Which Way the Trolley: America’s Hot Wars During the Cold War, Part 1
To summarize; as far as we can tell, and in regards to Korea, Truman proved to have made the morally mature choice and taken the ethical course and because of it may have saved several million lives in South Korea by preventing the complete conquest of the Korean peninsula. South Koreans were not incorporated into the idolatrous, soul-destroying cult of the Kims. Americans paid a high price in terms of killed, wounded, and treasure spent but reaped a harvest of a free, prosperous society with tremendous Christian spiritual vibrancy.[43]
Between Korea and Vietnam
Dwight Eisenhower was elected to the presidency in 1950, and carried forward and strengthened the anti-Communist foreign policy that had already developed under Truman. Eisenhower’s secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was passionately anti-Communist, and spent a great deal of his time forging alliances around the Communist borders of China and the Soviet Union to prevent their further expansion.[44] At the beginning of the Eisenhower administration there was some discussion of not only resisting Communist advances with defensive alliances such as NATO, but even of “rolling back” Communist regimes in Eastern Europe that had been forced on the countries by the advancing Soviet Army.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (now almost forgotten) was an opportunity to do just that, but Eisenhower chose not to intervene when the Soviet Army counter-attacked and destroyed the new non-Communist government. This was partly because the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal made our support of one invasion and opposition to another seem hypocritical, and of course, the ever present shadow of a Soviet nuclear response to an American incursion. Ironically, after the fall of the Soviet Union, documents revealed that the Soviet government was prepared to withdraw from Eastern Europe had the United States mobilized and threatened to inject troops into Hungary.
Note from the editor: The version of this article published on December 6, 2016 was the incorrect version. We regret the error.
[Part 2 Continues in Winter 2017 issue]
Notes for Part 1
[1] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See my review of this important work in Pneuma Review. Posted October 12, 2015. http://pneumareview.com/nigel-biggar-in-defence-of-war/
[2] In gratitude, many Muslims have concocted bizarre conspiracy theories of how this war really benefited us and the Israelis.
[3] The good work the American Army occupation did in Italy is mostly forgotten today, but it was recorded in the movie, A Bell for Adano (1945) which was about a civil affairs unit in Italy and based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by John Hersey of the same name. The movie was still used as a training aid when I was in an Army reserve civil affairs unit after my service in Vietnam (1972).
Category: Church History, Fall 2016
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