De: You're right; thank you for correcting me. I've read very little about the Korean war, so I ought not to have mentioned it at all.
My main point, which really showed up far more strongly in the case of Vietnam, and US participation in regime change and civil wars after, is that an imperial power, which has options, is really at a major disadvantage tangling with a CULTURE which views the war as an existential threat from a "for profit" aggressor.
And I think the US Revolutionary war is a classic case in point: The US participants *voluntarily* forfeit their lives if they failed; the English were only in it for the money.
In the case of Korea, the US had some reason to think it was an existential threat. The Koreans, themsleves, were already long divided and occupied by a series of foreign invaders. For China, especially, the case could be made that they, similarly, had considerable reason to feel the US occupation of S. Korea was an existential threat...although it sounds like the US had already substantially left S. Korea by that time?
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Here is an enlightening snippet from what I just read about the Korean war:
On June 25, 1950, the Korean War (1950-1953) began when 75,000 members of the North Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. It would be the first military action of the Cold War.
In 1945, superpowers drew a line bisecting the Korean peninsula to separate the Soviet-supported Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (today’s North Korea) from the U.S.-supported Republic of Korea to the South. Essentially a civil conflict, the Korean War became a proxy war between superpowers clashing over communism and democracy. Between 2 million and 4 million people died, 70 percent of them civilians. No peace treaty was ever signed, although in December 2021, North and South Korea, the United States and China agreed to declare a formal end to the war.
What Caused the Korean War?
“The Korean War was a civil war,” ...The Japanese ruled over Korea with an iron fist from 1910 to 1945. To weaken their colony, they used assimilation tactics ..
When Japan surrendered to the Allies...the Korean peninsula passed from Japan to the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The superpowers chose to divide Korea between themselves at the 38th parallel, which roughly bisected the peninsula. “It didn’t correspond to political, cultural, or terrain boundaries,” The Soviets set up a communist government to the North, and the United States helped establish a military government in the South.
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Kim Il Sung went to Moscow in 1949 and again in 1950 to seek Soviet support for invading South Korea....He also got a verbal commitment from China,” Kim says.
When North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, “North Korea was banking on the U.S. not coming back,” ..
“The U.S. initially didn’t want to get involved in any kind of invasion. They didn’t want to get tangled up with North Korea, much less China or the Soviet Union,” says Kim. Key events on the world stage caused the United States to change course.
On August 29, 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who had helped the United States build its atomic bomb program, had leaked the blueprint of the “Fat Man” atomic bomb to the Soviets. The revelation stoked Cold War paranoia. Then, on October 1, 1949, communist revolutionary Mao Zedong announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China following the defeat of the U.S.-supported Chinese nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. “
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Thousands of Chinese troops were sent to aid the North Koreans. “Mao Zedong was adamant about helping out his North Korean allies. He wanted to improve China’s prestige in the communist world by what he saw as freeing South Koreans from U.S. imperialist rule,” Kim says.
President Truman Orders US Forces to South Korea
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So, S Korea was quite the mess, already: it had been occupied by foreign powers since 1915. So this was largely a PROXY, where the motivations and resolve of the various parties, including the Koreans, was hardly clear.
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