School of War - Our Foreign Policy Divide Began with the Korean War

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

More than 75 years after the Korean War, its lessons endure—and divisions over isolationism and American power continue to shape the discourse around modern global conflicts. Dane J. Cash, historian and author of The Forgotten Debate: The Korean War and the Roots of America's Ideological Divisions, joins School of War to explain how the left’s hawk-dove divide during the Korean War foreshadowed the neoconservative break from the liberal consensus during the 1970s and why the political battles of the early Cold War continue to splinter America today. 2:10 America Before the Korean War 3:08 The Debate Over Containment 4:15 Multilateralism vs. Unilateralism 5:29 Did Acheson Invite the War? 8:23 Why North Korea Attacked 8:55 Conservative Criticism of Truman 11:10 Liberal Divisions Over Korea 13:30 The Roots of Neoconservatism 17:14 Truman’s Lonely Middle Ground 19:51 The Right’s Foreign Policy Split 22:05 Taft, Eisenhower, and the GOP 22:58 MacArthur’s Moment 25:31 China Enters the War 30:37 Herbert Hoover’s Foreign Policy Revolt 33:51 Stalemate, POWs, and Ukraine Parallels This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter and an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications. Build at the speed of war.

The invasion of South Korea by North Korean communists and ultimately by Chinese troops in 1950 not only was a disaster and tragedy for the people of the Korean Peninsula, But it tore American politics apart. It was a period of great ideological and intellectual ferment in the American foreign policy debate. And one of the amazing things about it is the terms of those debate are shockingly similar to the American foreign policy debate of the last decade. Let's get into it. It is for a war this Iraqi invasion of late December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infantry. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end.

They stay. We continue to face the grave situation in the ground. We shall fight on the beaches, a special fight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never arrest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome

to the show today. DJ Cash. He is Associate Professor of History at Carroll College in Helena, Montana, and he is the author most recently of the Forgotten Debate, the Korean War and the roots of America's ideological division. DJ, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. I thought your book was really interesting. I'm really excited to talk about it because I have a fascination both with the Korean War and with America's ideological divisions. So what a great, what a fascinating contribution you've made. We've talked actually about the intersection of these things before.

I've had Mike Gallagher on the show to talk about the Korean War a couple of years ago. He's got a fascination with it, and it's come up. It's a theme. And I've also always been of the view that if you really want to understand things, you kind of have to look to their origins. And the post-war, immediate post-war period was really a period of origins. And so I'm grateful to you for coming on. Maybe we could start, you could give us a bit of an orientation. You know, take us back to the spring or very early summer of 1950 before North Korea makes its run south. And tell us about the American foreign policy debate as it stood.

You know, what were the subdivisions amongst liberals and conservatives? And just give us kind of a tour of the ideological world at that point? Sure. So, you know, this is early in the Cold War. And the debate is primarily about containment policy itself, right? Containment policy is born, I guess, most directly in 1947 with the Truman Doctrine. And liberals and conservatives have very different orientations about that and other related issues. When it comes to containment itself, liberals are generally supportive of Truman administration policy, thinking that the Soviet Union is an evil that needs to be constrained slash contained, whereas conservatives are more dissatisfied with the idea of containment policy. They think it's too passive. They'd like to be more, quote, offensive is the word that was often used. Now, that was sort of vaguely defined. the beginning, Korea is going to help that come into sharper focus. But so there's that split

on containment policy generally. There's also a pretty significant divide when it comes to the extent to which the United States ought to remain involved and or constrained by multilateral institutions, specifically the UN and NATO. So liberals tend to be very supportive of that approach to global affairs, the United States working with partners around the world, especially its European allies in NATO, whereas conservatives are a little more skeptical about those relationships. And as we'll see, as the Korean War develops, again, that's going to accelerate conservative desires for the United States to go it alone on the world stage. So one of the interesting things about the debate that develops then during Korea is liberals like to use the word isolationism as a way to dismiss conservatives. thought. In my mind, though, it's really not about isolationism. It's about that question of

multilateralism versus unilateralism. So that's one of the things that really comes out of the Korean War. For conservatives, it was all the evidence they needed that the U.S. needed to go it alone on the world stage, whereas for liberals, it was a victory for multilateral institutions. So let's talk about the origins or causes of the war in the debate that breaks out about them. And maybe orient us a bit with Truman administration policy and this question of Dean Atchison's speech as a way to kind of ground this. And then tell us how everyone, you know, with 2020 hindsight, starts to characterize the role of this speech and of this policy. My personal view is that Atchison's speech always gets a bit of a tough rap because typically it's portrayed as kind of an oopsie like the Secretary of Selection. state just sort of accidentally left South Korea out, whereas obviously, as you know, as you know, and

historians as a period know, it was simply expressing administration policy. So what was the policy towards South Korea? And how does it get represented after the fact? Yeah, okay, good question. So you're frequently in Dean Atchison's defense perimeter speech, which is given shortly before the outbreak of the war in January, 1950, I believe. And yeah, Atchison outlines the Truman administration's policy for its defense perimeter in Asia, in which he basically says the United States is willing to come to the defense of the offshore islands. So Formosa, which we tend to refer to today as Taiwan, Formosa, the Philippines, and Japan. Atchison says, if the Soviet Union or any other hostile power were to launch some sort of aggression against those islands,

the United States would intervene militarily. He does not include any of mainland Asia, which of course includes South Korea. So in retrospect, this is viewed, as you said, sort of as an oops, right? Like, well, sort of opened the door there for Stalin, Mao, Kim, to see this as essentially a green light to attack South Korea. But like you said, this is essentially administration policy at the time. the Truman administration, Truman himself, Acheson, really didn't expect that global communism, for lack of a better term, that Stalin, that North Korea would be so bold. So maybe dumb as to

attack South Korea in an act of naked military aggression as they did in 1950. So it's very easy in retrospect, right, to, as you said, look at that speech. as a complete diplomatic disaster. But yeah, that's, again, with hindsight. As far as we know, the North Koreans didn't necessarily, weren't necessarily inspired by that speech. The reality on the ground in Asia was that it was more, it had much more to do with North Korean and Chinese communists,

having the bandwidth to start a new war after the Chinese Civil War. So, yeah, again, from the American perspective, this speech is this easy target to identify as a terrible blunder. And it certainly looks that way, no question, in retrospect. But the bolstering of North Korean forces in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War, I think, had much more to do with the timing of the attack. Talk about conservative criticism, not even necessarily just of the speech itself, which we just sort of covered, but of the policy and of the culpability one way or the other of the Truman administration for the start of the war. I mean, what was the nature of the criticism? What was the justice of the criticism? I just defended the speeches sometimes being unfairly maligned as a kind of mistake that I sort of suspended judgment in the way I framed that question on the policy itself. You know, in retrospect, it does, one does have to wonder, what a more strongly expressed deterrence about South Korea might have done to focus the minds of the North Koreans, the Chinese, and in particular of Stalin, on the risks when they were considering a variety of targets. I know Formosa was a potential target for further expansionism

at that point, maybe even one preferred by Mao. But please, take us to that. So, yeah, the conservative criticism most generally, especially once the war begins, is that this attack by North Korea against South Korea was essentially invited by the Truman administration for its weakness, for its timidity, that again, containment was too defensive, and that Stalin, Mao, Kim were all tempted by the notion that the United States was weak, essentially. You can cut that a couple of different ways, I think. I mean, on the one hand, the Truman administration is the administration that came up with containment policy, right? I mean, George Kennan and Truman and Atchison, kind of architects of containment policy, which more or less guides U.S. Cold War policy for the next

four decades. Ultimately, Kenan was correct, right, that containing the Soviet Union, containing communism would result in the Soviet Union collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. It takes a little longer than Kenan anticipated, right? He thought this would happen fairly soon. In fact, it takes another half century, basically. But

for conservatives at the time, again, containment was hopelessly weak and reactive. One of the things that was really interesting to me about your argument is how you out line not only the differences between liberals and conservatives, but the differences amongst liberals and conservatives within themselves. So I've been asking to kind of explain conservative opposition to Truman. Talk about divisions amongst the left, the center left,

the more progressive left, about the way to face down communism, about the proper attitude towards what starts to happen in June of 1950. You know, how is Truman position with regard to the rest of his own wing of American politics. Yeah, so this is one of the more fascinating things I found in my research for the book is that there is this pretty sharp division among liberals themselves within the left, right? A lot of scholars who look back at the early Cold War period talk about the so-called liberal consensus. And one thing I found that I argue very forcefully for in the book is that I'm not sure

that there was such a thing as a liberal consensus. And the primary division, as you just pointed out, is between what I can. call left liberals and hawkish liberals in the book. I mean, you can use different terms for that, progressive, center-left, whichever. But there is this split among liberals themselves. In the journals I look at, that's primarily you have the nation and the new republic on the left, and then you have the new leader, which is the journal that I'm calling hawkish, or that you might call center-left or or sort of Cold War liberal. The hawkish liberals, especially as the war drags on, those at the new leader, are going to

advocate for positions that are almost indistinguishable time and time again from self-avowed conservatives. So we have this really interesting dynamic where liberals themselves are quite divided and not just among themselves, but in a way that almost prefigures. the origin of the neoconservatives in 1970s, when neoconservatives split off from liberals and become a much more aligned with the conservative movement. We're seeing kind of the seeds of that, I think,

in the early Cold War period with these hawkish liberals who, like conservatives, are dissatisfied with containment, are skeptical about multilateral institutions and are very critical of the Truman administration for containment policy. being weak, being naive, that Truman and Atchison have invited the aggression in Korea, whereas left liberals at the nation in New Republic are certainly to the left of Truman, right?

I think the Truman administration is going to find itself, in a way, maybe as sort of a bridge between these two groups of liberal intellectuals, because like I said, the hawkish liberals is quite critical of the Truman administration, left liberals critical of the Truman administration as well, but from the other direction, right? They think Truman is too militaristic. They think Truman is too hawkish, too aggressive, that containment policy,

it's not that they disagree with containment policy in and of itself, it's that they think it's too militarized, right? They think that containment is too focused on military deterrence instead of things like the Marshall Plan, right? Foreign aid. providing food, providing medicine, providing the uplift, building up of democratic institutions and real democratic institutions, right? They're not satisfied with Singh Monry in South Korea.

They dismiss him as this quasi-fascist, right? They want actual democracy as they as they conceive of it in South Korea and they don't think Sing Monri or Truman administration support for Sing Monrillas is providing that. So from their perspective, the Korean War, yes, it's initiated by Stalin in their view. I mean, we know that it was much more Kim and Mao than than Stalin, but in any case, everyone sort of agrees that this was a communist aggression. But beyond that, again, for conservatives and hawkish liberals, the war is essentially Truman and Atchson's fault. They've invited it through U.S. weakness, just as the world invited Nazi aggression through appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.

Whereas for left liberals, it was the U.S. aligning itself with a quasi-fascist dictator like Sigmund Rhee, who had essentially invited, provoked the war. And that gets a little more complicated. I mean, that has to do with the U.S. not arming Rhee for fear that he would be the aggressor, that he would attack North Korea and start a Korean war. kind of in the other direction, were it not for his, quote, psychopathic nationalism as the, I think it was the nation or maybe it was the New Republic called it. But maybe more detail than you wanted. But there's the distinction, I think, between the left liberals and the hawkish liberals as I'm, as I'm

conceiving of them, at least at the outset of the war. This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem. Right now, across the Joint Force, thousands of uniform service members are pointing AI coding agents at their hardest problems and building the tools they need themselves, targeting workflows, intel products, battle management. No ticket, no vendor, no wait.

The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building. for it. That's how you fight at the speed of war. No, that's one of the great pleasures of School of War and just at the podcast format, DJ, is I want as much detail as you want to supply. And just to make an obvious sort of response to everything you've just outlined, it just all feels so familiar. And it's striking, you know, to talk about Truman who, you know, if any American, you know, freshmen studying foreign policy knows, Truman is the hawkish liberal. That's who he is.

He was the serious anti-communist liberal who sort of blazed the trail of this strong, robust but identifiably, you know, multilateral, identifiably liberal foreign policy in the face of, you know, all kinds of other critiques. And actually, the kind of debate you're outlining here, I mean, it reminds me sort of of the Obama years. And Truman, in the course he's trying to navigate, reminds me a bit of Obama in the sense that he's trying to balance, you know, a part of his party that is skeptical of this whole project, is skeptical of allies. You know, what's the point of defending ally X if they don't live up to our particular standards? You know, is that even an ally while at the same time trying to focus on, you know, sort of inescapable security concerns and strike a balance between that?

And it's a balance that ends up pleasing, frankly, very few people. Very few people are actually happy in the moment with the balance that's being struck. And what one takes away from your account of the Truman years is that nobody's very happy with Harry Truman or what he's doing, left, right, or otherwise. Right, at least at the beginning of the war, I think by the time we get to the end, and this is something we can talk about further. But by the time we get to the end of the war, liberals have sort of come around to say, okay, this was a success, right? Truman administration policy seems to have worked out fairly well in the end. But I do think your comment about comparing these years in the early Cold War kind of divisions within liberalism and where the presidential administration is situated within that. I think the comparison to

the Obama years is very insightful. Because like you said, very similarly, right? Obama is wanting to extract the United States from Iraq. That certainly is. alienates Hawks, but he wants to continue the war in Afghanistan. In fact, escalate the war in Afghanistan, which alienates the doves in the in the liberal coalition. So yeah, like I described the Truman administration, maybe a sort of a bridge or maybe uncomfortably in the middle of this liberal sandwich between Hawks and and those who are more on the left. I think, I think Obama was was quite similar. And the parallels are on the right as well.

That is to say between the conservatives of the era that you're documenting and conservatives during the Obama period up through the president. I mean, it's during the Obama presidency that you see the real fracturing. I guess it moves in the opposite direction. It's during the Obama era, it's the conservative movement really fractures on the questions of foreign policy. And you have what was a pretty strong internationalist consensus after now. Unilateralist, but also internationalists is how I'll characterize it.

consensus after 9-11, tensions in that formula, but I'd defend it. Splinter into a party that, you know, ultimately nominates a populist candidate in Donald Trump, who's very comfortable taking the other side of those questions, at least rhetorically. And you see a sort of emboldened intellectual movement on the right that does, I'll use the word, that does at one end sort of tend towards something I think is fairly described as isolationism. Of course, in your period, you see the same, I think, divisions. In the end, it actually melds together, though, and you get an Eisenhower sort of bringing things more together. Talk about the right and the divisions there.

You know, the tension that is always front of mind for me is that between Robert Taft, the sort of non-interventionist leader of the right or a-don interventionist leader of the right at the time. And then Eisenhower, who ultimately comes in and keeps the Republican Party firmly internationalists. you're more focused on the intellectuals of the period. Talk us through those intellectual divides and how that debate was playing out on the right. Yeah. Again, really interesting, right? I mean, just like there's these divisions on the left

that we talked about, their divisions on the right as well. I mean, on the one hand, we can set the hawkish liberals, as I've described them against the conservatives who embrace that label of conservative. But even within the conservative movement, it's kind of similar to on the left in the sense that intellectuals are maybe a little more strident than the politicians, right? You just mentioned Eisenhower.

The moderate ultimately is going to succeed in 52, be reelected in 56. But that was not inevitable. The 1952 Republican nomination was up for grabs for a while, and the journals, the intellectuals that I study are obviously quite invested in that debate. Taft, of course, is the primary political challenger to Eisenhower by the time we get to the convention. But let me go back even before Taft kind of becomes the voice of the isolationist, for lack of a better word. One of my favorite terms for my research, it came from liberals who are criticizing Taft, but they called him an Asialationist. So someone who wanted to put Asia first.

Of course. Again, just to, sorry to keep beating the dead horse, but the more things change, DJ, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because as you are well aware, we have an Asia, a very outspoken Asia First constituency on the right in America today. Yeah. So even before Taft becomes that, that voice on the right that's going to challenge Eisenhower. It's MacArthur. It's General MacArthur, who gets relieved of his duties by President Truman. MacArthur is initially the voice. of that we were too weak in Korea. We needed to expand the war into China itself. And it's not just among intellectuals. MacArthur is the hope for the presidency in 1952, for a brief period. And then what really puts an end to that is the televised MacArthur hearings, where before Congress he's sort of confronted with the potential ramifications of

his policy choices, where he's asked essentially about the possibility of World War III, right? If we had started to bomb China, if we had invaded China, might that have drawn the Soviets in and caused an escalation that would have culminated in a third world war? And MacArthur sort of shrugs that off and says, well, that's not my concern. And so this is kind of the moment where MacArthur discredits himself a bit. but but he was kind of the shining hope of of the right for a bit until until taft then is going to going to replace him but yes again that was not inevitable that that isenhower the internationalist would would win that battle right and ultimately that victory from eisenhower is going to

make the forces of again isolationism and i'm using that term in the sense that people used it at the time rather than how I actually think of it. But the forces of isolationism or unilateralism maybe is the word that I prefer are going to go somewhat underground in the, at least in mainstream conservative politics, right? That's maybe different than intellectual currents where that is going to continue just under the surface, really, for the remainder of the Cold War. Like an underground river, DJ, like an underground river. Right. And as you said, emerge much more robot. mustily, much more explicitly in our own time, right, with the Trump movement. So, yeah, when I first

started the project, I will say I did not anticipate this, right? I did not anticipate that isolationist or unilateralist thread becoming so relevant again. But here we are. So, yeah, fascinating. Let's linger with MacArthur for a minute. And not only with his firing, but that also just Chinese intervention as a enormous event in the war, but also just the history broadly, globally of the period. Your journals, your intellectuals, who you're chronicling, what are there various reactions to this Chinese intervention? What does it mean to them about, you know, global communism and the broader threat? And of course, what does it mean about MacArthur and his shortcomings? Which I think if, you know, if ever MacArthur, I'm actually more critical of his failure to predict

Chinese interventionism than I am of his policy recommendations thereafter, a controversial statement, perhaps, which I will defend if you're interested. But what are the reactions of your characters to this intervention? So first of all, this is this is one area where there's actually some kind of consensus. And it's not necessarily political, but there's this initial shock and horror on all sides of the debate when China intervenes in force. in the fall of of 1950. It seems to most that World War III is about to begin. And there's a great deal of hand-wringing about this,

certainly more so on the liberal side, but this is more or less across the board, this intense fear that a point of no return has been crossed when China enters the war. Now, after it becomes clear that the Soviets are not going to immediately intervene and that this might be manageable in some sense to keep it a limited war, that's really where the divisions between left and right become apparent or more apparent. And just like we talked about blame at the beginning of the war, there's blame here as well, right? when when China intervenes for liberals, the blame is on MacArthur, certainly, for, as you said, not foreseeing this, for sort of cavalierly leading the charge across the 30th parallel. But the Truman administration, again, bears a lot of blame for left liberals as well, that there was this,

again, overtly militaristic policy that essentially painted Mao and the Chinese into a corner and until they had no choice but to intervene. On the right, once again, it's the timidity of the Truman administration that invites Chinese intervention. So it's sort of a retread of the initial debates about the start of the war. Now, of course, there's the big question of what do we do now, right? and this is where, of course, MacArthur, the whole MacArthur controversy originates.

Yes, he's fired for insubordination, but at the core of that disagreement with the Truman administration is substantive policy differences, right? MacArthur wants to expand the war into China. He winds up giving the Chinese an ultimatum without Truman administration approval. That's what leads to his dismissal.

But yeah, MacArthur wants to expand the war into China. Liberals are horrified by that suggestion. They think that would almost certainly lead to a third world war and they may have been correct there. Who knows? In some ways, all of the debates that I'm unpacking in this book can kind of be boiled down to this question of what do we do about Chinese intervention, right? Liberals want to walk back a bit, say, okay, let's negotiate our way out of this before it gets out of hand. We don't want to, we don't want to, in general, Bradley's words. I'm sure, you know, Omar Bradley testifies about Korea and calls it the wrong war, right? This would have been the wrong war. Had we started

World War III in Asia, that was the wrong war. Europe is our primary focus. Had we started a ground war in Asia against the Chinese, that would have left Western Europe. almost defenseless and game over. So, yeah, much of these debates comes down to this question of what do we do about China? Do we take an aggressive line or do we negotiate? Do we keep Korea a limited war and maintain our focus on Europe? So there's that Europe versus Asia aspect of it. There's that hawkishness versus diplomatic approach to the core.

Cold War militarism versus diplomacy. All of these questions kind of get wrapped up in this moment that is going to last through much of the rest of the war. Just sticking with the right for a minute, I want to bring in another important figure in your book and in the history of the moment, which may be a surprise to some listeners because they're going to associate him with a different period of American history. But this is Herbert Hoover, who gives a big speech in December of 1950, sort of a mid-year. all the events that we're talking about, initiating a kind of debate, or self-consciously initiating a debate for Americans about the future of American foreign policy.

And to me, this firm on the right, again, it feels so familiar because it's characterized by, in the one hand, this disgust with perceived liberal weakness, this really overwhelming hawkishness regarding China. But at the same time, this real hostility towards engagement with Europe and sort of international engagement broadly. And these three things, at least the second and the third thing, maybe all three things,

actually, are a bit in tension, and yet all three things coexist within the movement and often within the same individual humans. Herbert Hoover, gone for some time from the White House, but emerges as an important voice to talk about what he does here. Yeah, another kind of fascinating tidbit here that, yes, the ex-president who not very popular when he left office, right, in the midst of the Great Depression, but Hoover's back in the early 50s, touting his vision for U.S. foreign policy. And he's quite critical of Truman administration policy, critical of containment, but like you said, even more so critical of America's commitment to Europe,

specifically and to multilateral institutions like the UN and NATO. So Hoover in this speech that begins the so-called great debate, the great debate about U.S. foreign policy, kind of where are we headed in this dangerous moment in the Cold War in the midst of the Korean War? And Hoover says, let's withdraw from mainland Europe. Let's basically leave mainland, you know, just like Acheson had given that defense perimeter speech about Asia. That's essentially Hoover's vision for Europe, right? Mainland Europe ought to be off the table. Sure, we can maybe take a different policy when it comes

to Britain, the offshore islands. But essentially, let's withdraw from mainland Europe. Let's not be constrained by NATO, focus more on Asia. Again, there's that term the Asia-Lationist that comes about here to kind of characterize Hoover's position. So yeah, he's, he's in some way the originator of much of this debate. He doesn't wind up remaining as involved, as MacArthur sort of, you know, the controversy about MacArthur's firing takes over. And then later, as we've talked about the 1952 presidential election, where it's Taft. But Hoover kind of gets the ball rolling here for much of this debate in a fairly unexpected way, perhaps. Let's conclude with talking about this sort of extremely difficult period for America and for the war,

which is sort of after the first crisis, the major crisis of Chinese intervention is face down. We enter this protracted period of negotiations with the communists and positional, sort of stalemated, for the most part, warfare on the Korean Peninsula. Democracies in general, the United States in particular, not great fans of grinding warfare without clear pathways to victory. And this goes on for some time, and it really rends, you know, the political fabric of America in ways that it sort of, you know, we forget about it now, but sort of foreshadows some of the, the social, the tears of the social fabric in the late 60s over Vietnam.

You know, again, it's like so much of this is familiar to me. You could say of the liberals and of the Truman foreign policy and the Truman Korea policy that it does indeed prevent World War III. So we can we can check that extremely important box. I've heard, I've friends of mine who, you know, served in the Biden administration will defend the Biden administration's Ukraine policy as having avoided World War III. Indeed. But in both cases, there are some similar outcomes, which are this protracted war without a clear

outcome that's extremely politically difficult, difficult for the American people to support for a variety of reasons. How does this debate painfully proceed on about the negotiations, about the protraction, which is sort of this inevitable consequence of the limited resources that are being applied in this commitment to multilateralism, in this terror of escalation, which to me seems like another strong parallel? Yeah. You're certainly right that those two years see the war decrease in popularity among the American people to the point where this is one of the issues that Eisenhower is able to capitalize on when he's elected in 1952. He says, I shall go to Korea. I mean,

sort of a vaguely defined solution, but, you know, he's Dwight Eisenhower, right? He won World War II. He's going to go to Korea and fix everything. Okay, sounds good. So, yeah, this war seemed to be, you know, again, the conservative critique is fought with one hand tied behind the military's back, for not necessarily a clear goal in mind other than containment, which again is sort of this, from the conservative perspective, especially this kind of defensive or passive goal. It's hard to get excited about that, especially when MacArthur's saying there's no substitute for victory,

etc. But yeah, these two years of stalemate drag on, the negotiations, drag on, they start and stop. Ultimately, the issue, as many of your listeners probably know, that that really is the toughest nut to crack in those negotiations is about prisoners of war, namely the Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war that the United States has taken, many of whom go on record saying, we don't want to go back, right? You have those who have been forced into military service, those who oppose communism for ideological reasons. so many Koreans would like to go. Many North Korean prisoners would like to go to South Korea or to Japan. Many Chinese prisoners would like to go to Formosa.

And Truman feels very strongly about this. And this is something that conservatives actually support him on. Again, one of the few areas where there's somewhat of a consensus during the war, where even conservatives say, yes, we support President Truman in this way that we should not be sending these prisoners back to be executed and tortured essentially now that Mao and Kim know that they don't support the regime. So this is part of what what leads to that prolonged and very frustrating stalemate. And again, has negative political consequences for the Truman administration, for the Democratic Party generally, right? I mean, it's Adlai Stevenson who is defeated by

by Eisenhower in 52, but Stevenson has to wear the albatross of the unsolved war in Korea around his neck contrast that with Eisenhower's tremendous popularity and it was a fairly easy victory for Eisenhower. But lots of interesting parallels if we think about Ukraine, obviously it's different, right? No American boots on the ground.

But in terms of support for a cause that doesn't necessarily have an ended sight and that many in the general public don't necessarily understand. And that starts to lose support over time. I think there's a lot of echoing of history there. DJ Cash, the book, which is really interesting, is called The Forgotten Debate, the Korean War and the Roots of America's ideological divisions. I'm grateful to you for coming on the show today. And I'm struck by, I mean, echoes understates it. I mean, just the strong, strong parallels between the debate of the early 1950s

and the foreign policy debate of our time. Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This episode of School of War is also presented by Strato Launch, a leading pure play hypersonics company. Hypersonic weapons systems travel five times faster than the speed of sound, making them difficult to predict, track, and defeat.

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