Cold War: The Korean War

The Korean War is seen as the “flashpoint” in the Cold War, which made the Cold war a global conflict. North Korea was led by Kim Il-Sung and was communist. South Korea was led by Syngman Rhee and was capitalist. Though it is said that Kim Il-Sung, who headed The Democratic People's Republic, which was created by the Soviet Union, had adopted a policy of opposition to Rhee's government and for the unification of the Korean peninsula by armed force, there are still many other theories as to why the Korean War began. Some say that Kim Il-Sung convinced Stalin that he could take all of Korea, others say that since Europe was not the only area where the Communists were coming to power and that President Truman believed that if Korea fell, then
that others could follow in suit, still yet others say that it was because Syngman Rhee was boasting about attacking North Korea. This investigation is about how essentially the Korean War influenced the Cold War.
Perspectives include those of the UN Council, the people of Korea, the two leaders, and all the major powers. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf in July and as far as they were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. American officials worked anxiously to fashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans because they feared that it would lead to a wider war with Russia and China, perhaps a World War III.
Due to fears of communism spreading to other parts of the world, nonintervention was not considered an option by most. President Truman argued that if we let the Koreans down, the Soviets would keep right on going and swallow up one area after another. He viewed the fight in Korea as a symbol of the global struggle between east and west. After a summer of bad battles and many allied losses, President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur, decided to be offensive. They called it a war to “liberate” the North from the communists. They could not use nuclear attacks because they didn’t want another nuclear holocaust and because the USSR had its bombs. This pattern of not using nuclear weapons would last through the entire Cold War. The U.S. got involved in Korea to save face and to appear strong in their cause against communism. Ironically, South Korea was only a falsely democratic state under Syngman Rhee, who was considered to really be just as tyrannical as North Korea's Kim Il-Sung. This, once again, set a Cold War pattern for the United States of America. The U.S. was seen as supporting anti-communists who were quite blatantly dictators themselves. However it gave the US reason to increase its military expenditure four-fold.
While there is no evidence that the Soviet Union got directly involved in the fighting, it did supply North Korea with quite a lot of firepower.
The US, however, did send troops as part of a UN international-peace keeping force. From the US perspective, the UN force was only in name as to them the troops seemed to be almost entirely made up of American forces, with some forces from the allied powers. The Korean War was the first instance during the Cold War in which it became clear that the UN could be used by the US as a foreign policy tool. It was somewhat surprising considering that it had only a few years after letting China turn into a Communist country without getting seriously involved, as well as watching Eastern Europe fall under the "iron curtain", that the US would then become embroiled in an Asian land war over the fate of a seemingly strategically insignificant Korea. Therefore, the Korean War represented an important shift in the US Cold War policy. By 1950, with Truman’s support people began to go with the idea that a loss to communism anywhere was thought of as a loss
everywhere.
The Korean War set the standard for many later conflicts, particularly about the usage of nuclear weapons. It created the idea of a proxy war, in which the two powers would fight in another country, thereby forcing the people in that nation to suffer the bulk of the destruction and death involved in a war between such large nations. With both superpowers possessing nuclear weapons, neither side could aim for total victory as the threat of escalation to nuclear war hung over their heads. It also expanded the Cold War, which to that point had mostly been concerned with Europe. It stopped the Communist expansion at the 38th parallel, which became the division of Korea, thus restricting it to the mainland of Asia, which claimed Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines etc. for the 'free world' side. Unlike many earlier turning points, such as the British withdrawal from Greece and Turkey in 1947, there were no events in that foreseeable future which could have served as functional substitutes for the war. The international or the American domestic system possibly may have "needed" high defense budgets, the globalization of American commitments, and the militarization of NATO, but these patterns arose only in the wake of the Korean War.
The Korean War shaped the course of the Cold War by both resolving the incoherence, which characterized U.S.
foreign, and defense efforts in the period 1946-1950 and establishing important new lines of policy. However some would argue that Korea was simply an important accident. They argue that we should note that the traditional explanation of the Cold War, which affirms the validity of President Truman's view in which he stated that Korea was a Soviet-designed test of American resolve, implies that there were possible substitutes for Korea. This suggests that the Soviets could have picked another battleground. The United States would have had to fight and rebuild its position, as it did after Korea, if it was to prevent the Russians from dominating the globe. The historians say that even if the war was planned by Russia the cause was linked to the local context and that had it not occurred, it is not likely that the Russians would have posed an armed challenge to the United States elsewhere. It is a theory that very few historians now defend but it does provoke the question of what if the Soviets had picked a different battleground? It poses the idea that perhaps in a different scenario their could have been a Cold War in which there were very few lives lost and sure, they argue that the U.S would have had to make the same, if not similar policy changes, but it still does not cover the fact that the pre-existing factors in the U.S would not have been enough to evoke such a
response to produce these policies. Therefore I would argue that the Korean War drastically impacted the Cold War in the end.