The Korean War Was a Special Case
Why you can't extrapolate from the Korean War that indefinite troop commitments can work
A thoughtful commenter responded to my post about the fact that American democracy demanded the pullout from Afghanistan by pointing out that while examples such as Vietnam and Iraq are constantly trotted out, nobody argues that what we did in South Korea was unjust. Which is quite true, in 2021. But the reason for that is because South Korea presented circumstances that are unlikely to repeat themselves. Circumstances which are worth understanding in debates about future troop commitments.
The first thing to understand about the Korean War is that it became extremely unpopular. It did not quite produce Vietnam levels of American combat deaths, but it wasn’t far away (about 39,000 vs. 58,000), and it did so in a much shorter period of time. Lots of Americans were coming back in body bags, and the American public was probably particularly tired of it given that we had so recently lost so many Americans in World War II. Korea became so unpopular that an incumbent President, Harry Truman, did not run for reelection because it was clear he was going to get beaten badly. (Very similar to LBJ’s decision not to run for reelection in 1968.)
So the new President, Dwight Eisenhower, had to get us out of Korea. He promised he would travel there and address the situation if elected. The solution Eisenhower came upon was an armistice- Korea would be divided into South and North Korea, with the Communists in charge in the North and a US-sponsored regime in place in the South. The US would station troops (currently about 29,000) to guarantee the armistice.
This turned out to work very well. But several things had to happen for it to work. First of all, the North Koreans had to respect the armistice. In Vietnam and now Afghanistan, the other side did not respect the armistice. That’s what allowed them to take over the country. This turns out to be a very effective strategy for our opponents, because the reason all three of these wars ended when they did was because they had become very unpopular in America and the US wanted to get out. As a result, there isn’t a large constituency for going back in.
The result is, the US was very fortunate that North Korea, for the most part, obeyed the armistice. Of course, the politics were very different back then: perhaps the North Koreans were afraid they would not receive Soviet or Chinese support if they violated it. Or maybe there was a higher probability due to anti-Communist politics that the US would have gone back into Korea had there been a violation. Or maybe Kim Il Sung simply felt that a deal was a deal. Whatever the reason, Kim could have forced a stark choice on the US by violating his deal, and he, for the most part, did not do so. But the North Vietnamese and the Taliban had figured this out, and future adversaries will surely understand this as well.
The second point to make about South Korea is that we are very lucky about what happened after the war. What I mean by this is that South Korea both was led by relatively forward thinking, not totally corrupt individuals who turned it into an economic powerhouse and the country eventually democratized. Think of what could have happened if the South Korean government was similar to the highly corrupt South Vietnamese and Afghan governments we sponsored. It would have been very hard to build any sort of successful country with that sort of leadership. South Korea’s financial success was a key factor in deterring the North Koreans from attacking. It meant that US elites (as well as elites in other militarily powerful countries) had investments there and a vested interest in the country’s success, and would have supported strong action against North Korea in the event of an invasion. And it also meant that South Korea had a lot of money to spend on its own defense.
The democratizing of the South Korean government was also something that did not have to happen. Obviously, US pressure played a part in the government’s move towards democracy. But we pressure lots of countries to democratize (indeed, we pressured South Vietnam and Afghanistan too), but we are often unsuccessful. But because South Korea democratized, it reached a position where the moral stakes of a North Korean invasion would be gigantic. South Korea would receive enormous outpourings of support if a Communist dictatorship tried to take it over, and the North Koreans realize that.
Accordingly, where we ended up in South Korea is with a very rich country with only modest amounts of corruption and a democratic system of government, in a situation where the other side, whatever our problems with them (and there are many), fundamentally obeyed its promises in the armistice agreement. And in that situation, yes, you can post 30,000 troops over there and the American public will not complain much about it. But you can imagine many scenarios where things went terribly wrong for post-war South Korea and the North Koreans capitalized on it.
But, you might say, didn’t the troops themselves deter North Korea? And the answer is, “not really”. North Korea’s army is magnitudes larger than our troop presence in South Korea. Nobody doubts that in the initial stages of a war, North Korea could overrun the American troops and invade Seoul. The American troops are referred to by foreign policy types as a “tripwire”. In other words, they are there to symbolize our commitment to South Korea; they are not, themselves, the substance of that commitment. The substance of that commitment is that presumably if North Korea restarted the Korean War, the US would use bombing, missiles, drone strikes, and even possibly nuclear weapons to completely destroy Pyongyang and the other major industrial centers of North Korea, and might even change the regime there. Indeed, we could enforce that commitment (and let the North Koreans know about it) without posting a single troop in South Korea; the troops’ presence are simply one way of expressing the commitment clearly (because to attack South Korea, the North Koreans would have to necessarily attack our troops and draw us into the war).
Think of it this way- what would have happened if we tried to leave 30,000 troops in South Vietnam? The answer is, obviously, that the North would simply continue the war and continue taking potshots at US troops, until the American public got tired of the casualties and deaths and pulled out. It wouldn’t have assured a successful South Vietnam and certainly wouldn’t have turned its leaders into less corrupt people who usher in a democracy. It would have just delayed the inevitable.
And that gets us back to Afghanistan. The loss in Afghanistan was inevitable, because wealth and democracy do not grow on trees. They require a whole bunch of luck, some natural advantages, yes, some outside support as well, and most of all a real commitment by the central decisionmakers. The Afghans were unable to build those things, despite massive amounts of US intervention, and there’s no reason to think they were going to turn the corner. Nor was the US able to successfully put down the insurgents. So what you were signing up for was a forever war, and forever wars are limited by the fact that we live in an (imperfect) democracy, and at some point the voters have their say. It happens that when the voters had their say with Harry Truman, the stars were aligned and South Korea turned into a success story. Most of the time, the stars are not aligned.