¹ Although the main thrust of the containment policy was designed to check the Soviet power in Western Europe, it also, perhaps because of this, became the general framework of United States global policy. This seems to me clearly implied both in the Truman Doctrine and in George F. Kennan's memoirs. President Truman made it clear in his address to the Congress on March 12, 1947, that it was the policy of the United States to help and to “support free peoples who” resisted “attempted subjugation by armed [communist] minorities or by outside [communist] pressures” (Truman, Harry S., Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, vol. 2 [Garden City, New York, 1956], 106)Google Scholar. The universal nature of the containment policy was likewise expounded by Kennan in his memoirs when he stated, “Repeatedly, at that time [1947] and in ensuing years, I expressed in talks and lectures the view that there were only five regions of the world — the United States, the United Kingdom, the Rhine valley with adjacent industrial areas, the Soviet Union, and Japan — where the sinews of modern military strength could be produced in quantity; I pointed out that only one of these was under Communist control; and I defined the main task of containment, accordingly, as one of seeing to it that none of the remaining ones fell under such control” (Kennan, George F., Memoirs: 1925–1950, vol. 1 [Boston, 1967], 359)Google Scholar.

In a recent article, Ralph N. Clough implies that the Korean War played the role of catalyst in modifying the direction of American foreign policy. He argues implicitly that the Korean War not only reinforced the containment policy, but it also helped to globalize that very policy. He states, “Containment in East Asia began with the decision by the United States to respond with force to the North Korean attack on South Korea in 1950” (Clough, Ralph N., “East Asia,” in The Next Phase in Foreign Policy, ed. Owen, Henry [Washington, D.C., 1973], p. 49)Google Scholar.

² At the end of World War II, the American government did not see the international order of things as a conflict of contending interests, and reality became distorted by the cold war prism that came to define American policies. In addition, the sudden emergence of the uncommitted nation-states in the non-Western world added a complicating dimension. Concerning the American perceptions of the postwar international system, see Brown, Seyom, New Forces in World Politics (Washington, D.C., 1974), pp. 8f.Google Scholar For a fuller account, see Brown, Seyom, The Faces of Power: Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Johnson (New York, 1969), pp. 31–45passimGoogle Scholar.

³ The United States did not have a unified strategic doctrine until the enactment of the National Security Act in February, 1947, which invested the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the power of making American strategic doctrine under the direction of secretary of defense. Theoretically, the enactment of the National Security Act enabled the United States to formulate her first coordinated and unified strategic doctrine. See National Military Establishment, First Report of the Secretary of Defense (Washington, D.C., 1948), pp. 9–13Google Scholar. In reality, however, the United States did not have a unified strategic policy until the summer of 1948. Although James V. Forrestal was sworn in as the first secretary of defense on September 17, 1947, it took nearly another year for the United States to come up with a concrete, unified strategic doctrine.

The new doctrine rested on the assumption that modern technology and the resulting advance in weapons systems made it inevitable that the next war between the United States and the Soviet Union must inevitably become a total war, for which the highest strategic priority of the United States would necessarily be to achieve total victory by completely destroying the industrial centers of the Soviet Union. The long-range bombers of the Strategic Air Command were central to the concept of total victory through mass retaliation which became the cornerstone of American strategic thought. It was also assumed that the Soviet Union gave top priority to total victory over the United States. In the first stage of the cold war, therefore, American leaders gave emphasis to the prospects of direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union.

During the MacArthur hearings, General Bradley implied that further commitments of American forces to the Korean War were an aberration from the basic aims of American strategy. He said that the United States should end the Korean conflict before it spilled over the Sino-Korean border and that the enlargement of the war was contrary to American interests because “it was dangerous to the security of our country on a global basis to commit on an allout basis the military potential of the United States” (U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Forces and the Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings, Military Situation in the Far East, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., 1951, p. 895). The message was clear: the more the United States committed her resources to limited wars, the less the chance of attaining total victory in a general war.

American efforts to strengthen the defenses of Western Europe were also predicated on the likelihood of a full-scale war with the Soviet Union. During the MacArthur hearings, Secretary of Defense George Marshall stated that he was quite convinced that the Soviet Union would attempt to take over the whole of Western Europe and repeatedly emphasized the need to prevent this. In his view, the best way to deter Russian designs in Europe was to strengthen the defenses of American allies. The purpose was, however, not to wage limited wan in Europe against the Soviet Union or her satellite countries, but to prevent “full war, deterring the Soviet military aggression” on a global basis (MacArthur Hearings, pp. 384f).

The main thrust of American strategic doctrine was, therefore, to avoid direct involvement in local or limited wars, in order to preserve military capabilities for a general war. Limited wars in Korea or in such areas as Taiwan or Greece were considered a deviation from the main thrust of American strategy, for they diverted attention and resources from the preeminent goal of containing the Soviet Union.

⁴ Garthoff, Raymond L., Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age, rev. ed. (New York, 1962), p. 5Google Scholar.

⁵ Kaplan, Morton A. et al. , Vietnam Settlement: Why 1973, Not 1969? (Washington, D.C., 1973), p. 87Google Scholar.

⁸ For a perceptive discussion on the doctrines of “massive retaliation” and of “flexible response,” see Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, 1965), pp. 298–319, 851–856Google Scholar. Also FitzSimons, Louise, The Kennedy Doctrine (New York, 1972) passim, especially, pp. 173–214Google Scholar.

⁷ On no less than five different occasions in 1962, President Kennedy stated that not to assist the government of South Vietnam was contrary to American national interest as such a policy would certainly result in communist victory in South Vietnam and Southeast Asia. See Gravel, Mike, The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision making on Vietnam, vol. 2 (Boston, 1971), pp. 814f, 817, 819 824fGoogle Scholar; cf. vol. 1: 260f. (Hereafter Pentagon Papers.) Cf. Reese, David, The Age of Containment: The Cold War, 1945–1965 (New York, 1967), pp. 108fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ On the Nixon Doctrine, see Nixon, Richard M., U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970's: A New Strategy for Peace, A Report to the Congress by Nixon, Richard M., President of the United States, 02 18, 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), pp. 25–107, esp. pp. 53–76Google Scholar. Cf. Nixon, Richard M., U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970's: Building for Peace, A Report to the Congress by Nixon, Richard M., President of the United States, 02 25, 1971 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), pp. 10–21Google Scholar.

⁹ Truman, Memoirs, 2:333Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Pentagon Papers, 2: 6, 21.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 22.

¹² E.g., Bundy, McGeorge, The Pattern of Responsibility (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 250fGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Pentagon Papers [Johnson, President], 3:718Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Truman, , Memoirs, 2:333Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Pentagon Papers, 2: 193, 802.

¹⁶ The concept of the policy of containment was spelled out by Kennan, George F., 07, 1947, in Foreign AffairsGoogle Scholar. Kennan's main thesis was that the United States was confronted by an entirely new kind of enemy. Unlike Nazi Germany, Russian policy was based on infinite patience, cunning, and flexibility. Most important of all, however, Russian goals were long-term. Russian objectives were highly flexible, and the Soviet Union never hesitated to use shifting tactics to achieve her goals. Russian imperialism could be, to use Kennan's own words, “contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter force at a series of constantly shifting geographical points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy …” (Kennan, George F., “The Source of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, 25, no. 4 (07, 1947), 576Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Truman, , Memoirs, 2:106Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Pentagon Papers,3: 718.

¹⁹ Consider, for example, a statement by President Truman: “From the very beginning of the Korean action, I had always looked at it as a Russian maneuver, as part of the Kremlin's plan to destroy the unity of the free world. NATO, the Russians knew, would succeed only if the United States took part in the defense of Europe. The easiest way to keep us from doing our share in NATO was to draw us into military conflict in Asia.” Truman, , Memoirs, 2:437Google Scholar. The communist conspiracy theory was indeed a consistent set of American assumptions as late as 1966. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: “The proof by ideology has relied on the syllogism that the Viet Cong, North Vietnam and China are all Communist states and therefore must be part of the same conspiracy, and that, since the Viet Cong are the weakest of the three and China is the strongest, the Viet Cong must therefore be the spearhead of a coordinated Chinese plan of expansion. The cliches about a centralized Communist conspiracy aiming at monolithic world revolution are still cherished in the State Department, in spite of what has struck lay observers as a rather evident fragmentation of the Communist world. Thus, as late as May 9, 1965, after half a dozen years of vociferous Russo-Chinese quarreling, Thomas C. Mann, then No. 3 man in the Department, could babble about ‘instrument of Sino-Soviet power’ and ‘orders from the Sino-Soviet military bloc’ As late as January 28, 1966, the Secretary of State [Dean Rusk] was still running on about ‘their world revolution’ and again, on February 18, about ‘the Communists’ and their ‘larger design’ (Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–1966 [Boston, 1967], pp. 67f)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Pentagon Papers,2: 801f.

²¹ For a fuller account, see Rees, Age of Containment, passim.

²² Pentagon Papers [Johnson, President ], 3:730Google Scholar.

²³ Schlesinger, [The Bitter Heritage], p. 66Google Scholar.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 65.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 66.

²⁶ Ojha, Ishwer C., Chinese Foreign Policy in an Age of Transition: The Diplomacy of Cultural Despair (Boston, 1969), pp. 100ffGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Almond, Gabriel A., The American People and Foreign Policy (New York, 1960), p. 54Google Scholar.

²⁸ Ibid., pp. 54–56.

²⁹ Wolfers, Arnold and Martin, L. W., eds., The Anglo-American Tradition in Foreign Affairs (New Haven, 1956), p. xvGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ As two distinguished specialists in international politics put it, “Choice presupposes freedom to decide which goals to pursue and what means to use in accordance with one's desires and convictions. Not to follow the dictate of moral conviction becomes a matter of guilt and subject to moral judgment” (ibid., p. xxi).

³¹ I am fully aware of the fact that any attempt to periodize neatly the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts is an arbitrary exercise, especially in the case of the Korean War, since there were many hidden factors which influenced American decisions during the course of the conflicts. For example, the United States decided to cross the 38th Parallel in the fall of 1950 because she felt she could get away with the unification of Korea by military means (domestic political consideration was another hidden variable) since the North Korean army was reduced to the level of an insignificant fighting machine. However, the time period from June, 1950, to September, 1950, was a period of great confusions and uncertainties. Decisions were made almost on a daily basis in coping with rapidly developing situations in Korea. The air of uncertainty permeated the minds of American officials, and their primary goal in this period was to push the invading army back to the North of the 38th Parallel. The air of uncertainty dissipated after the successful Inchon landings in September, 1950. For the analytical convenience of this article, I arbitrarily call the period from June, 1950, to September, 1950, a wait-and-see period.

³² Collins, J. Lawton, War in Peacetime: The History and the Lessons of Korea (Boston, 1969), p. 147Google Scholar.

³³ Ibid., p. 148.

³⁴ Spanier, John W., The Truman-MacArthur Controversy and the Korean War (New York, 1965), p. 95Google Scholar.

³⁵ Ridgway, Matthew B., The Korean War (Garden City, New York, 1967), p. 230Google Scholar.

³⁶ Zehnan, Walter A., Chinese Intervention in the Korean War: A Bilateral Failure of Deterrence, Security Studies Paper No. 11 (Berkeley, 1967), p. 19Google Scholar.

³⁷ E.g., Raymond Aron wrote in 1962: “In Korea, the United States leaders ceased military operations and consented to armistice negotiations as soon as Moscow expressed a desire to negotiate … in the spring of 1951” (Aron, Raymond, “Reflections on American Diplomacy,” Daedalus, 91, 4 [Fall, 1962], 721)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Acheson, Dean, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York, 1969), pp. 532ffGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Forces and the Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings, Military Situations in the Far East, 82nd Cong., 1st sess., 1951, p. 732.

⁴⁰ Acheson, , Present at the Creation, p. 517Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Acheson, , Present at the Creation, p. 534Google Scholar. Cf. Kennan, George F., Memoirs, 1950–1963, vol. 2 (Boston, 1972), pp. 36fGoogle Scholar.

⁴² Pentagon Papers [Gravel, Mike], 2:1Google Scholar.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 128, 129f.

⁴⁵ In hindsight, the Strategic-Hamlet program failed because of four factors. First, the vast majority of the peasantry was hostile to the program because they resented the fact that they were forcefully removed from the land of their ancestors to totally alien areas. Secondly, contrary to the official expectation, the program did not succeed in denying food supplies to the Viet Cong insurgents. When the peasants were relocated, the insurgents simply “helped themselves from the field.” Thirdly, the extent of the insurgency was much greater than both the American and South Vietnamese officials realized. Fourthly, the “Diem government pushed resettlement at much too rapid a pace. The Vietnamese National Assembly endorsed the strategic-hamlet program in April of 1962, and only eight months later, in December, Diem announced that 4,077 hamlets had been completed of a total of over 11, 000 to be built and that 39 percent of the population, or more than five million people, were living in these hamlets.” FitzSimons, , Kennedy Doctrine, pp. 208fGoogle Scholar.

It is possible that President Kennedy and his advisers were aware all along of these variables which might have suggested to them that the Strategic-Hamlet program might not succeed after all. Alternatively, it is possible that Kennedy and his advisers were not fully aware of the real strength of the insurgents as well as the passive but strong resistance of the peasants to the Diem regime. It is also plausible that Kennedy knew all of these variables well from the beginning, but domestic political considerations might have forced him to present tangible signs of progress of the war in Vietnam to the American public. Likewise, it is possible that Kennedy and his advisers were genuinely misled by the initial results of the program in relocating the peasantry. In any case, it is historically recorded that in 1962 the United States government repeatedly and publicly stated that situations in Vienam improved so favorably for the United States and South Vietnam that the former could terminate its commitments by 1965.

⁴⁶ Pentagon Papers [Gravel, Mike], 2:160Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 296, 355f.

⁴⁹ Pentagon Papers [Gravel, Mike], 3:390Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 391.

⁵¹ Pentagon Papers [JCS memo for the President], 4: 624; see also [Mike Gravel], 2: 429.

⁵² Pentagon Papers [Gravel, Mike], 3:395Google Scholar.

⁵³ Pentagon Papers [Gravel, Mike], 4:206Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 206f.

⁵⁵ Ibid., pp. 238ff.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 269.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 275.