On July 27, 1953, the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, and the guns fell silent for the first time in three years on the Korean Peninsula. The armistice effectively restored the status quo ante to the peninsula that had been shattered by North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in June 1950. The Korean War was the first “hot war” of the Cold War between the Soviet-led communist world and the West, led by the United States. And its inconclusive end signaled the triumph in U.S. policy of containment over liberation.

Ever since the end of World War II and the widespread recognition among American policymakers that the U.S. was engaged in what President John F. Kennedy called a “long twilight struggle” with the Soviet-led communist world, a debate raged among Western strategists regarding how best to meet this new geopolitical challenge. Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, and George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” written from our Moscow embassy, provided early warnings of the emerging Cold War struggle.

Kennan in his famous “X” article in Foreign Affairs explained the intellectual basis for the Truman administration’s policy of containment — a defensive strategy that sought to block Soviet and Soviet-backed aggression until the internal weaknesses of communism caused the Soviet regime to collapse or “mellow.” Kennan at the time was the State Department’s director of policy and planning. (READ MORE: The Weapon That Won the Cold War)

James Burnham, a former Trotskyist who had worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and who wrote an assessment of the emerging Soviet threat in the spring of 1944, thought containment was too passive and would eventually result in a Soviet victory in the Cold War. Burnham proposed a policy of “liberation” that would seek to undermine Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Burnham laid out that proposed strategy in three books — The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism, and Containment or Liberation.

This debate over postwar strategy grew more intense after the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communists in the Chinese civil war in October 1949. Soon thereafter China signed a security pact with the Soviet Union, creating what was then called the Sino-Soviet bloc — which occupied a large swath of the Eurasian landmass. The great British geopolitical theorist Sir Halford Mackinder — whose writings Kennan and Burnham had studied — had warned that the democracies would be in peril if a hostile power or alliance of hostile powers gained effective political control of the key power centers of Eurasia. The Truman administration’s national security team, led by Paul Nitze, who had succeeded Kennan as director of policy and planning at the State Department, responded to these developments with NSC-68, a classified strategic blueprint for maintaining the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. NSC-68 had elements of Kennan’s containment strategy and Burnham’s liberation strategy. That document was issued in April 1950. Two months later, North Korea — with Soviet and Chinese backing — invaded South Korea.

One can almost forgive Stalin and Mao for believing that the U.S. would do nothing to prevent a communist takeover of South Korea. The Truman administration had pulled American troops from the peninsula and Secretary of State Dean Acheson had infamously told the world at a press event that Korea was outside the American security perimeter in East Asia. Mao even set in motion plans to invade Formosa (Taiwan) to wipe out the remnants of Nationalist forces on the island. When North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel in force, Truman responded by ordering U.S. forces to the peninsula and sending the 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait — the latter move effectively blocking Mao’s planned invasion of Formosa. (RELATED: China on the Rise: Never Forget the Horror of Chinese Totalitarianism)

North Korean Communist forces took the southern capital of Seoul and rather swiftly overran South Korean forces. American, South Korean, and U.N. troops (Truman was able to obtain United Nations support for the defense of South Korea because the Soviet delegation was boycotting the U.N. for its non-recognition of Communist China) eventually retreated to the region at the southeastern tip of the peninsula near Pusan. U.S. and U.N. commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his staff then formulated and subsequently carried out an amphibious landing at the port of Inchon in September 1950, which changed the course of the war. North Korean forces in the south were cut off from their supplies and routed. Seoul was retaken. And MacArthur was authorized by the Truman administration to cross the 38th parallel and liberate North Korea (as long as Chinese forces did not massively enter the war). Although officially MacArthur was told to avoid the use of U.S. ground forces near the Chinese border, Gen. George Marshall assured MacArthur that he should “feel unhampered tactically and strategically” in proceeding north of the 38th parallel. 

After Inchon, and until Chinese forces crossed the Yalu River en masse in October–November 1950, the Truman administration sought to liberate all of Korea from communist rule. When China massively intervened, MacArthur sought authority to bomb Yalu River bridges and attack Chinese sanctuaries across the border. Washington balked. It was the beginning of the break between Truman and MacArthur that eventually led to Truman relieving MacArthur of command. Liberation was replaced by containment. And the debate about the best Cold War strategy entered the political arena.

As the war in Korea stalemated, President Harry Truman became more unpopular. The Republican candidate for president in 1952, retired Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, promised to end the war in Korea and ran on a platform that called for “rolling back” the communist empire. John Foster Dulles, who would become Eisenhower’s secretary of state, wrote an article in Life magazine that advocated the policy of liberation. Once in power, however, the Eisenhower administration sought and achieved a negotiated settlement to the war that restored the status quo ante. What’s more, Eisenhower did nothing to aid the uprising in East Germany in June 1953, and three years later he stood by as Soviet forces crushed the rebellion in Hungary. Containment won out over liberation. The Korean armistice doomed the people of North Korea to the horrors of continued communist rule. And the Korean example was repeated in Vietnam, where the United States eventually suffered a defeat, due in no small part to what James Burnham called the “strategic prison of containment.”

Many scholars and observers have credited containment for our victory in the Cold War. But that is only half the story. In the 1980s, as Paul Kengor and Peter Schweizer have demonstrated, President Ronald Reagan and his national security team devised and implemented a policy of liberation that undermined Soviet power and ended the Cold War without firing a shot. But as we mark the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, the people of North Korea continue to suffer the ravages of communist rule.