Make The Ukraine Truce, Then Cut Europe Loose
Exactly 177 days after being sworn to office, America’s greatest peace president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, announced that the demolition derby on the Korean peninsula would be halted, and that an armistice would prevail henceforth—which armistice remains in place to this very day.
Unfortunately, Ike’s truce in the hot war never got translated into a permanent peace treaty or normalization of relations between the two Korea’s or between the US and Red China.
Moreover, there is no mystery as to why. To wit, Washington falsely claimed it was fighting a noble war against the spread of world communism—so what became the Empire domiciled on the banks of the Potomac was not about to recognize a communist government in the north or abandon its puppet government in the south.
And we do mean puppet government. Shortly after the peninsula was arbitrarily split in two by FDR, Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference in January 1945, the US military installed Syngman Rhee as president in the area south of the 38th parallel. However, that particular Korean patriot was living a comfortable life as an ex-pat in the United States at the time, and had been for most of the 41 years since 1904 when he had first come to the US to study at Princeton. Accordingly, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in the hot place that he would have been chosen by the Korean people to run what became a brutal tyranny propped up by Washington.
Despite his best intentions, Eisenhower was hemmed in by the crusading anti-communism of the deplorable Dulles brothers at the CIA and State Department and most especially by the so-called China Lobby promoted by Henry Luce of Time-Life. The latter attracted a noisy cadre of red-fighters in Washington including VP Richard Nixon, Senator William Knowland, Senator Joe McCarthy and Rep. Walter Judd, among numerous others, and they were not about to countenance the normalization of relations with the winner of the Chinese civil war—Mao Tse-tung.
So the line of military contact was frozen in time, and the US proceeded to heavily arm South Korea and champion its independence from the communist regime in the north and Red China on its flank.
Yet in the hindsight of history, what in the world did the death of nearly 45,000 US servicemen and another 35,000 wounded, some of which are still receiving VA medical care and disability benefits even today, contribute to the homeland security of America? And that’s to say nothing of the 1 million Korean combatants killed on both sides of the war and 2-3 million civilians whose lives were also snuffed out.
Needless to say, neither Red China nor Red Korea was a military threat to the US at the time. Nor actually was Stalinist Russia, which, in any event, had cautioned North Korea against crossing the 38th parallel.
Still, Washington launched down a path after 1953 of standing up a permanent artificial nation south of the demilitarized zone, and then armed it to the teeth and brought it under the US military umb
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
