I believe that history will ultimately record that Harry Truman’s greatest mistake was declining to listen to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, when he advised Truman to respond to China’s intervention in Korea by launching an attack upon the Chinese mainland. In so doing, President Truman both threw away America’s best chance for a total victory in Korea and missed a golden opportunity to end the Chinese threat to the United States once and for all. While it is certainly true that Truman had many reasons for caution, I firmly believed that many of us will live to deeply lament his choice.

Let’s review the basic situation as it stood at the time. In June of 1950, the Army of Communist North Korea launched a surprise invasion of the free South. The United States (with the sanction of the United Nations) rapidly deployed combat forces to Korea in an effort to save the nation from totalitarian rule. Initially Allied forces were pushed back into a tiny corner of Korea around the port city of Pusan. However, under the command of General MacArthur (who was, arguably, America’s greatest living solider) the UN forces launched an amphibious invasion, seizing the port of Inchon and allowing Allied forces to break-out from the Pusan Perimeter and begin a headlong rush to the North, liberating the South Korean capital of Seoul and pushing beyond the old border and into the Communist North. Quickly the Allied offensive turned into a rout, with the North Koreans apparently totally defeated by MacArthur’s army. At that point, as UN forces approached the Yalu River that divides North Korea from China, the Chinese Communists launched a massive surprise offensive which forced UN forces to retreat back into the South.

At this point MacArthur sought permission to strike the bases on Chinese soil which were supporting offensive operations in Korea. Such permission was denied. US aircraft were even refused permission to pursue Chinese aircraft into Chinese airspace. MacArthur, now declaring he faced an “entirely new war” prepared plans for strikes against China itself, but no one higher up the chain of command supported them.

By this point President Truman had more or less already reconciled himself to the acceptance of a stalemate in Korea. General MacArthur did not accept this and so, when the US began to attempt to negotiate a peace, he essentially sabotaged the negotiations. In response, President Truman fired him.

So, why didn’t Truman strike? By 1951, the US had a nuclear stockpile of six-hundred and forty bombs versus twenty-five possessed by the USSR. Over the course of the next year the United States produced an additional three hundred and sixty-five bombs while the USSR managed only twenty-five. In other words, had President Truman taken the necessary measures, the United States could have dropped three hundred nuclear bombs on China while still outnumbering the USSR in weapons by a factor of more than ten to one, easily enough to deter the Soviets from launching a nuclear attack upon the United States. Any reasonable person ought to have seen that the United States had, in 1951, a window of opportunity to weaken the USSR and utterly destroy a nation which was, quite certainly, a long-term threat to the United States and which had already initiated a conventional war with the United States on the ground in Korea.

However, by that point, the fear of the bomb, especially in an increasingly weak and socialistic Europe, was so great that no one was willing to risk such a war, even when such a war was both unlikely and manifestly winnable if it occurred. In a very real sense, Korea provides the prototype of the syndrome which has since crippled US foreign policy: excessive deference to European cowardice and a public which is easily deceived by a media which tends to favor our enemies and oppose any effort to confront (or better yet, destroy) them.

In Korea, as they later did in Vietnam, the American people were convinced to accept something less than victory rather than risk all for something really worth winning. The nervous won out over the bold, accepting bloody stalemate as the alternative to a necessary fight. As MacArthur reminded us at the time, “in war there is no substitute for victory.” This is a lesson we ought to have learned from Korea: we’re had to keep troops in that nation for five decades and still have to worry about the North Korean threat because we didn’t have the will to finish the job once and for all then. We must worry about Chinese power overtaking that of America in the future because we didn’t finish off the Chinese when we had a chance to do so.

Now don’t get on me about how horrific what I propose would have been. It must be evident to anyone with a brain that such a war would have been morally justified: China had attacked the United States and killed its soldiers. While I have no idea as to the exact extent of losses which would have been suffered by the Chinese in the event of a massive attack in 1951, it does not seem at all unreasonable me to believe that the Chinese should have been made to pay in the blood of a thousand of their own for every American they killed upon the battlefield in Korea. Such a war would have punctuated the lesson of the Second World War: those who challenge America’s might end up dead and their nations end up so destroyed that they can only be reconstructed with American aid.

Of course, there is nothing which can be done about this now: the past is the past and (short of the invention of time travel) there’s nothing we can do about it now save learn an important lesson: when we have the chance to destroy our enemies we should not turn it down. Because we hesitated our easiest chance to devastate China and prevent it from ever taking over the leadership of the world was lost.

When I think of the great Douglas MacArthur I am often mindful of something from the Bible: a prophet is not without our honor, save in his own country and in his own house. General MacArthur understood that a failure to win in Korea would have disastrous consequences for America and for the world. We must accept danger rather than risk dishonor for, if we do not, we shall someday have to face an increased danger with reduced honor.