“So we won the First World War,” said President Trump. “We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between. And then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to Department of Defense.”
Trump spoke those words last week in announcing that, henceforth, the Defense Department would be called the War Department, its name from 1789 until the National Security Act changed it in 1949. The Korean War — America’s first “forever war” — broke out within months of the establishment of the “Department of Defense.”
But coincidence is not causation. The trigger for the outbreak of the Korean War was not the department’s name change, but rather another verbal formulation from the Truman administration during that same period — this one affecting policy.
In January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a National Press Club speech laying out America’s vital security interests in Asia. He outlined a strategic perimeter that aggressive communist powers — the Soviet Union, China, North Korea — were not to cross. Unfortunately, he left South Korea and Taiwan outside the perimeter. Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung saw not a red line but a green light for their expansionist ambitions. They immediately conferred with Joseph Stalin to decide which of his two junior partners would move first against its targeted partner of the United States. Kim beat Mao to the punch in June 1950 and “the Korean conflict” was on.
Harry Truman quickly mobilized a United Nations coalition to oppose North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. He also reversed an earlier post-war decision and sent the Seventh Fleet back into the Taiwan Strait to prevent a widening Asian war. Its purpose was not only to deter Mao from following Kim’s example and invading Taiwan, but also to discourage Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan’s military dictator at the time, from attacking Mainland China.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the War Department name change means the U.S. will return to an offensive mindset in wartime situations, “not just on defense.” Here again, Korea offers a useful template.
The Korean conflict was the first “limited war” after World War II, in which the U.S. goal was no longer the enemy’s unconditional surrender and regime change. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur for publicly advocating that advancing U.N. forces push north to the Yalu River, the Chinese-North Korean border, fearing the move could ignite a third world war. Instead, after three years of fruitless negotiations in which the communist adversary perfected the strategy of “fighting while talking,” an armistice was signed and North Korea’s invaders returned home, with the same leaders who had sent them into war still in power.
The only international punishment Pyongyang suffered for igniting a war that killed or wounded 1.5 million combatants and an untold number of civilians was a U.N. condemnation for aggression, along with its Chinese ally. The limited objective of this new, limited war was achieved: the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of the South Korean state was preserved. But, for the past 72 years, North Korea, now nuclear-armed, has continued to threaten the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula, Northeast Asia and the world.
Communist powers learned valuable lessons from the Korean War experience. The first was not to rely entirely on the West’s statements about whether it would or would not intervene militarily. Following from that, it was understood that any aggressive move must not be so overt and unambiguous that the moral and strategic consequences for failing to respond would be evident and demand a response. (As Deng Xiaoping later cautioned China’s strategic planners, “Hide your capabilities, bide your time.”)
After World War II, the U.N. Charter was created to prohibit any unilateral use of force to change borders or governments. The West feels bound to honor these international law principles, even if its members are not always willing to pay the price to enforce them.
Korea’s lessons were then applied to the communists’ expansionist designs in Southeast Asia. After France’s colonial rule in Indochina ended, America was challenged by the need to prevent another Asian “domino” from falling.
North Vietnam’s legendary leader Ho Chi Minh, who had helped found France’s Communist Party, wanted the South. He knew the U.S. opposed substituting communist domination for French colonial rule, so he avoided sending North Vietnam’s army en masse across the 17th Parallel, as the North Koreans had done in openly violating the 38th Parallel. Instead, he organized, funded and directed the Viet Cong in South Vietnam to conduct an armed insurgency against the anti-communist government of Ngo Dinh Diem.
U.S. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon sent an increasing number of U.S. forces and increased bombing of selective targets in the North but refused to hit the most strategic targets, such as the dikes. Nor did they retaliate against Russia and China, which were sending vast amounts of weapons and supplies to support North Vietnam, with China also deploying forces to fight the Americans and South Vietnamese.
After more than 15 years of sabotage and terrorism, and after the U.S. had cut off its support in 1975 and Henry Kissinger had been awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the withdrawal of U.S. forces, Hanoi finally tore off the mask. It sent in its massive tank divisions, ending with the calamitous U.S. withdrawal, presaging the abandonment of Afghanistan.
If Donald Trump is changing not only the name but the fundamentals of U.S. national security policy to make it more coherent and assertive, it would be a positive development. Unfortunately, his actions on Ukraine — and, increasingly ominously, Taiwan — bely those policy changes.
Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin and obvious sympathy for Russia’s aggression, to the point that he echoes Putin’s absurd claim that Ukraine started the war, makes it highly unlikely that his administration will correct the “forever war” syndrome that undermined Western interests in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. His brilliant attack on Iran’s nuclear program does not change that reality.
The War Department may be back, but the semi-accommodationist policies of the subsequent 72 years remain in place.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies, a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute and member of the advisory board of The Vandenberg Coalition.