This is not to say that Americans and their allies have nothing to celebrate. Air Force similarly recalled the damage that American bombers did to the Korean Peninsula: “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too.” Between 3 and 4 million people died in the conflict, and even the July 1953 armistice brought neither victory nor resolution. “I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man,” said General Douglas MacArthur to the Senate in May 1951, “ I shrink with a horror that I cannot express in words at this continuous slaughter of men in Korea.” General Curtis Lemay of the U.S. As a team of opinion researchers noted in 1953, “The united and wholehearted support of public opinion which characterized the last war is conspicuous by its absence in the Korean War.” President Harry Truman did not seek a congressional declaration of war for what he initially called a “ police action,” and commanders’ decision to exceed their initial mandate and “liberate” North Korea brought China into the fight.Įnjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Get the NewsletterĪmericans suffer a form of collective amnesia about the Korean conflict for many reasons. Get briefed on the story of the week, and developing stories to watch across the Asia-Pacific. While Americans use the neutral term “The Korean War,” there is no ambiguity in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) official nomenclature: “The War to Resist America and Aid Korea.” Diplomat Brief Weekly Newsletter N But in China, the Korean War holds a prominent place in public memory, and it serves a political purpose that has no parallel in America. That the war is remembered very differently in China, and that these memories reflect differing visions of U.S.-China relations and the destiny of the Asia-Pacific, is a lesson that Americans ignore at their peril.įor Americans, Korea is “the forgotten war” – a faraway conflict that is overshadowed in popular memory by World War II, the Vietnam War, and more recent conflicts in the Middle East.

Considering how tragic that war was – and the extent to which its legacies still haunt Northeast Asia – it is worth reflecting on how collective memory of it shapes perspectives on the present and the future. The Korean War (1950-53), which began 70 years ago today, sealed that first Washington-Beijing split and ushered in two decades of estrangement. alliance of the 1940s and the rapprochement euphoria of the 1970s and ‘80s. Periods of hostility also followed the Sino-U.S. This is not the first time that the pendulum has swung toward confrontation after an era of relatively congenial relations. A relationship that was already in trouble has foundered on the shoals of the trade war, the COVID-19 pandemic, and talk of decoupling. Few would deny that U.S.-China relations are the worst they have been in years.

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