> "With the comfort and hindsight of a half-century,
President Harry Truman's decision to
commit American power to save South Korea
from Communist aggression in late June 1950
stands as perhaps America's finest moment of the
Cold War. [...] By dispatching the 24th
Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions from comfortable
occupation duty in Japan to death and
destruction in Korea in mid-summer 1950, the
United States actually did nothing less than save
the world from a global conflagration."
I spent two-thirds of the article waiting to find out how, exactly, the Korean War prevented Armageddon. TL;DR: A squabble between Communist states was looking likely to come to open war, and my countrymen planned to respond by nuking the Soviets and starting World War III for some fucking reason. Fortunately, our strong defense of South Korea convinced Stalin that we actually were crazy enough to start WW3 over Yugoslavia, so he backed down.
Further TL;DR: Fifty thousand red-blooded American soldiers nobly laid down their lives to protect the world from the psychopathic nuclear aggression of...America. This was clearly one of America's finest moments.
> my countrymen planned to respond by nuking the Soviets and starting World War III for some fucking reason
That there was such kind of thinking is supported by other sources, not as the response to the situation in Yugoslavia but to Korea, at the same time, here's from RAND:
"when the Korean War began in June 1950, the question
of whether to launch an atomic offensive against the Soviet Union
resurfaced within the Truman administration. Seeing the North
Korean aggression as an act prompted by Moscow, U.S. officials met
with their British counterparts in July and discussed whether, if the
Chinese intervened, the United States should respond with an attack
on the Soviet Union.28 Receiving no support for such a move from their
principal ally, they quickly dismissed the notion; yet when the Chinese
did cross the Yalu in November, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Director Walter Bedell Smith asked his NSC colleagues “to what point
will the U.S. be driven [before it will] attack the problem at its heart,
namely Moscow, instead of handling it on the periphery as at present,”
and on January 3, 1951, the JCS issued a paper arguing that it
was “militarily foolhardy” to fight a land war against China while the
“heart of aggressive COMMIE power remained untouched.”29""
But you are right that the claims in the article appear unbalanced, writing just about Yugoslavia and then claiming something like "but the US actions in Korea changed everything."
I spent two-thirds of the article waiting to find out how, exactly, the Korean War prevented Armageddon. TL;DR: A squabble between Communist states was looking likely to come to open war, and my countrymen planned to respond by nuking the Soviets and starting World War III for some fucking reason. Fortunately, our strong defense of South Korea convinced Stalin that we actually were crazy enough to start WW3 over Yugoslavia, so he backed down.
Further TL;DR: Fifty thousand red-blooded American soldiers nobly laid down their lives to protect the world from the psychopathic nuclear aggression of...America. This was clearly one of America's finest moments.