Stardate 20030801.1648

(On Screen): The Korean war never really ended. There was a cease fire, but there has never been a formal peace treaty.

The Korean war was actually one of the major battles of the Cold War, and it can't really be understood without understanding the larger context of the Cold War. China and the Soviet Union had provided arms and advisors to the North Koreans to finance a war to reunite Korea under a communist government which would be a client of Moscow, and by so doing to hand a major defeat to America and its allies.

The initial offensive went well, and the defending forces commanded by MacArthur were surrounded in the Pusan pocket. MacArthur then launched the Inchon landing, placing a large force in the rear of the communist forces, and they began to pull back. MacArthur eventually pushed the communist forces into a pocket of its own in the north, at which point China intervened.

Macarthur is an interesting figure for students of military history. He was an enormously capable general officer who suffered from deep character flaws. He began to vocally criticize Truman and made plans for an actual invasion of China, and eventually it became impossible to ignore the insubordination and Truman fired him, replacing him with General Matt Ridgway. Ridgway had begun WWII commanding the 82nd Airborne, and later was promoted to command the XVIII Airborne Corps. He was a superb soldier and commander and he understood the one thing MacArthur had refused to accept: it wasn't actually possible to win the war in Korea.

Stalin had been humiliated in Berlin in 1949. In an attempt to wring concessions from the west, he'd imposed a de-facto blockade of the western zone in Berlin. Most supplies for Berlin had been shipped from West Germany by rail, and the Soviets stopped permitting the trains to run. The Western response was the now-legendary Berlin Airlift, which did not bring enough supplies in to make the people of Berlin comfortable, but did bring in enough to keep them alive. Eventually the Soviets recognized that the blockade had failed, and started letting the trains run. The first significant struggle of will in the Cold War had been won by the West.

So in the first shooting war of the Cold War, Stalin wasn't going to permit another defeat. Any attempt by an American commander there to try to win and crush the northern forces would only lead to escalation, which is exactly what did happen when MacArthur came close to wiping out the North Korean army. China committed hundreds of thousands of troops, causing the allied forces to once again pull back to the south. Eventually the military situation stabilized on a front more or less where the border is today.

Ridgway understood that his job was to maintain a stalemate so that negotiations could bring about a truce. He had also noticed that there were serious flaws in the Chinese command structure, with a distinct lack of flexibility at the lower levels. They were really good at following orders, but nothing like as good at reacting to unexpected situations. When the Chinese launched a major offensive south, the men leading the battle would be briefed about their objectives, and as long as the plan lasted they'd fight very well. But once they'd reached their objectives, they seemed to be confused about what they should do next.

When Ridgway detected an impending attack, he'd pull most of his troops out of the front line. The rest would withdraw when the attack came, putting up little resistance, so the Chinese would be permitted to easily take the physical objectives they'd made their plans to reach. Then he'd launch a counter-attack which would cause confusion and demoralization in the Chinese ranks, and chase them back to the original line. Over a couple of years this happened several times, and by using these tactics Ridgway reduced the allied casualty rate to the point where the Chinese were sacrificing five casualties for every one they inflicted on the allies. Stalemate is war of attrition, and Ridgway tailored his tactics to bring about the most favorable attrition exchange rate he could manage.

Meanwhile, peace talks proceeded at Panmunjom.

And for the first few months it seemed as if they only talked about preposterously silly things. Months were spent discussing the exact shape and dimensions of the main table which would be used in the negotiations.

There was a reason for that. If one side in a negotiation is more desperate than the other, and needs an agreement more, and if both sides know it, then the desperate one is at a disadvantage.

It's like buyer's markets versus seller's markets. When demand for a product exceeds supply, then the sellers will raise their prices, because buyers will be willing to make concessions (in this case, pay a higher price) to get the product. On the other hand, when there's more supply than demand, the buyers can shop for a deal, and sellers needing to make a sale may drop price or offer other enticements.

So it is in diplomatic negotiations. If one side is under more pressure to make a deal than the other, then the other will do better in the negotiations. The meaningless negotiations about table sizes and similarly trivial details really covered a period of stalling by both sides. Both were waiting to find out whether the other might become desperate and be forced to make concessions. Would the Chinese be willing to continue to suffer such an unfavorable casualty exchange rate? Would the upcoming presidential election in the US change the situation? If the Democrats were defeated, would a Republican administration be more eager to get out of a war they'd inherited from the Democrats and be willing to give up more to do so? Would the citizens of the open western nations begin to protest the war and bring pressure to bear on their leaders?

"Alright, dammit! We'll make the table the size you want it to be. Now let's start talking about the real issues, OK?" If one side had said that, it would have lost the negotiations before they truly had begun.

Eventually it became clear that neither side was going to blink, and they made a deal to cease hostilities with both sides holding their positions as of the time hostilities ended. But what they agreed to was a ceasefire.

In a way, VietNam was a replay of Korea. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, both sides in the Cold War recognized that any time there was a direct head-to-head confrontation between the two sides there was too great a chance of ultimate catastrophe. So the majority of the hot battles in the Cold War were fought by proxies on at least one side, with one side perhaps being publicly and formally engaged and maybe even using its own troops, while the other side offered support to its proxy without being directly engaged. Both sides in the Cold war would smile and nod at one another and publicly pretend they weren't really quite having a war, sort of.

With support from the Soviet Union and China, Ho Chi Minh continued his ongoing military campaign to reunite VietNam. He had managed to chase the French out after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and the resulting Geneva Accords formally recognized the communist government of North VietNam. Unfortunately (for Ho and the Communists), it also formally recognized the government of South Vietnam, and the Eisenhower administration supported it. Eisenhower also ordered the very first American troops into South VietNam.

President Kennedy had significantly increased the number of American troops to try to sustain the government of South VietNam, and under Johnson the numbers became massive, as did the rate of American casualties. Nonetheless, there was never any plan to invade the North, because doing so would have risked a huge escalation, possibly leading to a full nuclear confrontation. It was accepted that neither China nor the USSR would stand by while North Korea fell, and just as with Korea, there was a border with China. The stakes in VietNam didn't justify that risk. So an invasion of North VietNam wasn't politically possible.

That meant that like in Korea, it wasn't actually possible to win in VietNam. America had to fight to maintain a stalemate, just as had been done in Korea, and hope that eventually the will of the other side would crack and they'd give up their attempts to conquer the south. The difference between the two is that in VietNam it failed. (It's not clear it could really be called a success in Korea, but there's no doubt that it was a failure in VietNam.)

The Tet Offensive was the turning point in the VietNam war. It was a brilliant victory for Ho, who understood the difference between winning battles and winning wars. Ho had always kept his eyes firmly fixed on the true objective of his war, and Tet was brilliantly conceived to achieve that objective.

Understand: the Tet Offensive was a military debacle for the communist forces. But it was a political victory, and because of the Tet Offensive American voters began to ask themselves why the United States was even involved in the struggle. The anti-war movement picked up strength, Johnson decided to not run for reelection, and Nixon was elected on a platform of "Peace with Honor".

Which meant he was looking for a way out, and means that the leadership of North VietNam knew it. They consented to peace talks in Paris because they pretty much had to, but just as in Korea the first few years of those peacetalks accomplished nothing whatever, and instead bogged down in endless discussions about completely meaningless issues including, once again, the size and shape of the main table.

Ho did not live to see the end of the war, but the leaders of North VietNam knew that time was on their side. Nixon tried to increase the pressure on them by bombing the North, and expanding the struggle into Laos and Cambodia. Invasion of the North was still out of the question, but he hoped that bombing would cause the leadership of the North to lose heart. Unfortunately for him, it didn't, and the pressure on Nixon, directly and indirectly, because of the war and because of domestic issues, eventually forced him to give up. In 1973 Kissinger and Le Duc Tho negotiated an agreement which gave Nixon the political cover to pull American forces out. America's POWs would be released, and the government of North VietNam insincerely promised to use peaceful means to seek to reunite VietNam, a promise that I think no one actually expected them to follow. But they were happy to lie about it in order to get the Americans to withdraw.

In 1975 the NVA overran Saigon, and the VietNam war ended when one of the governments which had been fighting the war ceased to exist.

But the Korean war didn't really end, quite. Technically the war is still going on. There was a ceasefire but no formal treaty ending the war. The two governments are still there. The front is still there. The armies are still there, and sometimes they still shoot at one another. Military stalemate became diplomatic stalemate, and over the course of decades South Korea became rich and powerful while North Korea collapsed. During the Cold War, North Korea (like Cuba) was propped up by massive subsidies from Moscow and Beijing, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, most of that was cut off. North Korea truly began to suffer.

In the early 1990's they started raising hell. Using their trademarked gibbering-lunatic mode of diplomacy comprising dire threats of attacks to the south, scathing denunciations of their enemies, preposterous demands, and a clear declaration of intention to develop nuclear weapons, they managed to convince the United States to buy them off. The deal was negotiated by former President Carter on behalf of the Clinton administration. We gave them huge amounts of aid in the form of food and refined petroleum, with the tab being paid by the US, Japan and South Korea, and in exchange the NK government promised to stop trying to develop nukes, and more informally to stop causing trouble.

But the situation in NK continued to degrade, and late last year the government there began to engage in a new round of mouth-foaming, gibbering condemnations, grotesque demands and dire threats, and other forms of cage-bar-rattling. A NK diplomat informed an American diplomat that NK had actually continued working on creation of fissionables for nuclear weapons, in direct violation of the 1994 agreement.

Being publicly listed as one of the three members of the "Axis of Evil" probably didn't make the government of NK happy in any case, but I think that what they mainly hoped was that they might take advantage of America's concentration on Iraq. Given that Bush was working to try to commit a large percentage of American military forces to Iraq, reducing our ability to react in case of a simultaneous war in Korea, I think that NK thought that it was their best chance to suddenly start making demands. With the US distracted and relatively weak locally I think the leadership of NK hoped that Bush, like Clinton before him, would be willing to pay them off in order to shut them up. As it turns out, they deeply misjudged the man. (There's been a lot of that going around the last couple of years.)

They made demands. They offered little, demanded much, and intimated that imminent catastrophe would follow if Bush didn't "become reasonable". The Bush administration's response was to stand strong; we cut off the petroleum shipments, ad reduced our shipments of food (which hadn't been reaching the starving people of NK in any case because the NK government had been diverting that food to feed the army and apparatchiks), largely ignored their threats, and waited. I referred approvingly to the overall strategy as "