Miscalculations In The Korean War

The Korean War was initially a civil and military struggle that was fought on the Korean Peninsula between the Northern and Southern forces of Korea, with tensions rising following the end of the Second World War and the outbreak of fighting beginning in 1950; the majority of the war being fought for the following three years up until 1953. The establishment of the “38th parallel” divided North Korea, which was decided at a United Nations conference in August 1945 following Japan’s surrender and the American bombing of Nagasaki, the importance of this being that Korea had played a significant role in the Japanese war effort, due to Korea being a colony for 35 years under Japan. Korea has always been that of an interest to the world powers,

This, in itself then, proves to be dire. The Korean War could be argued to be a series of miscalculations, with Soviet forces not expecting the Americans to get involved and the American forces not expecting an attack from the North on the South. The danger of miscalculations on this scale in a nuclear age spoke for themselves . The Korean War therefore affected many things in the broader Cold War, both American and Soviet Union foreign and domestic policies changed throughout this period, but it also included effects outside of these countries and effectively pulled the rest of the world into the worry of Cold War. However, the Korean War did have some positive outcomes, such as the changing of the Japanese economy which boomed throughout this time due to American spending, and changes at the American home

For the United States, documents such as Kennan’s Long Telegram and the Mr. X Article and the callings for “containing the Soviet Union” . The Truman Doctrine and The Marshall Plan that shaped the beginnings of the Cold War were also prominent before the end of the Korean War, due to the Marshall Plan involving European states by giving them defense and militant aid, putting them in an arguably better or more “well-off” position to that of the Soviet spheres of influence. American spending budgets therefore could be also a reason as to how the Korean War shaped the broader Cold War. Initially the Korean War sparked only a moderate increase of about ten billion dollars in military spending. In 1950 Truman authorised a document from the National Security Council named NSC-68 which “unhesitatingly saw everything that the Soviet Union stood for as bad and everything that the USA championed as good” . The National Security Council is a committee in the executive branch of the United States government that advises the President on matters relating to foreign, military, and national security, whilst also directing the operation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which was later established in 1947. NSC-68 outlined a few issues that worried Truman, such as the need to resist communism at all points and the need to massively increase