When the North Koreans invaded South Korea in the summer of 1950, they met little effective resistance. The capital of South Korea, Seoul, fell in a few days.
But invading Russia has not worked even for military geniuses like Charles of Sweden or Napoleon, not even for the seemingly all-powerful Nazis in 1941.
America had been ambiguous about defending South Korea. When in January of 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson outlined U.S. commitments to Asian countries under Communist expansionist threat, he only mentioned Japan and the Philippines as being under U.S. military protection.
Acheson added: “So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned, it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack.” It takes a great deal of wiggling to say that Acheson was not excluding South Korea from America’s security guarantee.
North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung thought that the South had been left hanging out to dry. After consulting the big boys, Joe Stalin and Mao Zedung, he made his plans and launched his invasion. But Harry Truman decided that he would resist, the United Nations voted to join the battle, and a real war was now on.
Truman, however, had limited aims. He did not want an all out war in Asia war. The Soviet Union and China both bordered on Korea. Both had larger populations than the United States. Russia now had the Bomb. Truman wrote in his diary on June 30: “Must be careful not to cause a general Asiatic war.”
He did not even want to call this war a war, but “a United Nations police action.” Just as police do not conquer but restore peaceful order, just so he set the strategic aim: to restore the status quo ante bellum. He told his staff that no action should be taken north of the 38th parallel that had been the border between North and South, at least for the time being.
North Korea continued to push south. As American and UN troops gradually arrived, they executed a long retreat, not stopping till they had established a firm defensive line in the far southeastern corner of the peninsula, circling around the port of Pusan. The Communist troops kept pushing forward, but with the allied troops dug in, they hit their limit on September 12. The Pusan Perimeter held.
Three days later, the course of the war changed spectacularly.
Executing an audacious plan conceived by UN commanding officer Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Gen. Edward Almond landed a large force at Inchon, 150 miles north and far behind enemy lines. Inchon’s huge tides made it a huge gamble, but the invasion proceeded flawlessly, and the advantage it gave was rapidly exploited. Within ten days, Seoul was liberated. The North Korean forces suffered huge losses and could not put up effective resistance to the advancing UN troops.
The initial war aims were now rapidly achieved. The invasion was contained and all of the South was restored. But in the giddiness of an incredible turn of fortune, the strategic aim of the war shifted. As historian David McCollough wrote:
MacArthur favored “hot pursuit” of the enemy. So did the Joint Chiefs, the press, politicians of both parties, and the great majority of the American people. And understandably. It was a heady time, the excitement of victory was in the air. Except for a few at the State Department … virtually no one was urging a halt at the 38th parallel. “Troops could not be expected to march up to a surveyor’s line and stop,” said Dean Acheson.
And so, with little sober deliberation, the strategy changed. Mac Arthur cabled: “I regard all of Korea open for military operations.” No one in Truman’s White House said anything to the contrary in reply. Warnings that indeed a major Asiatic ground war was about to break open were discounted, even though it was clear they were coming from the upper echelon of the Chinese government.
As autumn deepened, and the winter with its winds from Siberia approached, MacArthur’s troops were heading for the Chinese border. MacArthur split his army, trying to encircle the North Korean troops. It left his own forces terribly exposed to the threat he had ignored — the massive Chinese counterattack that came on Thanksgiving weekend.
The giddiness of victory vaporized. Vastly outnumbered, with the American forces split and vulnerable and suffering from bitter cold, another long retreat began, not stopping until Seoul once again had been captured by the Communists. The American strategy was in tatters. MacArthur became unnerved and serially insubordinate to his Commander-in- Chief.
Truman eventually fired MacArthur and replaced him with Matthew Ridgway, who recaptured Seoul and saw to the eventual armistice, which accomplished the original, pre-giddiness American goal.
American presidents never expressed much of a goal with respect to Ukraine and Russia, both constituents of the old Soviet Union. There was some fluidity after the Soviet break-up, Crimea at first floating off on its own, then subsumed by Ukraine.
Putin in Russia spoke of re-establishing Russian power and prestige and began to re-assert itself in areas that had split away from it. When George W. Bush became politically ineffective due to the ever-more unpopular war in Iraq, Putin seized land in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, which it still occupies today. Bush made no effective response.
In 2014, correctly gauging Obama as ineffectual, Putin jumped for something much bigger — he grabbed the entire Crimea and the eastern reaches of the current version of Ukraine known as the Donbas, the basin of the Don River. Obama’s outrage, as Putin had figured, did not translate itself into any effective response, not even the supply of antitank Javelins that Ukraine urgently requested.
Trump, however, was another story. We have his colorful and perhaps hyperbolic description of his meeting with Putin when he broached the topic. What we know for sure is that Putin stayed within his boundaries and attempted no territorial aggrandizement during the four years of Trump 45, even when Trump was distracted by impeachment, even in his lame-duck days. Putin’s drive resumed with Biden’s presidency, whose pusillanimity was on full display in the calamitous and shameful Afghanistan skedaddle.
Biden played his hand at the beginning by telling the world that his response to a Russian attack on Ukraine would depend on how big the incursion was. Putin decided to make it big, and his full-scale charge on Kyiv showed his utter contempt of the failing Biden and his Obamaite staffers. Biden offered the Ukrainian president a jet ride out of there and possibly a place on Failed Dictators’ Row in Miami.
Zelensky’s resolution and the stout resistance of the Ukrainians against all odds sent the Russian invasion packing. Suddenly, instead of facing national extinction, Ukraine was riding high. And suddenly, the Obamaists in the Administration got giddy. Almost by accident, they had backed a winner, and without making any kind of courageous decision, they had a chance to ride the wave of the Ukrainians’ courage and Russia’s blundering.
And ride they did. Like Truman in the days after Inchon, the strategic goal shifted dramatically. Instead of half-heartedly backing a policy of leaky containment, suddenly Biden mucky mucks had visions of sweeping away Russia’s forces in a spring offensive, inspiring the Wagner Group to rise in revolt, and to drive Putin out of power. On to Moscow!
But invading Russia has not worked even for military geniuses like Charles of Sweden or Napoleon, not even for the seemingly all-powerful Nazis in 1941. It’s too big, has too many people to throw into the fight, and it has far more resources than Ukraine. The war degenerated into trench warfare, a stalemated battle of attrition, in which casualties mount, misery mounts, and Ukraine’s population dwindles from battlefield losses and from the millions who have left the country and gone elsewhere.
After the failure of MacArthur’s invasion of North Korea, Truman learned his lesson and stuck to containment. Victory over the Soviets came about through their economic collapse and their collapse of will, not on an all-out military campaign. Today as well, there is no serious plan to achieve victory through invasion of Russia and no political will among those talking loudly against Putin to actually commit troops to a ground invasion.
There is only a vague idea of bleeding Putin through and endless bloody stalemate. But Russia can survive such a stalemate much better than Ukraine. Their ability to sustain huge and disproportionate losses and keep going is what overwhelmed the Nazis at Stalingrad. The Russians suffered far more losses than the Germans. It wasn’t enough to bring victory.
And today, there is something more in Russia’s favor. Russia would not hesitate to reply to a successful invasion with their nuclear arsenal, just as we would do faced with a similar reality.
The giddiness of the repelling of the dash for Kyiv is long gone. Yet people are still trying to summon up the ghost of that giddiness as if that could make Putin go away and leave Crimea and Donbas behind.
A touch of sobriety, please. A serious deal is sorely needed by all.
The only successful conquest of Russia came from its fall to internal disorder. Lenin took down Russia from within, and so Germany got a victory, stripping huge areas from it in the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.
Contain the dictator. Isolated and hemmed in and unloved by so many of his people, in God’s good time, he will fall, one way or another.
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