The fact that such an assumption was belied by 2,000 years of Sino-Vietnamese hostility was ignored, and it was not until Richard Nixon’s diplomatic initiatives in 1970 that the United States became aware of, and began to exploit, the fissures in that so-called Communist monolith. By then it was too late, for the American people had long since given up on Vietnam.

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The fact that the U.S. response to both the Korean War and the Vietnam War was built on the false perception of a Communist monolith began to emerge after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. At a July 1995 conference I attended at Georgetown University, Dr. Valeri Denissov, deputy director of the Asian Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, revealed the true nature of the Korean War’s origins.

Drawing from the hitherto secret documents of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Denissov revealed that far from being the instigator of the war, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin was at best a reluctant partner. In September 1949, the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party rejected an appeal from North Korea’s Kim Il Sung to assist in an invasion of the South. But in April 1950, says Denissov, Stalin changed his mind and agreed to provide assistance for an invasion of the South. For one thing, Kim had convinced Stalin that the invasion was a low-risk operation that could be successfully concluded before the United States could intervene.

‘Thus,’ said Denissov, ‘the documents existing in Russian archives prove that…it was Kim Il Sung who unleashed the war upon receiving before-hand blessings from Stalin and Mao Zedong [Mao Tse-tung].’

Why did Stalin change his mind? The first reason lay in Mao Tse-tung’s victory in the Chinese Third Civil War. Denissov asserted that ‘Stalin believed that after the U.S.A. deserted Chiang Kai-shek ‘to his own fortunes’ in the internal Chinese conflict they would not risk a participation in a Korean-Korean war as well.’ Another factor, Denissov believed, was that ‘the Soviet Union had declared the creation of its own nuclear bomb, which according to Stalin’s calculations deprived Americans of their nuclear monopoly and of their ability to use the ‘nuclear card’ in the confrontation with the Soviet Union.’

Another Russian Foreign Ministry official at the conference, Dr. Evgeny Bajanov, added yet another reason for Stalin’s change of heart–the ‘perceived weakness of Washington’s position and of its will to get involved militarily in Asia.’

That perception was well-founded. Dispatched to Korea at the end of World War II to disarm the Japanese there, the U.S. military was not too fond of the country from the start. When I arrived at the replacement depot at Yongdungpo in November 1947, our group was addressed by Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, commander of the XXIV Corps and of U.S. forces in Korea. ‘There are only three things the troops in Japan are afraid of,’ he said. ‘They’re gonorrhea, diarrhea and Korea. And you’ve got the last one.’

After a year with the 6th Infantry Division in Pusan–a time spent mostly confined to barracks because of the civil unrest then sweeping the country–I was only too glad to see the division deactivated in December 1948 and myself transferred to the 24th Infantry Division in Japan. In 1949, the 7th Infantry Division, the only remaining U.S. combat unit in Korea, was also transferred to Japan, leaving only the several hundred men of the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG).

‘In Moscow,’ Denissov said, ‘American military presence in South Korea in 1945-1949 was viewed as a ‘deterring factor’ which became defunct after America’s withdrawal from the South.’ Yet another sign of lack of American will was Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s public statement in January 1950 that Korea was outside the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia. Finally, Moscow must have been well aware of the drastic cuts made in America’s defenses by the false economies of Truman and Louis Johnson, his feckless secretary of defense.

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