The calamitous history of America’s wars of choice.
US Secretary of State Dean Acheson and US Delegate Eleanor Roosevelt attend the opening session of the UN General Assembly in New York City on October 16, 1952. (FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
EDITOR’S NOTE:
As Trump’s disastrous war against Iran continues to grind on, it might benefit the incoming class of Democratic policymakers who seem poised to take over not just the House but possibly the Senate to reflect on the calamitous history of Washington’s wars of choice. The first such war was President Harry Truman’s, in Korea, begun by North Korean forces in June 1950. As Nation contributing editor James W. Carden shows in The Great Betrayal: How the Democrats Became the Party of War, Truman and his hawkish secretary of state, Dean Acheson, steered the party in a direction not intended by Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman and Acheson’s embrace of the burgeoning national security state and their adoption of the paranoiac anti-communism that heretofore had been characteristic of the American right led them headlong into an unnecessary war of choice in Korea. Korea set the precedent for Vietnam, for Iraq, and for Iran—it was the first of many wars waged in the absence of constitutional authorization on the flimsiest of pretexts.
As Trump’s disastrous war against Iran continues to grind on, it might benefit the incoming class of Democratic policymakers who seem poised to take over not just the House but possibly the Senate to reflect on the calamitous history of Washington’s wars of choice. The first such war was President Harry Truman’s, in Korea, begun by North Korean forces in June 1950. As Nation contributing editor James W. Carden shows in The Great Betrayal: How the Democrats Became the Party of War, Truman and his hawkish secretary of state, Dean Acheson, steered the party in a direction not intended by Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman and Acheson’s embrace of the burgeoning national security state and their adoption of the paranoiac anti-communism that heretofore had been characteristic of the American right led them headlong into an unnecessary war of choice in Korea. Korea set the precedent for Vietnam, for Iraq, and for Iran—it was the first of many wars waged in the absence of constitutional authorization on the flimsiest of pretexts.
The invasion of South Korea by North Korea’s Kim Il Sung provided Washington’s Cold War planners with just the story they needed at just the right time. As President Harry Truman reached the midpoint of his first elected term, he surprised some of his Defense and State Department planners by not immediately accepting his national security staff’s more hawkish recommendations. “We were sweating over it,” one Truman adviser admitted later, “then thank god Korea came along.”
The idea that South Korea represented a core US national security interest was a novel one. In fact, there was, in the years and months leading up to the conflict, broad agreement among US policymakers that it represented no such thing. At Yalta, a four-power trusteeship was created to oversee the former Japanese colony. In April 1948, Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) admitted that Korea was “of little strategic value to the United States.” In a speech on January 12, 1950, Acheson famously left both Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) outside the boundaries of the US defense perimeter in East Asia. North Korea launched its attack on June 24, and even then the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that it would be “militarily unsound” for Washington to commit large forces “in an area of slight strategic importance.”
But once the war was joined, Truman made the ever-dubious historical parallel with Neville Chamberlain’s decision to “appease” Hitler at Munich. “The free nations have learned the fateful lesson of the 1930’s. That lesson is that aggression must be met firmly. Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war,” declared Truman on July 19. Truman later claimed that upon learning of North Korea’s invasion, he “remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act, it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen and twenty years earlier.”
“If this was allowed to go unchallenged,” he continued, “it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on a second world war.” In his seminal study on the “Origins of the Cold War,” the realist scholar Hans Morgenthau noted, “The misinterpretation of the North Korean aggression as part of a grand design at world conquest originating in and controlled by Moscow resulted in a drastic militarization of the cold war.” Indeed, Truman and Acheson viewed Asia solely through the prism of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, Acheson blamed the Russians for starting the war, but there is no evidence the project originated with Stalin.
Dean Rusk, an Acheson protégé then serving as assistant secretary of state for the Far East, blithely dismissed China as a puppet of the Soviets. China, in Rusk’s view, was merely a “colonial Russian government, a Slavic Manchukuo on a large-scale.” Acheson also thought he saw Moscow’s hand behind Ho Chi Minh’s insurgency in Vietnam. Acheson worried that Ho might establish a “communist-dominated, Moscow-oriented” regime. For Acheson and his disciples like Rusk, Moscow’s was the not-so-hidden hand behind every problem everywhere.
Paranoia is a poor substitute for strategy, but driven by their fears of a monolithic communist movement, Truman and Acheson provided $15 million to France to bolster its efforts against Ho’s insurgency. Truman also created a US Military Assistance Advisory Group, Indochina, to provide material support and advisers to the French forces fighting the Viet Minh. On October 9, Army Brigadier General Francis G. Brink arrived in Saigon with a contingent of 65 American troops—the first of many more to come. As a recent, and sympathetic, Acheson biographer admits, Acheson “was in the vanguard in leading the United States into Indochina’s Big Muddy.” As with many of his Cold War policies, Truman’s intervention in Vietnam was diametrically opposed to the intentions of his predecessor.
At the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt said the Allies should not fight to restore Vietnam to the French—in his view, after 100 years of French colonialism, the Vietnamese were worse off than ever. In Bohlen’s judgment, Roosevelt’s views on Vietnam reflected the president’s “strong dislike of colonialism,” which Roosevelt frequently expressed. Yet by the time Truman and Acheson left office, Washington was funding nearly half of France’s costs in Vietnam. Ultimately, these decisions set in motion a war that would eventually kill upwards of 3.5 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen.
By 1952, Truman was a deeply unpopular and polarizing figure, so much so that he was defeated in the New Hampshire primary by a margin of 11 points (55 percent to 44 percent) by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver. By the end of March, he had abandoned his bid for reelection. Truman left office with a 32 percent approval rating, the second-lowest approval rating for a departing president after Richard Nixon, who had sunk to 24 percent in 1974. Yet in the three-quarters of a century since leaving office, Truman’s reputation has witnessed a remarkable turnaround. By the time the new century dawned, Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; his headlong rush into a Cold War with the Soviet Union; and his unconstitutional war of choice in Korea were all treated as acts of statesmanship by both popular historians and the Democratic elite. In September 2000, President Bill Clinton presided over a ceremony naming the headquarters of the State Department in honor of Truman. “Thanks, in no small measure to President Truman, we have won the Cold War,” said Clinton.
Truman’s stock has only risen further in the quarter-century since Clinton spoke those words. A Siena College survey released in 2022 ranked Truman as the seventh-greatest president. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project at the University of Houston ranked Truman as the sixth-greatest. There are precious few dissenters from the pro-Truman consensus. Among the most astringent was the novelist and critic Gore Vidal, who noted, “The inexorable beatification of Harry Truman is now an important aspect of our evolving imperial system.”
But it was Acheson who lent an intellectual sheen and respectability to Truman’s parochialism. It was he, not Truman, who, as the main driver behind institutions like NATO and programs like the ERA, spawned generations of imitators among the Democratic foreign policy cognoscenti. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, learned at his knee; Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, said Acheson was her model. Republicans also now line up to praise him. Henry Kissinger observed in 2006—and perhaps with not a little envy—that “Accolades for him have become bipartisan.” Later in life, working to defeat congressional opposition to President Nixon’s anti-ballistic missile program, Acheson served as an early mentor to the young neoconservative operatives Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Edward Luttwak. Acheson spent his years out of office crafting one of the most enduring and pernicious of Cold War myths: that of Roosevelt’s credulousness in the face of Stalin. Acheson succeeded in selling the story that the Cold War was unavoidable, and the course he and Truman chose could not have been otherwise. Yet others, like Harriman, who knew the Soviets, Stalin, and Roosevelt far better than Acheson, thought otherwise. “FDR was basically right in thinking he could make progress by personal relations with Stalin,” said Harriman some years later. Harriman, like Bohlen, was at Tehran and Yalta and remembered that “Stalin was very much impressed with Roosevelt; you could almost say he was in awe of Roosevelt.” “I don’t know what would have happened if FDR had lived,” said Harriman toward the end of his long, eventful life. “I only know things would not have been the same.”
The militarization of the Cold War that took place under Truman and Acheson was a conscious choice. But it was not a choice with which everyone agreed; and so began a decades-long battle within the Democratic Party establishment between the heirs of Acheson and the heirs of Roosevelt.
James CardenJames W. Carden is a contributing writer for foreign affairs at The Nation. He served as a policy adviser to the Special Representative for Intergovernmental Affairs and the Office of Russia Affairs at the US State Department.