North Korean
government and unify Korea by force, the same thing which the North Koreans had
attempted. This decision, as I see it, was the greatest single foreign policy mistake in
our history. It converted a small war, already won, into a dreadful catastrophe
which devastated Korea from end to end, killed some 2,000,000 people and wounded
another 3,000,000. By the time the war ended South Korean military casualties alone
had risen to 1,312,836 and the other side suffered a still greater slaughter.2 Indeed,
in the latter stages of the war our Army frankly labeled its objective to be &dquo;Operation
Killer.&dquo; The Korean War also cost us 144,173 American casualties and led us into
the huge armaments budgets which still continue.
Is this the kind of &dquo;solution&dquo; toward which we are sliding gradually in South
Ijietnama Before we answer &dquo;Yes, we...